They are trained artists. Yet they took up the craft. At least in their own words. And businessmen. Successful businessmen. That's what I think.
It didn't look good for a while. They were doing things that a lot of companies do around here. They made a good living, but their ambition and artistic frustration drove them on. Today they have an internationally successful company with great products in a very specific market. A pipe dream for a lot of entrepreneurs. For them, it came true.
And one more thing about them caught my eye. They may make movies, but they mention a lot of things that can be implemented in any business. Like the fact that success in business is a result of will and discipline. Or that their company is at least half technology.
This is how Martin Jůza (CEO and film producer) and Filip Veselý (COO and CTO) from Krutart s.r.o. look at their business. Two of the three founders who could pass on their experience today. But they are driven to fulfill their vision. To make entertaining films for the planetarium storylines. And to build a hundred million dollar little Pixar in their industry. I have no doubt they'll succeed. And what did we talk about?
🔸 How did they choose their specialty?
🔸 What led them to want their own product?
🔸 What is their business process?
🔸 How to keep up with the cutting edge?
🔸 How to tell a great story?
HOW TO TELL A GREAT STORY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Guest introduction
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before we get to what today's Ignition is going to be about, I have one big request for you right from the start. If you like what I'm doing, if you've seen a Zagžeh before and took something away from it, then subscribe or like, share. That way you won't miss any more episodes, and you'll help me slip through the social media algorithms and get even more great guests like tonight's. Today's guests are Martin Jůza, CEO and film producer of Krutart Studios, hi.
Martin Jůza
Hey, hello.
Martin Hurych
And his partner, co-owner, COO Filip Vesely, hi.
Filip Vesely
Hey.
What are they surprising each other with?
Martin Hurych
Today it's going to be a great ride outside our bubble, we're going to see what the animation business looks like. But we're also going to get down to the basics of how business is done, how innovation is done, and how people are managed, so I hope you all find the trip outside the bubble interesting. You guys have been together for a bunch of years.
Martin Jůza
Tenth year under the LLC and some 15 years I would say we've been in a relationship.
Martin Hurych
That's why I thought of a provocative question. What have you surprised yourself with in the last 14 days, either positively or negatively?
Martin Jůza
Yesterday we played Age of Empires, except I was just watching and the guys were playing and I was giving them advice. It was such a surprise to me that even though I play it worse than them, I was giving them advice.
Filip Vesely
Actually, that's true. That was a great moment, because I realised again what Martin is good at, that he is a little bit aloof like that, looking down on it and he can name what's wrong with it very well.
Martin Hurych
Is that why there is a CEO in your company?
Filip Vesely
Maybe you are. I think Martin doesn't like to go into detail, unless it's about woodwork or woodwork, which he loves. It's a position where he sees it from the top and then he can hand out tasks and go from there and then come back to it and see that it's better crafted than he could have done on his own.
What kind of business are they in?
Martin Hurych
Today we're going to dig into how you do business. I told you, you're a film studio, an animation studio. Before the shoot, I confessed that all I know about animated films is that they're on TV, so let me tell you what your business is and how you got into it.
Martin Jůza
The business that we have now has some three major branches. We sell licenses because we've found that this whole business is about the fact that you're trading licenses. Maybe it's similar in software, you're giving some permissions to somebody to use something for a period of time. That's the business in the end. But that's what we were rushing towards for maybe 10 years before we figured that out and before we realized that that's the main and essential thing. We've always had a terrible time doing our own thing and not doing so much custom work. The way we approached it in the beginning was that the three of us founders of Krutart went to film school and we wanted to make money by making commercials and doing marketing work so we could make his feature films. That didn't work out at all because we found that we would always do the work, the money would kind of last until the end of the month and we could go do more work. It didn't create that free time to do the films. That's where we spent the first couple of years.
