Behind-the-scenes at Durioo - what it's like to work at an animation studio

What exactly happens in an animation studio every day?

We take a peek inside the Durioo studio located in Cyberjaya, to see the magic that happens behind closed doors! When we arrived at the studio, Durioo founder, Sinan Ismail welcomed us to a cozy space filled with bean bags, coffee makers and even a mini arcade machine and scooters in the corner of the studio.

An office equipped with a cozy setting seems fitting for people to churn out their creativity.

Now, what are the roles of the employees in the studio? Sinan explained that there are about 50 staff in Durioo so far, and they work in different departments such as the operations and content team.

“Firstly, we have the marketing team in charge of looking for sponsorship deals.

“In addition to operations, what we do day-to-day is brainstorming, and working with content or script writers, storyboard artists and content artists,” he said.

Durioo also has its designated team of professionals responsible for lighting for the animation where they also work with a team of experts for post-production and sound design.

Voice actors, who they call talents are also involved the recording process, where they work closely with voice directors to ensure each recording runs smoothly.

For the voice recording, Sinan shared that it’s important for them to select the right person for the role, more so for the English speaking audience.

“There is so much happening in Durioo day-to-day, honestly. But I am blessed with a great team and they really produce great content,” he said.

With the long process he mentioned for the shows they produced, it does make us wonder how long does it take to create an episode of the cartoons like Little Ammar and Mina Mila, among others.

He shared that one episode of a duration of 7 minutes roughly takes about two months to complete.

However, the flow typically goes according to the standard operating procedure (SOP) as it is done in stages where the script writers will work on it in the first week, before it gets passed on to the team of concept artists and others involved in the next step in the second week.

This means the script writers can start on a new script in the second week, making it possible for them to produce 2 episodes a month due to the repeating process.

As for his role as the co-founder of Durian Digital and also Durioo, he said he has no difficulty running both companies since they have strong teams on each side.

“Most of my time is there for Durioo, honestly, I’d say 95 percent of my time is there.

“This is because it is new and it is a startup that needs a lot of focus there but Digital Durian also has strong leaders so it is not a problem for both to do well as they do now,” he said.