3DTotal: For the last 12 years, ever since your first job as a junior artist at Proximity, you seem to have quite an intense career! Can you tell us a bit more about what you regard as the most important milestones?
Eduardo: Well, working in this industry makes every day a milestone. Everything is evolving so fast that you have to be up to date all the time. Anyway, there are a few important milestones in my career. Back in the mid 1990’s, when I first started in the CG industry, it was extremely difficult to find information relating to this field. In Spain, the culture of Internet arrived a lot later, so if you had any problems with your software then you had to figure them out yourself or use the manuals to find the solution. You were on your own. Although the learning process was quite slow, my mind got used to solving problems for itself and that’s something that has been very useful throughout my career. After a couple of years of doing industrial CG, I had the chance to work at one of the largest post-production houses in Spain at the time, which was Videoefecto (Molinare Barcelona). During my time there, I learned the meaning of “tight deadlines”; I worked tons of overtime, faced clients who didn’t know what they wanted and grew to know the post-production business from the inside out. Besides all the hard work, that period was also very helpful because I learned how to speed up my working process, how to cheat on things and how to organize my 3D scenes so that if the clients wanted to modify anything (and they always do), it didn’t mean I had to start all over again. In 1999, when I was only about 24, I decided to start my own company: Pixel in motion. Starting a new company is always very hard, but the learning curve was huge. This period made me face new challenges; budgets came into the game, scheduling, invoices, facing clients and also hiring and managing people. The goal of the company was always to create our own content, but we had to combine that with providing 3D services to third party companies so we could get some money to keep the company alive. That’s how “Chess Mate!” was born, which we’ll talk about later.

After more than two years of really hard work on the Chess project, we decided to throw in the towel. We were self-financing the project and while we talked to lots of people, companies and TV channels, we didn’t get the external funding we needed for it. Despite this, I still had the need to create something - so I started to work on the short film Valle Paraiso. I decided to face it alone because I’d had a bad experience with a previous short film (Smoke City, 1999) where people who were involved at the beginning disappeared a few months later. During the first year I was working at Pixel in motion at the same time, but I decided to quit from Pixel and focus on the short instead. My partner took over the responsibility for the company and I went home to finish the film. I started to teach 3D stuff in some universities and doing some freelancing to get some money. Again the learning process doing the short film was huge. It was a very ambitious project to be faced alone, almost 12 minutes long, 140 shots, six characters, five sets... I had to organize the pipeline of the film very carefully, so that it didn’t become a mess after a few months. Except for the music, I did everything on the film, from the script and the storyboard to the final compositing - and it took me two years to finish it. Unfortunately in this case, I wasn’t only learning but “unlearning”. When you start a project that will take you so long, you commit yourself to the technology of that moment. When I started there wasn’t GI, final gather, subsurface, ZBrushes - or they were poorly implemented. So once I was done I realized that I was a little bit out of the loop in terms of technology.

Once I finished the short film, I kept working as freelancer. I moved to Iceland to work on a TV show called Lazy Town and in August 2007, I was hired at Ilion Animation Studios as sequence lead. I had always wanted to work on animated feature films and that was a great opportunity. 

3DTotal: It’s a real shame that it didn’t work out as planned. Funding is always one of the main challenges with independent animations. With the power of hindsight, and more years of industry knowledge and experience, do you now think you could have done things differently to be more successful with the funding?
Eduardo: Well, one of the things that I would focus on now would be to try and bring in someone with production experience. I consider myself an artist rather than a producer and the producing itself needs one dedicated person. We were always looking to hire a person with that profile back then, but unfortunately we never had enough money for that extra salary. Partnership is always tricky but I think that in order to succeed, you definitely need someone with a production background on board.

3DTotal: Judging by your online gallery it seems obvious that stylized characters are you “thing”, but you also seem to have a strong interest in lighting too. Can you tell us more about these two topics and how you bring them together?
Eduardo: Digital characters have been my drug throughout the years. When I was young I used to draw characters all the time, so once I started using 3D software it was natural for me to focus on digital characters. On the other hand I had always been very interested in lighting from those years where I was studying photography. Everything else is shown on the renderings. I like to create interesting characters and put them under nice lighting conditions to make them look even better.