A Calculated Whisk with Production, Talent & Culture
Hello fellow Spice lovers! As you’ve seen in our previous production diaries, Steamroller Animation has been busy cooking up our pilot episode of Spice Frontier, an original, fully animated TV series that follows a chef named Kentucky Williams and his disparate crew of adventurers as they traverse the galaxy searching for long-lost Earth ingredients.
In this episode, we’ll meet our indispensable support teams, without whom the whole production would inevitably fall apart like a distraught chef who forgot to add butter to his chocolate chip cookies. For our first course, we’ll be looking at our Production Team and everything they do to keep the kitchen running smoothly.
We begin our interviews with our production team explaining the critical role they play in making sure everyone is moving in the same direction. Skyler Slater, Head of Production, spends much of her time looking after the production team across all Steamroller projects. Steamroller currently has 14 service projects running simultaneously ranging from in-game animation and game cinematics, to VFX film and feature animation. Skyler’s primary focus is to make sure all shows are adequately resourced as well as ensuring her team is set up for success by maintaining a healthy work-life balance, communicating effectively with staff and clients, understanding their day to day priorities, and providing the necessary training for the entire production team.
Andrea Bergendahl, Production Manager, explains her focus on the day to day running of the Spice Frontier project. Setting priorities, establishing and maintaining the overall production schedule and working closely with the project’s director, Jalil Sadool, Andrea plays a huge role in maintaining cross departmental communications and making sure fires are being doused in the right order.
Madison Turchin and Jamey Harper, Production Coordinators, on the other hand focus more specifically on their respective departments, informing Andrea and Skyler of any critical blockers and making sure their staff have everything they need to be successful. They also manage individual artist tasks, keep an eye on progress and priorities in Shotgrid, and take extensive notes in dailies and rounds sessions.
Spice Frontier is the largest self-funded Steamroller Animation project to date! The pilot episode, a hearty meal with a running time of approximately 30 minutes, has our production team cooking on all the burners as it supports our largest internal team since we released our award-winning Spice Frontier short film back in 2020. There are currently 60 people working on Spice Frontier, and the project boasts 530 shots across 13 sequences.
Jamey Harper describes the great feeling of camaraderie with the team despite the hybrid and fully remote working conditions of the studio were established during COVID. However, hiring great people who can work well together doesn’t guarantee a great studio culture. As a studio owned and operated by artists and technicians, Steamroller has always understood the value of creating a relationship-based working environment, where staff are able to interact collaboratively, maintain a strong work-life balance, and be given many venues to communicate and be heard by the studio’s upper management team. One of the main ways Steamroller has managed to achieve this over the years is through the adoption of its Talent & Culture team, a branch of its Human Resources division, that is uniquely integrated into all aspects of the studio’s daily operations. Unlike traditional HR models where staff are interacted with in a very peripheral way, the Talent & Culture Team is embedded within all projects, and each staff member has a Talent & Culture Representative (TCR) who manages a variety of their needs.
Introducing us to the role of the Talent & Culture Representative are Rebecca Polin, Lead TCR, and Jake Webster, TCR. We start by asking them what exactly a TCR is. Jake kicks us off by explaining that when the role was initially designed, the studio needed to establish a staff-to-TCR ratio that allowed the TCR to give their team as much support, guidance and attention as possible without being overstretched and letting staff fall through the cracks. After over 2 years of developing the role, Jake explains that each TCR covers projects and departments totaling a maximum of 30 people. Jake and Rebecca go on to explain that the main function of their role is to create a safe space for growth and development for each person they look after. As of this writing, there are currently 7 Talent & Culture Representatives at Steamroller looking after approximately 230 people.
