The Start of STATE, with Dash Bash speaker, Marcel Ziul
Meryn Hayes had a chat with Marcel Ziul, Creative Director and Founder of STATE.
Growing up in the suburbs of Sao Paulo, Ziul moved to the U.S. in 2007 after working with some of the top studios in Brazil. Read on to learn more about his journey and how STATE came to be.
Q&A with Marcel Ziul
Read time: 10 min
Meryn Hayes:
Today I’m speaking with Marcel Ziul from STATE design, welcome.
Marcel Ziul:
Thanks for having me.
Meryn Hayes:
Marcel is a Creative Director and founder of STATE. Growing up in the suburbs of Sao Paulo, he moved to the U.S. in 2007. As a freelancer, he has contributed his talents to Prologue Films, Stardust, Zoic Studios, Troika, Shilo, Apple, MAL/TBWA, and Bigstar, where he served as an Art Director and Lead Animator on the Bio Channel rebrand.
Marcel’s amazing work is highlighted by several awards and nominations.
Meryn Hayes:
We're so excited. The Bash is getting close. I feel like we've been planning it for so long and now it's actually happening. The more we talk to our speakers, the more excited I'm getting, and the less stressed I'm feeling about the logistics.
Marcel Ziul:
I know. It's exciting. I was thinking the other day, the conference is happening in September, but September is already here. Now I need to take a look at my keynotes.
Meryn Hayes:
It's time to start prepping.
Marcel Ziul:
Exactly.
Meryn Hayes:
Awesome. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the industry?
Marcel Ziul:
Yeah. I joined the industry totally out of the blue. I was going to med school, actually, and realized that it wasn't for me. My dad saw me through that process. He owned clubs back in Brazil and I used to do all the flyers for them. He was like, “dude, you love designing, why don't you talk to a friend of mine who has a studio? Maybe he can get you an internship?" I went there, talked to the guy, and started as their PA. I was doing things for shoots, organizing cables, all of that.
I would stay at the studio from 6 AM until I finished my shift at 6 PM. Even then, I’d stay longer to go to the post-production room to ask the guys questions. I was doing tutorials at that time. One day the main 3D guy was on vacation and they had to animate a logo. My boss needed to find a freelancer and asked if anyone knew someone that could tackle it. I said, "I can do it, I've been doing tutorials. I can do this thing." It came out good. From there, I was promoted to the post-production side.
Marcel Ziul:
This was all in my hometown. My town is medium-sized. It has almost a million people and is close to Sao Paulo, but the industry is super small. It's not big, so I wanted to go somewhere else. I moved to Sao Paulo and started working with bigger shops, doing my thing. After that, I went to Rio to work in this big production house. Then I moved to LA. Here I am.
Meryn Hayes:
That's awesome. It's so interesting, I've talked with a few people throughout the industry about this. Sometimes when people are getting started in their careers, they realize something's just not working. For example, you tried med school…It’s easy to think of these times as points where we're failing ourselves.
I started out doing photography and realized halfway through college that I didn’t want to move to New York to be a photographer. I was really hard on myself but realized through those curves of my career path that finding out what you don't want to do is as important as finding out what you do want to do. You find your way to where you're supposed to be through those challenges and moments where you're identifying, “Is this what I want for myself?”
Meryn Hayes:
Med school is a really big deal and hard to get into. Was that a tough decision for you? It sounds like you had a lot of support from your family, which I'm sure helped.
Marcel Ziul:
Well, it wasn't a hard decision for me. You're right about knowing what you don't like to do. It's important. I usually say this to clients when I present something for them, let's say, mood boards. I say, if you don't know what you like, just tell me what you don't like.
Meryn Hayes:
Totally.
Marcel Ziul:
But in regards to transitioning from med school to this industry, I don't think it was a hard decision. It was a moment of clarity. When I think back, my dad had such a vision, that he too realized, "Dude, you don't like this. Why are you going to continue?" It's also hard to be 100% sure of what you're going to do when you're younger. We all carry that pressure and feel that we need to know.
“STATE, meaning the state of mind, or ‘this is your state.’ this is a place where you can come and be yourself…”
No, sometimes you need to make decisions and that's the beauty of this thing, you can just re-correct. When I started working at the studio, I could tell it was right because I was putting in so many hours after work. Let's say I would work in the studio from 9 AM to 6 PM and then at 6 PM, I would go to the post-production division and stay there with the guys. I was putting in all the hours. It was a passion. To me, it was an easy decision.
