NEW YORK CITY — Creative company Bonfire (www.bonfire.nyc) has entered into a strategic partnership with Juice (http://juice.pl), the Warsaw-based animation, design, VFX, CG and sound studio. Bonfire will now offer Juice’s services to US-based agency and brand clients in the East and Midwest on an exclusive basis, and will tap Juice’s extensive capabilities for projects across the board.
Juice was founded in 2006. The studio’s team includes partners Adam Tunikowski, Pawel Janczarek and Wojtek Piotrowski, managing director (Tokyo) Michal Dwojak-Hara and director Michal Misiński.
“We’re psyched to add Juice to the Bonfire family,” says Bonfire managing director/partner Jason Mayo. “Their 3D and VFX work is insane. It’s beyond top level. And our experience collaborating with remote talent around the world makes it feel like they’re right next door, and our like-minded attitudes about work and creativity makes them the perfect company to align ourselves with.”
Bonfire made the Juice connection via Juice’s New York-based creative producer, Lio Spiegler, and the studios have already teamed on projects for Maybelline and Samsung. The relationship marks Juice’s first time being affiliated with a US-based production company.
Juice's Adam Tunikowski
“One thing that struck all of us here was just how much our philosophies about design and our company cultures are alike,” says Mayo of his Juice counterparts. “Our respective pipelines for executing work felt familiar, and their interests in forging a deeper relationship matched ours perfectly.
Tunikowski notes that Juice’s roots are in design — the company initially was tapped by other animation studios to pitch in on character design, environments, style frames and other assets. From there they started doing animation on their own, and things took off.
Tunikowski says a number of factors influenced Juice’s decision to link up with Bonfire.
“Aside from the business principle, it was all about energy,” he notes. “We’ve always grown organically; we’ve never forced anything or made big leaps. Whenever we were expanding it was due to a project, or we were given a challenge. Even then, a lot of the decisions we were making were based on the human factor first – the energy of the people engaged, or our connection with the client. From the very first talk with the Bonfire crew, we knew we’re very similar, and the relationship just felt very natural. It was kind of like a ‘follow your heart’ situation.”