I was also freelancing in animation, I did those mobiles for Vodafone, which are shown in shop windows all over the country. At the same time, Filip and his girlfriend connected us with today's illustrator celebrities, Tomski&Polanski, we borrowed money and made an animated series for social networks. It was a kind of Czech South Park and that was actually the beginning of us doing our own thing and doing it in animation.
There are three main parts to what we're doing now. The first one is called IPs, intellectual properties, and that's the part where we operate most with traditional media like TV or cinema. We invent some characters and some world in which those characters exist, and we make it as universal as possible. It really works like that intellectual property in the sense that you can take those same characters and put them in a movie, in a TV show, in a game, print them on a backpack, on a case, make pencils. That's where the animation has this crazy advantage, that you make something that catches on somewhere and you can pitch it to x amount of other mediums into some big brand. So that's one part where we have a successful Kosmix brand. That's an animated series originally and that sells all over the world. Plus it airs on D, you can watch it with your kids and we're developing a feature film.
The second section is fulldome, which are films for planetariums. That's actually how we met, and that's that we produce films for planetariums at the rate of one film every 3 years. We have built a whole sales department within our company and we are exclusive in that we have our own shop and we sell the film ourselves all over the world.
The third section are orders where we specialise mainly in museums, where we supply, for example, the National Museum, the National Technical Museum and other large institutions with audio-visual equipment for museums. Sometimes we also do some smaller commercials and spots for non-profits as a hobby, but mainly we do exhibitions and their interactive audiovisual content. That's Krutart.
Martin Hurych
That means that part of it is custom work and part of it is your own product portfolio, if I understand correctly.
Filip Vesely
It's true. That's actually part of the whole journey, because we started with those contracts, those were the ads. Those ads gradually transformed into work for these museums that we came across completely by accident. I was editing some video for a lady and then we found out that the lady worked at the National Museum and she offered us to do the whole show. That was better than the commercials, because the commissions are longer term, more stable for cash flow, so it gradually started to add a bit of calm to the work that we'd got used to. The advertising is terribly stressful and suddenly this was working on interesting projects, you learnt something. The way it always works in that museum is that they pile cauldrons of data on you, which you then have to somehow distill into something that the customer in that museum is able to digest. That was actually kind of the ignition of the fact that we found that we were good at distilling experiences from different facts.
So we went to do those museum commissions, and then we found out when we were doing business with those museums that there are actually planetariums that have exhibits where we could also use our audiovisuals in some way. When we came across those planetariums, we found that there was all this space of this full house cinema and the films looked terrible. At that point, we thought, let's combine what we can do from those museums, distill the facts and make them experiences, and do the filmmaking we've always wanted to do. We made it a product of not doing it custom, but selling those licenses.
How did they choose their planetarium specialty?
Martin Hurych
Do I understand correctly that the planetariums were a positive blunder, or was it a targeted attack on a niche where you saw you had a chance?
Martin Jůza
It was a two-phase process, and it includes both phases you've listed here. We already wanted the museums to have a more stable supply of commissions, so we sent our shopkeeper around the Czech Republic to institutions that she chose. Then she found out that there were these fulldome cinemas, which we didn't know. That was the rub, but we then spent an awful lot of time picking out the biggest ones here in the Czech Republic and going around to do some qualitative research to soak up what the demand was. Those people were terribly open and to this day that community is terribly open in spreading the know-how. We also very quickly got to the point where we were one of the biggest festivals in the world for these films in the Czech Republic completely by accident. We got inside that community awfully quickly and started to do an awfully thorough search of where we were. We really went through all the films that exist, of which there are 500, and we saw maybe 30 of them in their entirety, and the rest we at least looked at the pictures, the trailers, we read. We compared it to what the people in those planetariums were telling us, what they really wanted, what they were buying and what they were showing and how much they were buying it for and how often. From that, we made a prediction. I think that was the first time we did any kind of market analysis in depth. Our hands were reaching mainly into the Czech Republic at that time, so we did it in the Czech Republic plus some interviews with people we met at the festival, for example. The decision was made after that analysis that we wanted to invest in our own film that would be for this medium and would be a little bit on demand from what we had learned in various ways. We wanted to corner that market on quality and be the Pixar for planetariums, because all the other companies are making science films for kids and they're terribly boring.