Meryn Hayes:
That's so interesting. Then what? You moved to LA. What year was that?
Marcel Ziul:
I moved to LA in 2007--I'm going to talk about this in my keynote. The funny thing is that in Brazil, things are so different. There is a lack of planning, not that the U.S. has the best planning efforts, but we plan stuff better here in the States than in Brazil. I got tired of that. I got tired of the disorganization, working crazy hours, and having no weekends for six months. It was time for me to go and do other things. I was in between the U.S. and Australia.
Marcel Ziul:
I had a studio in Sydney that wanted to hire me, but I was really into the studios here in the U.S. I came to LA and met with a studio called Belief. It's old. I don't think people are going to remember it, but Belief was like BUCK back in the day; the go-to studio. Everyone wanted to work there.
I talked to Belief and they wanted to hire me. It was so awesome. I went back to Brazil and said, "Well, I'm moving to the States. Bye." They did all of my paperwork because it's such a big deal. One thing that people here in the U.S. don't realize is that when you hire someone from a different country, it is a big deal for a foreigner. You have no clue. I remember going to my farewell party with all of my friends and family there. Everyone was crying. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not like moving from New York to LA.
Marcel Ziul:
For us, it's a huge deal. I would never have expected that I would be here for this much time, but I love it. I would stay longer for sure.
Meryn Hayes:
So you were working in LA, what led to the start of STATE? How did that happen?
Marcel Ziul:
That's an interesting question. It was mid-2013, until that point, I was a freelancer. I was also doing projects on the side with a friend of mine, Marcos, who's an amazing Art Director and Creative Director--he's awesome, we're still friends. We were doing projects on the side where we would get the overflow work from studios and do it ourselves. We had a space and it was like we were in this limbo mode: do a project, go back to freelancing with studios, do another project, more freelancing. I got tired of it. This whole movement. We weren’t a studio and we weren’t freelancing a hundred percent.
I felt the necessity to create something I could put all of my time into. I talked to a friend of mine about building a studio. He wasn't ready for that. He wanted to be a director. So, I decided to move to New York. I was tired of LA; Hollywood, the flashy people. I wanted to go somewhere else, but then something crazy happened. I was doing my green card at the time and I needed letters of support to show to immigration so that I could stay in the U.S. as a resident.
Marcel Ziul:
I called the NFL and asked, "Hey, you guys tried to hire me in the past. Could you write me a letter stating that?" The guy never got back to me. Two weeks go by, I'm like, "Oh snap." I sent another email. Finally, he responded and asked if I could come by the next day. I showed up and he started talking to me about a project I had no idea about. I asked why he was talking to me about a project when I had come for a letter. I didn’t get it. He was like, "Letter, what letter? Dude, I thought you were here for work.” He ended up giving me the letter and telling me he’d call in a month.
Marcel Ziul:
A month later, he called me with a project. By then I had realized that I did not want to work with a friend of mine. I wanted to build something. My wife came to me and said, "Hey, I can be the producer on the project. Then we can hire other people. What do you think?" I agreed and we took on the first project. We did another one and another after that. We did maybe three to four projects with the NFL when one day, Carlos came to me with an offer.
Carlos was a client of the NFL. He's an amazing friend. I love that guy so much. He came to me with “the biggest project of the season.” No pitch needed, he wanted to give it to me. The only kicker was that I couldn’t work from home. I needed to have a space because he needed to be able to take his boss to an official office. With bigger projects, you need more stuff.
Meryn Hayes:
Show me you're legitimate.
Marcel Ziul:
He gave me two weeks to pull that together. One of the producers on the NFL side was a friend of mine--Joe Nash. He's now an Executive Producer at BUCK, but back then he was leaving the NFL. Carlos suggested Joe and I get together to do the project. Joe came to work as the producer and then we got a space together.
It felt right. We loved working together. We loved each other. We asked ourselves, “Why don't we become partners and build a studio?” Then, STATE was born. It happened out of the blue. It wasn't something planned or structured.
Meryn Hayes:
It's funny. There are a lot of ways to start a studio, but that's similar to what happened with Mack and Cory. They were working at an agency--that's where I met them--they got a project that they were going to take on freelance, and they decided they were going to leave the agency to do it. Then, they started working together and ‘Mack and Cory’ turned into dash. How long were y'all working together on that project for the NFL?
