When journalists at a Ukrainian TV channel filmed an interview with the co-founders of the local post-production company GloriaFX six years ago, they didn’t air the footage.
They didn’t believe a small company from Dnipro, a city of nearly 1 million people located 500 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, could work for the world’s top musicians. But by then, GloriaFX has already done visual effects for music videos by DJs Benny Benassi and David Guetta, rappers Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and P. Diddy, hip hop diva Mary J. Blige, and pop star Justin Bieber.
The co-founders of the company, Sergii Mashevskyi, 38, and Anatolii Kuzmytskyi, 34, weren’t offended. They found it hard to believe their success too, even after they won their first MTV Video Music Award for Best Visual Effects in 2015. They were the first Ukrainian company to get that award.
“How could it happen?” Kuzmytskyi told the Kyiv Post. “It was incredible and breathtaking because we learned everything by ourselves using two computers, and now we get the MTV award.”
The next year, GloriaFX made history by becoming the first company to win the visual effects category two years in a row.
Today, they have offices in Dnipro and Los Angeles and work with top production companies around the world.
But there was a long path to the achievements the company now enjoys.
Predictive name
GloriaFX was founded in 2008, in the middle of the economic crisis in Ukraine. It was one of those ideas that sounded more like a fantasy at first, but Kuzmytski and Mashevsky also had the perspective to build a thriving business.
An artist by education, Kuzmytskyi worked as a designer until he found out about several visual effects companies in Kyiv. He researched the field and discovered that the visual effects industry was expected to grow, with the potential to be a very profitable business.
Kuzmytskyi met Mashevskyi when he worked for Mashevsky’s construction company, and the two got along well enough to go into business together.
“(At first), it was a hobby that didn’t require big investment,” Kuzmytskyi said.
Kuzmytskyi learned the visual effects craft on his own. He remembers watching video tutorials in the 2000s with terrible quality and slow internet and learning from the U. S. Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the Vancouver Film School.
In the beginning, Mashevskyi led the business, making deals with clients, while Kuzmytskyi was in charge of visual effects. Their responsibilities, however, have become entwined over the years, and today they co-run the company and are both involved in all of its working stages.
Eleven years ago, they casually named the company after the glory monument in Dnipro. “We used to hang around nearby,” Mashevskyi said. They didn’t know the name would turn out to be predictive, leading the company towards international acclaim.
One of the latest works by Ukrainian award-winning post-production company GloriaFX is “Just Us” by U.S. artist and producer DJ Khaled and singer SZA. Full of visual effects, the music video features both musicians as royal warriors in an epic battle. (GloriaFX)
U.S. market
In its early days, GloriaFX worked on Ukrainian and Russian projects, creating visual effects for commercials and music videos. However, both markets came as a disappointment for the company, and they frequently didn’t get paid on time or didn’t receive payments for their work at all.
So in 2010, GloriaFX decided to stop working with clients in Ukraine and Russia altogether. They had no projects for over three months, until Ray Kay, a Norwegian director based in the United States, reached out to them.
Kay had seen one of GloriaFX’s works and wanted them to help him make a music video for Italian DJ Benny Benassi’s song “Spaceship.”
The 2010 music video now looks a bit cartoonish, depicting the DJ steering a spacecraft with a record mixer. However, “Spaceship” became a turning point for GloriaFX, establishing their name in the U.S. video production industry.
“So the grapevine has started,” Mashevskyi said.
What came after was a period of nonstop work for Gloria FX. Soon there were five visual effects artists on their team, working day and night and releasing six projects every month.
Awards
Eleven years after they began, GloriaFX has executed over 1,000 projects. About half of their works are commercials, but the other half are the music videos that pushed their development and brought recognition.
The list of their collaborations includes some of the most popular and influential musicians in the world: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Rihanna, Drake, Maroon 5, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande and many more.
They won their first MTV VMA for the video for “Where Are U Now,” performed by Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo in 2015. In the video, Bieber appears to be part of numerous paper drawings that displace each other every second.
That year, out of five nominees in the category, GloriaFX was involved in making four of the videos.
But it was actually their second MTV VMA in 2016 that was special for the company, which they won for the visual effects for “Up&Up,” the video by British rock band Coldplay.
The music video was a surrealist reflection on modern issues such as war, climate change, and immigration.
For “Up&Up,” GloriaFX used old footage shot from the 1940s to the 1960s, and combined the so-called uncombinable, with images like a volcano erupting popcorn and a ship full of immigrants floating in a bathtub. They spent two months in preparation and two more creating the effects for the video.
One of the shots took their two artists four weeks to make. “At one point it was so hard that some people wanted to quit,” Mashevskyi said.
However, their hard work eventually paid off. “Up&Up” was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Music Video category, collected a number of other prizes and attracted over 180 million views on YouTube. Coldplay’s frontman, Chris Martin, called the work, “one of the best videos people have made.”
“This is the most significant project in our history,” Kuzmytskyi said.
Spider-Man
According to Mashevskyi, the competition in their field is fierce. There are hundreds of visual effects companies working in the U.S., both local and from countries like Canada and Australia.
In many of them, employees have degrees in visual effects, while GloriaFX’s artists are self-taught — there are no colleges or universities in Ukraine that offer such a specialty.
Mashevskyi believes that despite the lack of qualified visual effects artists in Ukraine, persistence and hard work are what made their company competitive in the U.S.
“It is all based on enthusiasm,” he said.
His business partner adds that they always aspire to create visual effects that look so believable that they are hard to distinguish from reality. “The key to success is to deceive consciousness so that you believe that it is real,” Kuzmytskyi said.
The company’s co-owners say they want to shift to working on bigger projects like movies and animated films, however, at the moment, they say they’re way too understaffed.
According to Mashevskyi, major U.S. studios and streaming services like Netflix, Disney, Sony, and Universal appear to know about GloriaFX, but the number of their employees is always a stumbling block for cooperation.
The company now has 70 artists working in their office in Dnipro. However, big projects that often spend between $20 and $50 million on visual effects need at least 300 employees and sometimes as many as 1,000.
For that reason, GloriaFX is constantly looking for and hiring new employees. Mashevskyi says that with new film streaming services launched in the U.S. like those at Apple and Disney, the need for video content will keep increasing, and they hope to deliver it.
“Someday we will make another Spider-Man,” Mashevskyi said. “It will be the new Coldplay for us,” he added.
