CGWire is the company behind Kitsu, a collaboration platform that helps you efficiently deliver animated content from anywhere. EAJ interviewed Frank Rousseau, Founder & CEO at CGWire, to find out more.
How did CGWire come about, and what does it do?
As animation productions become more complex and deadlines tighter, teams are becoming more distributed. It has become common for multiple studios to be involved in a project, with a large proportion of the workforce working remotely. While this approach has many benefits, because organizations can join forces to make better movies and access talents from anywhere, it also has a major drawback: communication is much harder.
CGWire’s mission is to foster distributed organization by keeping teams as efficient as if everyone were in the same room. To achieve this goal, we have two activities. We provide software to smoothen the interactions between all stakeholders of the production (i.e. the Kitsu ecosystem). Additionally, we create events and educational content, available on our blog and YouTube channel, to allow people to meet and grow their skills together.
Can you explain how your animation platform Kitsu works?
Kitsu is a web application that connects artists, supervisors, producers, directors and clients. They all have dedicated views designed for their jobs and take advantage of optimized interfaces for their needs.
Producers can plan their projects, create related tasks and send them off. Artists and supervisors know what they need to do and share their progress. Directors can then review all deliveries and provide feedback. Finally, clients validate the content produced and have an overview of the project status.
Each stakeholder gets the right information, can communicate effectively and is clear about expectations. This leads to more efficient teamwork, less waste and more accurate iterations. In the end, we get a much better picture.
Can you name some of the animation studios and schools you have worked with in the past year?
Among the many studios using Kitsu (200 at the time of this interview), I can mention Miyu, winner of the Annecy Cristal for Best Feature Film and the Cannes Palme d’Or for the Best Short Film in 2023, Cube Creative for their outstanding 3D series, and Fost for their high-end 2D TV series. On the school side, we collaborate with institutions like École Georges Méliès, ESRA, or ECV. But we mainly work with Gobelins, the most famous French school, where they have a class dedicated to training people for the Production Manager roles.
Recently you have also been collaborating with game companies… What kind of feedback have you received from them?
Video game productions are even more distributed than animation productions. Most of the artists are freelancers working from home. As I said, Kitsu is designed to bring creative people together, wherever they are and whatever organisation they belong to. When video game studios scale up and need efficient collaborative tools and a proper library of deliveries, Kitsu is the obvious choice. They prefer a user-friendly approach. Now, they want to push things further by integrating more with Jira, the project manager used by tech teams, and finding more ways to link creative assets to code.
What are your next plans?
Studios are satisfied with Kitsu’s ability to build their movies, but are asking for more forecasting tools. So, over the next 12 months, we will be working on budget management, advanced scheduling, and carbon tracking features. Then, in 2026, we’ll push innovation further by providing artists with a dedicated platform that they will use throughout their careers. Through it, they will be able to manage their work, their invoicing, and their relationships with studios. However, we will remain agile and let the Kitsu community influence our plans.
Besides Annecy festival, which events are you planning to attend in the coming months?
The main events we have in mind are SIGGRAPH Asia in Tokyo next December and GDC in San Francisco in March 2025, where we will be exhibitors. We will also be attending RADI/RAF in Angoulême and the Blender Conference in Amsterdam as visitors. On our side, we expect to organize meetups around pipeline and production management during the last quarter of 2024.
Read the article in the new issue of The European Animation Journal.