What led them to want their own product?
Martin Hurych
I commend you for the market research. A lot of people don't do that and jump in headfirst. I'm interested in the stage before that, because when I go into some market research, I'm very likely already looking for what product I could put in there. Where did it come from in you that you wanted a product?
Filip Vesely
At least for me, it was really the endless frustration of the contracts. There's some arbitrator who claims something that you see is bullshit, that wants to buy something from you that you don't believe can work. I was still taking it in those commercials because it's such a stressed business and you never know where the assignment is coming from, what corporate sphere. Then it gets filmed, it gets thrown in the trash, it doesn't even get released, the money gets burned, the work gets written off, and that's it. With the museums, it really irritated me, because then you come to the opening and see how it's all put together all wrong. I like a good experience, I like it when I come and it's wow, but in those museums it's really awful to see how most of the time the exhibitions are created not for the people, but for the experts. They come there, they read the mile-long description and they are satisfied. A normal person comes and wants to be entertained and educated without actually knowing it. That's how I think museums should work. But what we've found there is that the sphere is really still a bit ahead of a revolution, it's about to be transformed into the 21st century, when it starts to be fun and through that fun you get some education into people.
Martin Jůza
I think that Fíla's frustration also came from the fact that he was managing a lot of the commissions artistically, coming up with the elements for the exhibition, coming up with the concept for the advertising. We're not that good at commissions. I've been in the service business for quite a long time, longer than we've been doing Krutart, and I see and like to see when someone can do the service well. He doesn't show some opinion and really serves you the way you need. I think a large part of the core of that company of ours is terribly arrogant about something. We thought we could do it better, and that's why we just took all the money that ended up flowing through that production and said we're going to make the product. The people who are doing the jobs with us now are better than we are at offering that pro-customer service, but I think we're also a lot better at doing customer service when we're selling our own thing that we can back up 100%.
How big is their market?
Martin Hurych
You're on several continents today, those licenses are approaching a hundred. How many planetariums are there in the world?
Martin Jůza
The numbers vary, but I have just dusted off the initial research and there are over 1 800 institutions listed in a database. But again, some figures put it as high as 4 000, if you include some inflatable planetariums that a gentleman has and takes around schools in Hungary. We have the terrible advantage that if we wanted to do advertising for foreign countries, here we have a database that Filip scraped from public data at the beginning, and suddenly you have 1 800 customers in CRM and you're off and running.
Martin Hurych
So the sales department that you have still has the potential for another 1,700?
Martin Jůza
Yes. I hope he hears that.
What is their business process?
Martin Hurych
We salute them. How's the planetarium film selling in your business?
Martin Jůza
You're a member of Scaleupboard and you run sales there, and I've been going myself for a year and a half to learn and listen, I enjoy it immensely. Philip is terribly systematic and spreadsheet master and he sorted out that CRM and then built some of the foundation of that process. With our super shop assistants who came up from the bottom of the company, they both came up from the office, we worked together to learn how to do that shop and do that process, what the stages are, where it stutters. I think we spent maybe a year and a half tweaking it before it clicked and then we said this is how we're going to go forward. Then one of our mall managers became the store manager and she recruited x amount of other people to be the hunters for her.
Martin Hurych
So Philip is the author of the business process. Do you make calls, do you meet at conferences or how do you actually generate those first contacts?
