While animation may be an industry geared mostly toward the smallest set, it’s a colossal player in the entertainment marketplace that has grown even bigger in recent years.
Responsible for the rise of one of the largest and most well-known companies in the world — Disney is still the largest animation studio in existence — the animation industry is now estimated to be worth around $400 billion globally.
A big reason is that animated movies benefit from a wide appeal and great merchandising potential, factors that contribute to average profit margins 30% higher than their live action counterparts.
Although the artform has been around for a long time — the first animated films appeared in the early 1900s — it has seen its most notable economic growth over the last decade. So far, 11 animated films have broken $1 billion in worldwide box office earnings, and four of the top five have been released since 2018.
Surprisingly, however, animation itself has changed very little over the years. Following the release of Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937, hand-drawn imagery became the standard for animated films for 60 years. The release of Pixar’s “Toy Story” in 1995 then introduced a whole new look, with a whole new set of possibilities to the marketplace when it became the first full-length film animated solely using computer-generated (CG) imagery. “Toy Story” was the second-highest grossing film of the year, and with a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for three Academy Awards, it also ushered in a whole new era; CG animation now accounts for 85% of the global animation marketplace.
Thirty years later, the industry is finally seeing another major disruption, and it’s coming from New Orleans.
Marrying a love of music and puppetry, the five principals of Swaybox Studios in Elmwood have created a new form of animation that they call “Motion on Motion” (aka Momo). Described as a cross between CGI, stop motion and live action using puppets, the style has been turning some pretty big heads.
In 2022, Swaybox was plucked from obscurity when the NFL hired the company to create a two-minute commercial starring puppet likenesses of NFL stars that aired just before the Super Bowl halftime show.
More than 100 million people saw the piece, and the feedback was immediate and positive.
Buoyed by the exposure, the five Swaybox principals focused on securing film and television projects. Some success followed, but the biggest news hit Oct. 1, 2024, when the studio announced that it would be working with the home of beloved characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, DC Studios, on a full-length animated film called “Dynamic Duo.”
Set to be released on June 30, 2028, the film will focus on the early days of two iterations of Robin, Batman’s famed sidekick as portrayed at different times by Dick Grayson and Jason Todd.
Who Is Swaybox?
Accomplished musicians Theresa Andersson (a violinist and singer/songwriter from Sweden who came to New Orleans in 1990) and Arthur Mintz (a New Orleans drummer) met through music. Mintz, also a lover of puppetry, served as Andersson’s sound man and director during a tour. The couple fell in love and married and were working together on music and puppetry in 2011 when they received an opportunity to go to Shreveport and perform an interactive puppetry production of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” that Mintz had directed.
“One condition of the gig was that we couldn’t bring any of our cast with us,” recalled Mintz, Swaybox’s co-CEO and director. “We had to use local talent. But one thing I’ve learned about puppeteering in the South is that there is no one with any experience.”
The show included one human actor, and the partners auditioned a skateboarder named Chris Armand for the role. After watching Armand playing with the puppets during rehearsal breaks, Andersson said it became apparent that he was a natural.
The same thing happened with another skateboarder, Noah Scruggs.
“Within 30 seconds I knew he was one of the best puppeteers I’d ever seen,” Mintz recounted. “I made him do things over and over because I couldn’t believe he hadn’t done this before.”
Armand and Scruggs then recommended bringing in a friend of theirs from the
skateboard park they frequented, Thomas Woodruff, the park’s manager. But when they reached out to him, his response was a succinct “Hell no.” Woodruff did at least agree to attend one of the shows.
Recognizing the potential of their new friends, Andersson and Mintz maintained contact with the Shreveport trio. According to Mintz, it was more than just their innate ability that impressed.
“They had an incredible work ethic,” he said. They would practice one 7-second skateboard move for 10 hours a day, three days straight.”
From Frustration Comes Innovation
A year and a half after the Shreveport gig, with Mintz and Andersson still working as musicians, Mintz began working to launch a pet project of his, a coming-of-age political full-length film made with puppets. As things progressed, they formed a more formal alliance with Armand and Scruggs, and Woodruff at last agreed to join the team.
Still, even as they tinkered with new technologies and effects, there was no grand plan or design.
“That was really it, we just wanted to make this film,” said Mintz. “There was no plan to form a company. We did suspect that if we were able to pull this film off, there would be other applications.”
The team realized quickly that the leap from puppet shows to filmmaking was substantial.
“It was really startling when we first put our puppetry on camera to see how awful we were,” Mintz recalled. “What sells from 50 feet away with a live audience no longer sells when you’re in a close-up.”
Since the objective was to make a serious film, transformation was necessary.
“We wanted the performances to be incredibly nuanced because it was a very adult, layered, nuanced human story,” Mintz continued. “All of our development came out of our inability to achieve the results we were trying to achieve.”
The first advancement was drawn from how bands record music, laying down multiple tracks at different times in the studio. Using what they call “multi-track puppetry,” they discovered that they could create more complex, nuanced movements for their puppet characters. They eventually coined the phrase “Motion on Motion,” , a play on Les Paul’s Famous “Sound on Sound” approach to guitar, to describe their new method.
“That’s where we separated ourselves from everything that had come before,” said Mintz.
Still, there was much more ground to cover.
“We’ve always been driven by the creative — there was always a story that we wanted to tell,” explained Andersson, who is the co-CEO and producer for Swaybox. “But our first round of investment was more about just inventing; we were exploring all kinds of things on a very limited budget and just figuring stuff out.”
Adding to the complexity was the need to be able to teach their new techniques to the much greater number of people required to pull larger projects together. Scruggs is Swaybox’s creative technical director, Armand is the puppetry supervisor and a puppeteer, and Woodruff is the lead puppeteer, but the five co-founders knew that more staff and more skills had to be brought on board.