Marcel Ziul:
We worked on the project for about four months. It was huge. We had to shoot and everything. In the middle of this whole project, we liked working together so much. Joe and I were like, “oh man, now let's get a space, and let's keep this going. You're the Creative Director, I'm the EP, let's go.” He started doing business development, and we began to get a bunch of small projects. Like really small projects, but for us it was awesome.
Joe was with STATE for another year, then I think...I don't know. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think it was too much for him to be the owner. The responsibility and the hours. Once you become the owner of the studio, there's no more nine to six. It's nine to whatever. Joe decided to leave because he wanted to do something else. He wanted to be a farmer. He went back to Connecticut to pursue that.
Meryn Hayes:
That's awesome!
So, where does STATE’s name come from? How did y'all come up with that?
Marcel Ziul:
It's funny because we had another art director who was supposed to be with us as a partner. The three of us were all trying to bounce names around and what we came with was just bad. We came up with ridiculous names and Joe's mom, she's a consultant for Google, was like, "send me your name ideas and I'll let you know if you guys are heading to the right direction,” as far as branding and recognition go. We sent the names to her and she told us they were all terrible. Eventually, we came up with STATE, meaning the state of mind, or ‘this is your state.’ This is a place where you can come and be yourself, something like that. She liked it! Short, strong, and has good meaning behind it.
Meryn Hayes:
Awesome. In the beginning, those early days, what were some of the challenges you didn't expect to be dealing with?
Marcel Ziul:
Well, there's a funny story. We started our studio. Right? Cool. We booked a few freelancers. I was working one day and one of them came to me and said, "Hey, Marcel, can I talk to you?" All I could think about was how awesome this was. He was running a project at MY studio, and now he needs to talk to me. He comes to me, and he's like, "Hey we need toilet paper." I'm like, "Oh God, this is the shit that we have to deal with."
That was the first wake-up call. I realized that we needed to take care of the space and have things in place. Structured. Having a studio is like having a kid. I mean, I have two kids and love them to death. They are my life, but it's so hard as a parent because it's a 24-hour thing. I'm always there and always taking care of them--they're two and six. The company is the same. If I tell someone who wants to have a kid how hard it is, people will never have kids.
Marcel Ziul:
They'll be like, “Forget about this. You're not going to sleep. You're going to do this. You're going to do that. Whatever.” Having a company is the same.
Meryn Hayes:
Same way.
“…when something becomes a business, a really big business, it loses its soul.”
Marcel Ziul:
It's the same way. There are hard problems. If someone tells you beforehand, you wouldn’t want to have a studio, but I think the biggest fear for me, in the beginning, was the cash flow. We got projects and you feel good, but now you need money to produce the projects. You need to have money to finance the project, then get paid later. We have to develop a system for that. It was pretty cool, but for me, just that anxiety of not knowing was hard. The business side of it was pretty intense.
Meryn Hayes:
I have a four-and-a-half-year-old, and I can totally empathize. I think for so long, I felt like a bad mom because nobody talks about how hard it is. I was just like, “is it me?” Then I realized that nobody talks about it. It's just hard. I like that comparison, that if people talked about how hard it was to start a business or a studio, they wouldn't do it because it is hard.
Mack and Cory, when I met them, they were animators. Now they own this business. They can empathize with the whole mindset shifting from a creative to the business side and how different that is. Do you feel you just had to figure it out on your own? Or did you have resources early on that were helping you figure out the business side of things? Because that's just something that if you're not used to it, it's out of left field for a lot of creatives.
Marcel Ziul:
This is a good question because I never understood what my dad used to do with me in terms of preparing me for the world. He always had his own business and he was always teaching me things. I remember going to my dad’s work helping him at his business and I would complain about something. I'd be like, "Hey dad, did you see that thing is broken?" He would be like, "You already identified that it's broken. Why don't you go and fix it? You know the problem. How do you solve it?" He was always giving me that mindset. I used to hate when he would say that to me.
Then when I started running STATE, I realized how necessary those lessons were, because I saw all the problems and was already thinking about how to solve them. The transition from being an artist to a business owner wasn't that hard for me because I was trained for it by my parents. But if you're not ready, some give up along the way.
Marcel Ziul:
I think the biggest hurdle I had to overcome was learning when to be the creative director and when to be the owner. It's like being an animator and a designer at the same time.