Filip Vesely
It's definitely changed now, I was there at the beginning where we were kind of trying all these methods. Eventually it distilled down to a pure mailing, it's 100% going by mail, because the market we've hit is a bit of a wild west. It's a very unplowed field business-wise. A lot of it works on, for example, you buy the technology, you buy the projection software and you he gets the movies for free. The companies that make the technology are also the distributor of that content. They come in once every year or two, offer a technology update, give free movies, and everybody is happy. We did it the other way around, we wanted to actively reach out to those institutions and sell them, but they are often not used to that, and they don't even speak English. So it makes it all the more difficult. We do business with the whole world, so there is the classic problem of time zones. Often incompetent people come to these conferences to look at the content because they don't know what to do at these conferences. The CEO has been there x number of times, so he'll send someone because it's weird not to have anyone there, but it has no business culture.
As a result, the mailing has proven to be the most versatile tool and I think we will refine it more and more over time as we focus more specifically on individual markets. Right now we're really going for more of an all-out effort and then we'll find that France is maybe very conservative and we have to have that French person and we have to speak that language and maybe it will work over the phone. But it's probably going to be some way before we get there.
Martin Jůza
What got us to those 100 actual sales is discipline. We understand that's the complete key here to the business the way it works for us now. It's some quantum of emails to x dozen institutions, it's hundreds of emails a week ideally spread out amongst that team. Everybody's got their dozens of leads going out and they're contacting planetariums. We've also, over that time and the time that we've been educating ourselves on this, we've paid consultants, we've mentioned the language, and we focus a lot on that end.
We're also helping those planetariums understand that this film is the most successful film they've ever had in Copenhagen, in Singapore, and we have that backed up by case studies and data from those customers. We tell them that they may not like the film, it may have won all the awards it could in that market, they may not like it, but it will bring them money. The schools will be happy and they can put that in their annual report. So we're going at it from the business end, from how the film can help those customers. As Fila said, institutions will often buy something terribly expensive, it costs 200 million, just because they have the projectors there, but then what do they want to show. Paradoxically, because we are dealing with institutions that are often funded by public money, it is easier to fund the CZK 200 million than it is to spend a million a year on new films. But that's what it's based on and the school will go and see it. So the business is done by systematic work in emails, where we use the languages of those markets, where we write via artificial intelligence. We tell them to try the film, we have it in their language, they can buy a shorter license, we'll give them some discount and then they can buy it at full price. So they can try it out, that it will give them the results they need.
Martin Hurych
Do I understand correctly that all these emails are highly personalized and handwritten? Because I see a bunch of people around me, you say 1,800 to 4,000 planetariums, you have a database, a bunch of people load it into a machine and tomorrow after lunch they send it out and they're surprised there's no results.
Martin Jůza
We'd have the whole market sorted in a day.
Filip Vesely
I think our head of sales would be more likely to answer that, because it's different now. We're just looking at the numbers that come out of the deal and we've left that process purely to her.
Martin Hurych
Is there satisfaction with the numbers coming out of the store?
Martin Jůza
We said at the beginning of this year that we would try to double last year and so far it has worked out that way. We don't have to go into the mail that much, but we do meet on some pretty regular basis and I think at some stage it goes on automatic. The institutions are relatively few though, we've now recruited 5 malls and each of them has maybe 30 institutions, so going through 30 sites, reading those annual reports, all of a sudden there you know and you can write an accurate report. Phila was still dwelling on one point, we have to look for really relevant people in that institution, which is usually the director of that institution, who you talk to in some language of what I named. So we do go to conferences, but in the end the conversion tends to be much greater from those emails.
How to keep up with the cutting edge?
Martin Hurych
Turn the page. I have two boys, so I've been forced to go to the cinema to see animated films for a while now, and I enjoy it, especially the American scene. It's very much a vanguard of innovation for me technically and technologically to make some kind of donkey's bridge to what I want to ask. Pixar's name has already come up here today, even though it's in a completely different league and a completely different segment. But how does Karlak keep up technologically with someone who rules the world cinema in this segment?
Filip Vesely
I think it's simple, we're in a completely different market. We don't have to keep up, we're borrowing that brand that everyone knows to show what we are in that market, that we're number one in that content.