The Journey from First Demo to DC
“We thought what we’re doing was cool,” recounted Mintz, “but we were in a garage in Shreveport, and we could see that we were about to run out of money. So, we said ‘Let’s make a little demo reel of what’s possible’ and that piece went viral.”
Somewhat to their surprise, the demo really resonated in the marketplace and drew considerable attention from major Hollywood figures — none more important, and more interested, than Matt Reeves, director of “Planet of the Apes” and “Batman” films and owner of the 6th & Idaho production company. Reeves became a huge supporter of Swaybox.
“He felt that what we were doing was really special, something that he could relate to,” said Andersson. “He connected with the emotional quality of what we were doing, the truth of what we were doing.”
The new animation form offered a new aesthetic — with overtones of film noir and even cinema verité — as well as additional benefits.
“Because our filming is done in real time with real cameras, it is the highest fidelity imaginable relative to any other CG animation,” Mintz explained.
To start with, the puppets are far beyond Muppets or Punch and Judy.
“Our characters have the same range of facial articulation as a CG character.” Mintz stated. “It’s like if a Pixar character came to life.”
And the puppets aren’t the only things that are real. Swaybox uses handmade sets, first painted in two dimensions and then crafted in intricate 3D detail, and in multiple scales depending on the performance and the actions required.
“We use real water, real wind, real fire,” explained Armand. “If the puppets are underwater, then the puppeteer is underwater with them.
“We work with real light, we work with real directors of photography,” added Andersson
There is also a big practical advantage to the Swaybox approach: While a studio like Pixar may take a week to create three seconds of action, Swaybox averages about 60 seconds per day.
When the NFL came calling in 2022, Swaybox Studios had been operating out of its Elmwood location for nine years. The studio has always maintained a core group of 10-15 employees who are based in Louisiana. After the success, another project quickly followed.
“We were greenlit to make a project for HBO Max, a feature film based on Catwoman as a kid,” recounted Mintz. Unfortunately, three months into the project, the CEO of Warner Brothers decided to cut back on the studio’s streaming productions.
“He canceled 42 projects, including ours,” said Mintz.
With that door closed, however, another one soon opened.
It was then that director and producer Matt Reeves reappeared. Having seen some of the work for the Catwoman project, he put together a short video compilation, which he then brought to David Zaslov, president and CEO of Warner Brothers.
“Zaslov said, ‘This is incredible, we need to release it theatrically,’” said Mintz. But the marketing department felt that it needed to be a larger story.
Again, Reeves stepped in.
“Matt had always wanted to make a story about Robin [Batman’s sidekick], and he thought this would be the medium to do it in,” explained Mintz. “So, he called us and we started developing that with him. The writer of the Pixar film ‘Coco’ came back with this great script pitch that we were all excited about, but just to put this into context, it doesn’t take much when you’re running a startup to get you excited when someone calls you with an idea. If it’s two celery sticks that rob a bank, you’re like, ‘I’m so into vegetables!’”
It also helped that all five of the co-founders related to the project concept for “Dynamic Duo” as they have long been fans of the DC comics universe.
The final icing on the cake was that Reeves fully embraces the Swaybox style.
“The previous projects we worked on were great, but everyone was, ‘We like your style, we like your aesthetic, let’s do that,’” said Armand. “Then when you get into working with them, they’re like, ‘We don’t like that anymore, can you do what we do?’ Matt Reeves and 6th & Idaho were the first people to say ‘We like that, stay doing that. That feels the best.”
Scaling Up
To take on a project of this size, their first full-length feature film, Swaybox will be undergoing their own super transformation.
“Up until now we have operated with project-specific term employment where we have swelled up to 50-75 people depending on the project,” explained Andersson. “We will be hiring about 240 people to work on the film, and most of them will be here in Jefferson Parish, in this building.
Andersson noted that the company aims to hire locally as much as possible, only relocating people from out of state when they can’t find what they need. To that end, she said Swaybox is working with local universities to create opportunities for students via internship training programs.
“It is part of our ongoing development strategy to engage with the film studies professors to identify the interests of the students and connect them to opportunities here at Swaybox,” she said. “We also offer training that is specific to our systems for those who have the right base skill sets,” she said. “Typically, our leads have previous experience in similar positions and if we can’t promote from within, we look for experienced candidates in similar industries.”
Andersson made it clear that Louisiana’s substantial film tax credits were integral to enabling the company to reach this level of success, and she feels that the studio is giving the state a good return on its investment.
“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have the tax credits,” she affirmed. “We are bringing a lot of people to the state and are having a lot of economic impact. Utilizing the tax credits was a must, and we were very happy to hear that they survived.”
Looking Ahead
As a breakthrough startup about to hit the big time, it would be easy for Swaybox to feel like they’ve figured it all out, and to just do what they do.
That’s not likely to happen.
“The one thing we learned over these last 11 years is to keep an open eye,” Mintz said. “We’re all huge fans of film and animation, and when you’re a fan of the medium, you get excited when you see something new. I think that was our competitive advantage, we were just kind of geeks, so when we would stumble on something that we had never seen before, it would excite us, and we would explore it.”
Driven by the tenacity and creativity that first brought them success in skateboarding and music, the team is determined to keep pushing boundaries.
“We can’t sit here and anticipate what that next exciting discovery is going to be, but we will stay open to those discoveries,” said Mintz. “We have a sort of a laboratory that’s running concurrently with this film and we’re dumping ideas into it. We’re not going to have time to explore them before the release of the film, but we are keeping that going.”
“There are always new things you have to tackle,” added Andersson. “We try to tap into the things we know, that we’ve already figured out, and then the lab is for figuring out things in the future.”
