Sedelmaier Studios: Keeping Fresh the Old Spirit

JF: Why do favor a small studio?

JJS: Staying small lets us say yes or no to a project. There’s no need to support a whole staff, so we can choose what projects we take on. We like to have the flexibility to make decisions that are good for us.

We like keeping things small enough that you can manage people and not have it interfere with creative things that you want to do as well. “Beavis and Butthead” taught us that we didn’t want 50 people working for us at the same time. That just becomes a big managerial ordeal. I like the intimacy of having a small place, where everyone’s busy and getting an opportunity to work on things and gets an exposure to things that they couldn’t get anyplace else: the type of place where I’d like to work. The smaller you stay, the more control you have.

Working for JJ for those weeks, I found myself sharpening skills I otherwise would not have had reason to strengthen. I realized around week three that I had already inked, cleaned up, in-betweened, created layout scenes, designed characters and backgrounds, storyboarded and animated. Before one task got boring, another new task fell into my lap. Because there wasn’t a clique for each department of production, there was a feeling that we were all in the same boat and could speak each other’s language. It was a team in every sense of the word