Martin Hurych
But I expect a similar quality in story and execution when I go to see Pixar and then go to the planetarium with my parents as a preschooler, so as not to be bored. Obviously, you have to stay on the cutting edge of that technology. How do you do that?
Filip Vesely
You're just mixing apples and pears, story and technology. By technology, one imagines how to render it, how to model it to make it beautiful, shaders, skin, light, reflections, flairs and that's not what it's about. It's about how well you tell the story.
Martin Hurych
Is the story really still more important?
Filip Vesely
Oh, yeah. Form is always second, content is first. Kids nowadays watch videos that are completely crappy, edited on a cell phone, subtitles over each other, 6 comment windows, and they don't care if they're interested in what the person is creating. What's important is the story and that's what we're good at, we just know how to tell the story and we learned that in those museums. We're still in the edutainment field, those planetariums are educational institutions, so we always have to bring some education to the table, that's the meat of it. But to get that education into those people, we figured out that we need to make sure that those people don't know that they're being educated, so there has to be a good story. So you need to put out a good story with good characters that you put obstacles in their way that they have to overcome, and in order to overcome those obstacles they have to learn something, they have to learn something themselves. At that point, the person is happy to learn it too.
Martin Jůza
The fila is much closer to the creation of the narrative, and we spend an awful lot of time on it, maybe a year coming up with the story and prototyping it. You quickly scribble down images and put them in your timeline in the editing room so you can play it as a scene, and we did like 10,000 of those images for the 30-minute film we're finishing now. So we spend an almost psychopathic amount of time making sure it's fun, that it has an emotional core, that you're tense and moved, that it works. I think that's the key to success in that market.
I think there's another little trick. I've spent some time now calculating what the capacity of that market is, how much is spent on tickets there annually. I came up with something like a billion dollars, which in the US alone is a $10 billion cinema market turnover a year. So it's a piditmarket, so we're hoping that Pixar doesn't get interested in that, but it's extremely interesting to us because we see that our ambition to do 100 million sales in a couple of years is actually terribly small compared to what that market can bear.
Pixar isn't going there and the big studios aren't going there and it's being done by semi-amateurs, they're not filmmakers, they don't have a degree of x years and they don't have a network of great writers. We have, like, totally awesome screenwriters who have won Czech Lions and are working on these films. But these films are otherwise really amateurish in the story dimension.
There's another important aspect, you as a kid often go there under duress, in quotes, because the school takes you there or a parent takes you there. We were talking to a Czech film distributor yesterday, and he said that a great target audience is divorced dads who want to entertain a child for the weekend. So maybe that's our target audience as well, so the kid is going there a little bit forced, that they don't choose that as their agenda, that they want to spend some time at the planetarium. We may shock these people who come there by saying it's so good because they expect it to be no big deal. I think that's also an interesting position to be in, that we've found that blue ocean, which we've been strengthening some of our know-how in for an awful long time, and it's finally turned into some profit as well.
Where can we see the films in the Czech Republic?
Martin Hurych
If someone wants to film family time at home, where to go in the Czech Republic to see your film?
Martin Jůza
Unfortunately Prague is closed now because they are updating the projection system and they will have the best in the world, they will have ice projectors. There are about 12 institutions in the Czech Republic screening it, and the biggest ones are probably Pilsen, Hradec Kralove, Ostrava, Brno had it only for a year, so unfortunately they can't screen it anymore, but I think Jindřichův Hradec can screen it as well. Otherwise, the film is called 3-2-1 Start!, it's a bit of a rush.
What's interesting about their company for people in the industry?
Martin Hurych
So if you're listening to us and you need to film some family time so you can get back to your hobbies, you know where to go. The third topic that I have prepared for you, you in the film
business, you have a completely different model because a lot of people here are freelancers or specialists who get hired for projects. You're building a company, and a very business-oriented company at that. What is it that makes those specialists go to you and be with you and maybe for those 3 years or even longer they're willing to build that product with you?
