Every year, the popular Pixelatl festival brings a wonderful fix of animation fans and professionals to the booming city of Guadalajara in Mexico. This year’s event, which is slated for September 3 to 7, promises to be another fantastic celebration of the art and business of animation.
The special signal film for the 2024 edition is produced by Guadalajara’s wonderful stop-motion house, Hobby Creative Studio. The festival trailer was created by writer-director Humberto Cervera and studio founder Salvador Rios de Dios, who were kind enough to answer a few questions about their creative project.
All exclusive imagery provided by Hobby Creative Studio.
Animation Magazine: Congrats on being chosen to create the Pixelatl trailer. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration and your involvement with the event?
Humberto Cervera: Writing and directing this year’s trailer means the world to me so my inspirations are multidimensional. First and foremost, I had to honor this year’s theme, which is Defeat your Fears, so I thought about what that meant to me.
The common opinion is that the opposite of fear is courage, but after some reflection I concluded that in fact the opposite of fear is love. When someone tries to plant the seed of fear in your heart, what they are doing to you is taking away the capacity to love or understand the thing they are making you fear. This takes me to my next thesis, which is that fear is the tool that fascist or authoritarian strongmen use to get into people hearts and minds and the way to defeat your fears and the people who want to put that fear in your heart is by choosing love.
That sense of love, that sense of community is a thing that Pixelatl has nurtured in my heart so in a way with this short film, I am also trying to honor what Pixelatl means to me. Long story short, my inspirations are my love for Pixelatl and the belief that love can defeat fascism.
What do you love about the final results?
Humbi: Just about everything! And by that, I not only mean the piece itself but all the things that had to happen for it to exist. I love working with Hobby Creative Studio and I love how they have trusted me to help them, first with Song of the Lake and now they trusted me to lead the creation of this piece. I love Pixelatl, the role the event has played in my life for ten years and how it has helped shape not only my career but a lot of my personal philosophies.
This is my directorial debut and in a way it’s also the most personal work I have ever done, so just having the opportunity to put my heart out there in front of a community that I have given myself to in many ways, it just means the world to me and that is what I love. But to give you a concrete answer, I definitely love that as a Pixelatl trailer this is the corniest in the history of the event — and this is not only intentional but something I take a lot of pride in.
Salvador Rios de Dios: We love many things about working with the vision that Humbi and Pixelatl came up with. We think today, especially with an election year here in Mexico, our society is really fractured. We love working on a piece that sends a message of unity and hope, especially the love that we can find for the smallest things, like our treasured heart creature. The piece itself is a testament to this vision, since working on it brough together the teams from Pixelatl; Humberto; us (Hobby); Ronin Studio, who is doing the art direction; and our music studio, Bakemono … Also as a stop-motion studio, it is a rare opportunity to be able to build sets inspired by Mexican culture and we hope our town offers a rarely seen vision of Mexico.
How long did it take to make and how many people worked on it? Which animation tools were used?
Salvador: From preproduction to production, it took us about six months. Here at Hobby Creative Studio we have Sam [Mendez] doing animation directing, me doing production and photograph direction, and so far from our studio around 15 more people have worked on it from our different departments. Of course, Humberto is doing direction and scriptwriting, Santiago Arellano helped with the animatic and storyboard, Mario Ruiz and Ricardo Niño from Ronin Studio are in charge of production design and Mario Hernandez from Bakemono is doing the beautiful music that you will hear on the final piece. We are using Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and of course Dragonframe for stop-motion animation.
Please tell us more about your studio, Hobby.
Salvador: Hobby Creative Studio started on 2015 with a firm commitment to work on stop motion animation, having to keep a roof over our and all of our crews head, circumstances have forced us to focus our work on publicity. We have done stop motion to promote Batman toys, Dragon Ball Z toys, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Distroller, which is how we met Humberto. We have been fortunate enough to work on some music videos, we actually did the music video for the one unreleased song of The Doors, called “Paris Blues.”
Last year we finally had the chance to invest on our first original production and with Humberto’s guidance we chose to partner with Carlos Sallas and Ari Navarrete to do a short film based on Carlos’ comic book, Song of the Lake. This has brought us lots of opportunities, including the chance to do this year trailer for Pixelatl! We are really looking forward to dedicating more and more of our time on creative original work, rather than publicity, although we won’t turn down a job if they come knocking at our door! Just having existed for almost 10 years in such a hostile environment for creative work is something we are very proud of and we hope the opportunities brought by this trailer will help us keep going for 10 years more!
What are some of projects Hobby is working on right now?
Salvador: Currently, we are excited about Mechzalcoatl, the Latino futurist film that we are collaborating on with Humberto. It’s Aztec Mechs in stop motion. What’s not to love!? We are currently looking for funding on that one. Pilotos is our other collaboration with Ronin Studio, which is in pre-production and we are hoping to use the short film as a platform to make this a feature film. Velo is a coproduction with Dos Rios, a Seattle based production company and it’s on its festival run so keep and out for that one if you are attending some festivals!