The TCRs provide a host of critical support tasks to their teams. Jake explains that training is one of the critical components of the TCR role. The TCRs work closely with a project’s supervisor and the production team to identify where training is needed with each individual. Training across all departments and projects is handled officially through Shotgrid, like any other project, and this allows all TCRs to see what training is being planned and provided studio-wide, allowing them to make sure training across the studio is not unnecessarily duplicated. Adding to this, Jake explains that Steamroller has enrolled all TCRs into an online learning institution, allowing the TCR team to take classes from a number of different subjects and then create their own training workshops for the studio, combining their knowledge of the studio with the subject matter they have learned about to provide context-based training for the staff on a myriad of subjects. Ranging from soft skills training like active listening and communication, to training in conflict management, vulnerability, time management, and personality types, the TCRs have created an ever-growing library of training materials that can be used on their projects.
Rebecca explains the importance of socialization at Steamroller. In a studio that is now more than 50% remote, Steamroller has spent a lot of time focusing on how to create culture and engagement with staff regardless of their remote or in-person status. With studios in Florida and Mauritius as well as remote staff in over 39 countries around the world, it became essential to establish practices to unite remote workers and provide them with opportunities to build strong relationships. One of the principal ways Steamroller achieves this is by integrating the TCRs into all of a project’s or department’s operations. The TCRs attend leadership meetings, creative reviews, head of department meetings, as well as drive the socialization practices themselves. By doing this, the TCRs act as a kind of nervous system for the studio, engaging directly with the staff in many different ways and therefore are able to build lasting relationships with them that go far beyond the typical HR model.
Discussing some of the ways in which the studio embraces remote socialization, Rebecca explains a number of different programs that promote remote engagement. The Let’s Chat program uses Zoom’s breakout room feature to connect staff every week like a kind of virtual water cooler. Teams working on the same project who might not normally find many opportunities to learn about each other have an opportunity to find themselves paired with their fellow Steammates in a kind of private watercooler style chat. By doing this consistently across the entire studio, Steamroller is able to create dynamic engagements among all of its workers. Adding to this, Rebecca also explains the value of a weekly Happy Hour across the entire studio. Projects and departments come together to have a virtual drink with each other, playing online games, chatting about a myriad of topics, and just generally enjoying each other’s company. Staff located in more distant time zones are able to also enjoy International Happy Hours. Along with these social programs are in-studio activities such as barbeques and special holiday events and gatherings. The TCRs are central to spearheading all of these activities at Steamroller.
Throughout their interviews, Jake and Rebecca also discuss many other key programs of engagement with the staff that make their department so successful. Each TCR also manages a regular meeting system called One-on-Ones and Coffee Catch-Ups that occur throughout the year, where they are able to work with each staff member at an individual level to make sure they are voicing any concerns they may have as well as receiving the attention they need to continue their growth trajectory in the studio.
As the production diary interviews continue throughout the day, we jump back to our production team on Spice Frontier to discuss the specific challenges of working with Unreal as well as building a new pipeline around the unique visual style of the project. Andrea explains that managing milestones and setting deliverables hasn’t changed a great deal when working in a real-time pipeline. The major challenge facing the project is actually training the team to work effectively in Unreal. On Spice Frontier, there is a very small group of Unreal experts and so training the rest of the team to adapt their traditional workflows to the unique capabilities of the engine has been a huge challenge. While this has been difficult and there is no end to the amount of fires that crop up along the way, Madison explains how exciting it is to be on the cutting edge of pipeline development in this new real-time space for linear narrative content. Epic Games has been a huge source of support for the project and the entire team has felt a real commitment to defining new technical and creative workflows for Spice Frontier.
The production team also describes how Unreal has sped up the creative process and helped overcome many of the bottlenecks that occur in a traditionally linear pipeline. By having departments able to work more collaboratively through overlapping workflows, notes get hit quicker and there are less instances where the flow of data gets trapped by a limiting upstream/downstream data model.
As we close out this production diary, we couldn’t help but ask our production, talent & culture teams how they feel about Steamroller and the Spice Frontier project and what they hope for the future of the studio. The answers we got were all really positive, describing a love of the visual style and animation quality of Spice Frontier, a passion for the individual characters, and most importantly, a deep respect and admiration for the team working on the project.
To learn more about Steamroller Animation please visit their site at: www.steamrollerstudios.com