Filip Vesely
I would say some stability, because when you talk about the specialists, those are the people on set, the cameramen, and we don't really attract those people because they're the people who like the set. They're going out there and they're working with these big tripods, cameras, lights, they're building these scenes, they're out somewhere where it's raining, it's kind of an adrenaline rush. These are people who live a completely different life than we do. We're normally in the office from 9 to 5, we don't work on weekends, we don't work on holidays, we're sitting at the computer, we're in the conference room, we're having fun, we're there celebrating birthdays or playing Age of Empires. It's a completely different style and we're very much in the business in the sense that we're the production company for these movies. This American production comes in, they make this big foreign series here and our specialists freelance there, but what we're driving is that we want to make a local product that we develop here. The network of people that we attract, on the other hand, are the ones who are not interested in the massacre, who are interested in the animation, and they are interested in the visual style that we communicate that will attract them. They also often get a little bit of a shiver in the beginning, but then a year later they've got the slippers, they're sitting there and they're happy. That stability ultimately prevails because that set life is a brutal life destroyer. It destroys all family life, it's not very compatible with that rootedness and family background.
Martin Jůza
I'll describe it a little bit for people who don't know. When you're doing a location shoot, that's the set life that Fila was talking about, the standard is 12 hours, that's not exceptional, 12 hours is the standard and you go above, 14, 16 hours you spend on that shoot. That means you go there and you leave there, which is your hours that don't count, but usually it's just overtime. It's a lifestyle that not everybody can handle or wants. We're an alternative to that.
I would maybe say the main pitch, we do the best thing in the world from the Czech Republic, which is movies for kids in a fulldome planetarium. It's long, it's complicated, but it's true. We make the best films for kids for fulldome planetariums in the world. You can be part of this story. We do business in 26 markets and we've kind of squeezed it all out from underneath. I always say that analogy, that we're not the Czech Skoda company that gets the assignment, they assemble it perfectly and send it off. We're the German one that invents it and trades it. The fact that we have that production is great and now we have decided to keep it at least in the planetarium segment. We want to make it domestically as well, because we are already better and better at it. The fact that we invent the things and then sell them, we have control over the whole chain and we're not dependent on someone somewhere deciding on something and that keeps us busy. We also took a terrible risk for a long time of employing these people when they had nothing to do, when we didn't have the contracts, and that's what gave rise to the seedbed and the development of the films that feed us today.
Are they more artists or artisans of art?
Martin Hurych
That's awesome. You, Philip, have one more, CTO, in addition to the COO title you mentioned, and that leads me to wonder if you're more of an artist or if you're more of a technology company. Are you manufacturing, or what are you?
Filip Vesely
We are the best storytellers. But even when I went to art school, I always referred to myself as a craftsman. I've never had that burning desire to make that auteur film, to let some of that idea out into the world that's been tugging at me. That's where I enjoy our dynamic in the studio, because the assignment is the science. We're actually popularizers of science and different social aspects that we see that we want to set a good example for these kids. That's a much bigger assignment for me than some of my ego. It also allows us that the film can then be made in a much more democratic way, that it's not this kind of authoritarian thing where there's this crazy director, the architect of the crazy guy who's yelling at everybody. We've been piping this thing for so long that it's great for everybody and everybody's looking at it from their own aspect because nobody has that brutal authorial ego in it and that makes for a good product in my opinion.
Martin Jůza
At the same time, the production itself is insanely technically demanding. We're working in software that's open source, so our main tool is free, but of course that has these big contradictions. Every day a new version comes out and those versions support each other and there's always something breaking somewhere. So what we're planning and need to improve on now is very much just the technology part. We have amazing talent, designers, animators, I think we have a strong network there, but we also need to strengthen the technology part, which is 50% of the production. It's like setting up a production line so that these people can really just come in and say today they're going to animate a hamster doing something for 7 seconds somewhere and they don't have to figure out how to store it.