We are also working on the concept trailer for ¡Es la Luna!, a feature film that we are coproducing with La Valiente, a Colombian studio, which we actually met last year at Pixelatl festival.
Sadly, there’s not a lot of funding right now for original work, but we keep our hopes high. We will keep looking for funding until we get it or until the studio goes broke (ha ha ha) and, meanwhile, there’s always publicity work to keep us afloat. We’re also working on the development of two short films from Guadalajara and Mexico City and we are in the pre-production of a film in co-production with a Colombian animation studio.
What do you love about the Pixelatl festival?
Humbi: I’ve said many times before in public, but you can’t tell the story of my life without speaking about how Pixelatl has changed my life’s trajectory many times, for everything that this community has given to me I always try to give back. First and foremost, I love that Pixelatl is a community, one held together by the shared values of kindness and generosity. I never lose sight that the only reason that Pixelatl exists is because Jose, Jordi, Chris, Diana, Julia, Lupita, Sebastian, Carlos, Damne and all the Pixelatl team will it into existence, they do it out of a labor of love and that love trickles down to everyone in the community.
I was working in video games before going to Pixelatl in 2014 and making the choice to pivot my career into animation. It was at the 2014 Pixealt where I met the Cartoon Network executives that would hire me for my job there. Then, at the 2020 festival, I met Aaron Berger and Ari Ben-Avram from Chatrone, who have been my managers since then. It was through Pixelatl I met Salvador and Sam, I hired them to do some publicity work for Distroller in 2022 and that has bloomed into a beautiful friendship and creative partnership through which the short film Song of the Lake came to life, and now this Pixelatl trailer, with hopefully many more things in the future.
In short, what I love about Pixelatl is that first and foremost it is a community where everyone is heavily invested in the success of everyone else, driven by the values of kindness and generosity. For me, it’s like Christmas in September!
Salvador: While we have taken part in some of Pixelatl’s initiatives, like Cumbre and Sublime, actually we went there for the first time in 2023. As part of our collaboration with Humberto, Carlos Sallas and Ari Navarrete on Song of the Lake, we had the national premiere at Pixelatl. We admired it from a distance for a while, other commitments always impeded us from attending. Still, the sense of community and camaraderie that Pixelatl fosters within the community is something that we have felt as part of the national industry, everyone talks about Pixelatl and everyone loves it, it was just a matter of time for us to love it too. It is truly an honor to be doing this year’s trailer and represent the stop-motion community of Guadalajara and Mexico through our work.
What is your take on the animation scene in Mexico these days?
Humbi: Honestly, animation all around the world is on a tough spot right now, the top movies and series on all platforms are animated but as long as animation workers cannot have job security in the industry, the art form will be in a tough spot. All creative industries have fallen into the Silicon Valley trap of thinking about infinite growth — this has endangered the creatives crafts, making it more akin to a gig economy where there is no sustainable career path. Even after 12 years of working in the industry I still keep a part time job that is not related to animation or writing to keep a roof over my head! But I believe in having hope and I believe that at some point the tides will turn and the first ones to be lifted will be the ones who are still inside the sea, even if we are close to drowning. So, that’s why I keep swimming. The communities that we build are stronger that corporate greed and so, we will prevail.
Speaking of Mexico specifically, there is great talent and great opportunities but we have close to zero support from the government and the big companies only see us as cheap labor for industrialized productions. Pixelatl does a great job of putting a spotlight on all the great storytellers that we have in the country, they would never say so but I will, it was in great part because of Pixelatl’s efforts that Mexico was the guest of honor at last year Annecy festival. We are very lucky to have Pixelatl at home but an industry is an ecosystem that needs many players, so without government support and private investment so that our local storytellers can grow and thrive we are going to be stuck on this loop for a while.
There is a reason why some of the most recognized Mexicans in the industry like Jorge Gutierrez, Alfonso Cuaron or Guillermo del Toro have found their success outside of the country; the conditions in Mexico are currently antagonistic to thriving in the country with a creative career, and that makes me really sad. The animation scene is thriving creatively, yes, but financially, materially, economically, we all get anxious when thinking about the future. There are extraordinary cases like Cinema Fantasma, Viva Calavera, Mighty Animation and some others, but their success has come at great personal expense and I have the naive belief that having a creative career should not be in opposition to having a stable life.
Salvador: Mexico has all the potential to be a creative animation powerhouse, and we are growing. Pixelatl and doing the trailer is a magnificent platform to show the work that Mexican studios can put out into the world when we are allowed to express our creativity, not just adapt to someone else style on budget and deadline, although that is important too!
That is why we are putting 150% effort on this trailer, we want the world to see and fall in love with what Mexico, and of course us, can do. We are eternally grateful to Pixelatl for the platform and the opportunity and we are hoping this opens many doors. The Mexican industry has all the potential to grow and thrive, we just need to be allowed to do so by our material and financial conditions.
For more information, visit wearehobby.com, humbertocervera.com and elfestival.mx.
