One studio, three shocks in five years, and what a one-man shop in Lisbon learned from a wolf.

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For most of my career, bigger was how we kept score. More people. More desks. More logos on the wall. A bigger number whenever someone asked, “How many of you are there?” Joel Pilger, who built Impossible Pictures and now advises studio founders, admits in a talk I keep coming back to that whenever anyone asked how big his studio was, he rounded up. So did I. Everyone does. Then he asked the question I’d been avoiding for years: when did headcount become the scorecard?

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His answer has been on my wall ever since:
“Your studio doesn’t need to be bigger. It needs to be harder to kill.”

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I know something about the second half of that sentence, so here's the sequence, in order, with none of the rough edges sanded off.
Flying Eye started in São Paulo in 2014 and grew the way studios grow: good work, good clients, a bigger team every year. In 2018 we did what growing studios do and signed a lease on a real office. A little over a year later, Covid shut the country down. Every job on the board was on hold within weeks. A studio that had just taken on rent, furniture and the confidence that comes with a front door was suddenly a WhatsApp group. We got through it, but it took the better part of a year to get back to where we'd been. That was the year I learned that a studio is a set of relationships with a logo on top, and that the relationships are the part that holds.
Once things were steady again, I moved the whole operation across the Atlantic. The reason was simple enough: our biggest clients were in Europe. We were working for WPP agencies in Brazil and in Europe, and being in the same time zone as the larger half of that work made sense. Moving a business between countries is harder than any deck makes it look. You arrive with a smaller studio than the one you left, in a market that has no idea who you are. But we settled in faster than I'd expected, demand in Europe picked up, and for a while it looked like the plan had worked.
Then the same clients stopped calling. Nobody did anything wrong. The big agency groups restructured, in every market at once. Work that used to go out the door got pulled in-house. Budgets that used to fund production got redirected to AI, sometimes to build real capability, sometimes just to be seen building it. Within a few months, Flying Eye's demand fell by 70 to 80 percent.
This is the part founders don't usually put in writing. The honest version is that during the good years I was busy making the work and not nearly busy enough finding the next work. When the calls stopped, there was no pipeline to fall back on, no next client waiting in line. I could tell you nobody saw the restructuring coming, and that would be true. I still felt, and still feel, that I should've been out there selling while the selling was easy. Both things are true at once, and that's what founder's guilt looks like: accurate and useless in equal measure.

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AI is part of why that budget left, and it's also the biggest opportunity Flying Eye has had in a decade. A small studio can now build worlds that used to require a facility. Our latest short film was made almost entirely with AI and finished by hand, frame by frame, for a fraction of what it would've cost in 2019. Selling that is another story. The market is loud. Every week brings a new tool, a new hustler with a demo reel and a price that makes no sense in either direction. Clients have real concerns, and they're right to have them. Is the image true? Who owns it? What happens to the technical drawings and confidential files we upload? Is somebody's model being trained on our brand? Explaining a new process, a new price and a new set of guarantees to a client who's also nervous about the technology is slow going. The whole industry is in an adoption phase, learning on both sides of the table. I've made my peace with the fact that education is now part of the job, and that nobody pays for it directly.
Pilger has a name for the studios he sees thriving in all this: wolves. One founder, maybe a partner or two, little or no full-time staff. "They don't try to own every capability," he says. "They assemble it. They have a small cockpit, but a huge crew whenever they need it." That's the Flying Eye that came out the other side of shock number three, described better than I managed at the time. The cockpit is me: creative direction, art direction, script, the choice of tools, the edit, the client's phone number. The crew is a group of senior 3D artists, motion designers, cinematographers, sound designers... people I've worked with for a decade, some in Lisbon, many in Brazil, a few wherever the project happens to need them. In Brazil the studio now works through HUB Studios, a group of production companies that decided cooperation beats competition. In Europe, partners in Portugal, Spain and Germany. None of it shows up as headcount. All of it shows up on screen.

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What "harder to kill" means in practice, for us, comes down to three things. The idea comes before the invoice: every film starts with one question, what has nobody shown about this brand, and the technique gets chosen after the answer, whether that's live action, 3D, motion or AI. A studio that owns one technique has to sell that technique. A studio that assembles gets to choose. Seniority over volume: every seat on a Flying Eye project is a senior seat, which costs more per hour and less per film, because senior people get it right the second time, and often the first. And the director stays in the room: from the first sketch to the final master, one person is responsible. Where a big studio has a process, I have a chair.
There's a trade, and I'd rather name it than pretend it isn't there. A studio that's harder to kill is also harder to scale, at least in the old sense. I'll never be able to tell a client "we've got forty people on this." What I can tell them is "you've got me, and I brought the five best people I know." For some clients that's a dealbreaker. Those clients were never mine. And the cockpit is the bottleneck. I know that. The next person to join Flying Eye will run the commercial side with real autonomy, so the eye stays on the work and the pipeline stops depending on whether the director found time to send emails that week. Shock number three taught me that one. I'd have preferred a cheaper lesson.
Three shocks in five years: a pandemic, a move, a market that changed its mind. The studio that came out the other side is smaller than the one I used to round up to, and it's the first version of Flying Eye I'd describe as hard to kill.
Joel Pilger said it first, and he was right. Your studio doesn't need to be bigger. It needs to be harder to kill.

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Marcello Amora is a Motion Creative Director and the founder of Flying Eye, a boutique studio making film and animation for brands, based in Lisbon and working everywhere else. Joel Pilger's talk can be found at joelpilger.com and on Instagram at @joelpilger.