Martin Hurych
How long does it take to animate a 7 second hamster?
Filip Vesely
It's maybe 14 seconds in the result, because 7 will take blocking and 7 will take animation. So it's got two phases, kind of a rough one and then a fine one, if I were to put it in masonry terminology.So all in all, it will take about two days.
How to tell a great story?
Martin Hurych
I always end the episodes here with some kind of carving in stone or summarizing the whole piece in 3 to 5 sentences. I'm intrigued by the storytelling here, because storytelling is great for business and you definitely tell your stories too. Come tell me in a few points how to tell a good story.
Filip Vesely
I think you have to have great characters that have something going on.
Martin Jůza
We're so caught up in it now that it's awfully hard to put it in those few sentences. I think, fundamentally, the most basic rule of thumb for a good story is that when you're saying the sentence that tells the story, you don't use too many "ands." That is, went and saw and bought. He went, but he forgot to put his shoes on, and just by using a different word in that sentence, you create drama. He went but forgot to put his shoes on. Suddenly you're already imagining something in your head, I've already created a story. The conjunction "and" creates a terrible linearity, and the story is that you've always got twists and turns in there, and the twists are created by the words "but" and "yet" and so on.
Filip Vesely
It was very enlightening for me when we made our first feature documentary. That was a spin-off that taught us how to work in the film world and be good producers. It was a documentary called The Swede in the Gigolo in Czech, The Russian Job in English. When we did the teaser for it, it started with just two shots. The first one was the headline, Avtovaz, a Russian car company, 7 billion rubles in the red every year, 130,000 employees. Then there was a second shot of the dude and it was, Bo Andersson, Swedish ex-general, crisis manager hired to get it into the black.
You can absolutely see at a glance that this is going to be a drama.
Martin Jůza
Phil, you said something was happening to them, that's called an inciting incident, some point in the story right at the beginning of the movie or whatever you're telling. Some coincidence happens that puts you in some uncomfortable situation, but that's the last coincidence you can have in the story. From then on, to have a good character, she still has to be actively acting, she still has to be trying to figure it out. She gets loaded in the beginning, and then she gets loaded worse and worse, because some antagonist is coming against her and making her situation worse. She's actively fighting back and offensively going and trying to resolve the situation. Then you know you have a good character. To use the movie 3-2-1 Start!!!, the hamster is kind of inspired by Andy Weir's The Martian. I think that's a totally cool character with a great story and there's only two characters. There's the Martian and there's Mars as the other
character, like an antagonist, and he's still actively trying to survive. That's his drama, the guy has landed on Mars, but he has no way to get out of there, everything is against him. I think that's an example of a great story, but it's terribly simple. There are terrible logs against him, he's always getting hit, but the antagonist is predictable, and the character is trying to get out of there by any means necessary, by his cleverness, intelligence, and creative means. That, for me, is the story of our company, for example.
Bonus
Martin Hurych
I'd like to end this. I realized I asked you for a few sentences and you've exposed me to a great story here, for which I'm glad. I'm just going to ask if we could work some points into the appendix of this podcast afterwards that maybe our viewers and listeners could stick to in telling their story. Otherwise, I wish you guys to be in all those 1,800 to 4,000 planetariums with at least three films. Thank you for visiting.
Filip Vesely
Good luck, thanks for having me.
Martin Jůza
Thank you very much, it was great.
Martin Hurych
If you're already googling or binging the Martian somewhere, we've done our job well. Again, I'll repeat my plea, if you liked us, give subscriptions, give likes, refer us to someone who might find this episode helpful. We'll be happy to, it will help us get through the social media algorithms as well. Be sure to check out that promised bonus that's already hanging around the episode.
Also check out www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, which not only has this episode and not only this bonus, but all the episodes I've done so far. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.
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