With the coronavirus rattling the animation world, we are launching a new series of articles, each of which will look at the crisis from the standpoint of an individual in the industry. Our first interviewee is Bruno Blain, founder and CEO of Rigbox, a 3d rigging studio based in Montreal, Canada. The company’s portfolio includes rigs for the upcoming feature Fireheart, the 4d theme park film Attention Menhir! for Parc Astérix, commercials for IGA grocery stores (pictured at top), and an undisclosed project for Ubisoft.
Rigbox is a boutique operation: it consists of four employees and a few consulting collaborators. Its size was the first factor that helped it transition to remote work — as Blain says, “we just had to make sure the VPN connection was robust enough.”
The second factor was preparation. Blain launched Rigbox with the intention of letting his colleagues work remotely from time to time. By chance, they started testing their remote work procedure a few weeks before the coronavirus hit Canada. As a result, “VPN ports were already configured for each user within our team, and we were set on the streaming software (HP RGS) we wanted to use.”