Meryn Hayes:
That's so interesting and such an important mindset because again, you're trying to make the best creative possible. Taking the side of the business, which might impact what you'd say about the creative direction and focusing on the project or the client or the creative or whatever the task is. To your point, you can figure out the logistics or the cost or the extra stuff on the other side, but to focus on the creative, to make sure that it really shines through. That's great advice. How big is the studio now?
Marcel Ziul:
I think STATE has a staff of 20 to 25 now.
Meryn Hayes:
In those early days, how conscious were you of how many you wanted on staff? Was growth more so based on the creative needs for client work and projects?
Marcel Ziul:
Our biggest thing when building the studio was going back to how we started this conversation--we knew what we didn't want to be. We didn't want to be like the big studios because I believe that when something becomes a business, a really big business, it loses its soul. Most of this is because I believe that when clients look at STATE, they can see our soul. They can see how much heart we put into our projects. I always thought that if we got too big, we would lose that component, which is so important to me.
I never thought about having a studio with 25 people. Did I want to have a studio that had 50 people? Maybe not, maybe I'm fine with 25, maybe I'm fine with 20. Maybe I'm fine with 15. To me, it's all about measuring how much heart is still coming out of STATE. If we’re still producing with passion and people can see our soul, cool. If that component starts getting lost, then we're getting too big in terms of structure. But I never had that mindset of exactly how many people we needed.
Meryn Hayes:
That's great. I’ll probably steal that quote. I love that. Measuring how much heart. Sometimes people can get too caught up in the tangible aspect. I mean, I understand businesses have to be tangible for many reasons, but I love the idea of keeping on the pulse of how it’s feeling. The soul of the work that's coming out. So, you were in New York when you started and now you're back in LA. Is that right?
Marcel Ziul:
No. I never moved to New York. I was moving but then…
Meryn Hayes:
Then STATE was born, so you never left.
Marcel Ziul:
Yeah. Never did.
Meryn Hayes:
I was like, “how did you get back to LA?” But you never left.
Marcel Ziul:
Never left. We never made the move, which is something that, every time I go to New York, is the biggest frustration of my life. I never lived in the city. I think I needed that, but it's fine. Now I'm at a different point in my life. I can go to New York anytime.
Just quickly going back to that heart thing, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. This guy is so amazing. He’s unbelievable. Every time I talk to him, he’s like, “I have three businesses. Now, I have five businesses.” He's always building. At one point, he was going through a rough time. He has a studio back home, back in Brazil. I told him this. I said, "You know what's happening with you? You were putting money ahead of everything. Your end goal is always cash. I can guarantee to you I never put money ahead of STATE, no." I said, “all you have to do is work hard, and love what you do. Do you show up excited about this business? Can people see that through your words? Through your work? Through your conversations? Yes?” If people see that, money becomes a consequence.
“when you say no to others, you're saying yes to yourself. we look at ‘no’ as a crime…those ‘nos’ got me here.”
Marcel Ziul:
Like at STATE, if you could see the amount of work that we say no to because these projects have nothing to do with what we are. They’re just going to be about the money. If it's just money, you lose the soul. We're not doing our thing. It misses the mission statement of the studio which is what’s important. A few days later, he called me. He had gotten rid of two of his businesses and is now just focusing on the studio.
Meryn Hayes:
That's great. That's something that I think is difficult for people, in general, to say no to from a business perspective. Especially for people who are just starting in their freelance career or are just starting a studio. Saying no is especially hard because of the money. Do you think that that's something that's gotten easier? Or would you say that y'all were just as willing to say “no” early on to keep up with the soul of the studio? Has it gotten any easier over time?
Marcel Ziul:
It gets easier. My wife once said something to me that was cool. She said, “when you say no to others, you're saying yes to yourself.” We look at “no” as a crime. My whole keynote at the Dash Bash should be talking about the power of “no”. How “no” got me here. Am I the most successful studio out there? No. Am I the most successful person to myself? Maybe, yes? I'm happy with me. Those “no’s” got me here.
Even the way that you take on rejection is important. For example, I've seen people when they lose pitches. They get so mad. But there's always a victory when pitching. You pitch them something and if you get a “no”, you go back and ask why you got the rejection from your client. Is it because of your idea? Was it because of a business relationship? You find so many important answers through “nos” that we don't even realize.
Meryn Hayes:
I love that. The introspection. It's so easy to get caught up in why you didn't win a pitch or why the client didn't like something. But I really appreciate the introspection of learning from why something didn’t work.
Early on as a Producer, I didn't know how to talk to clients or I didn't know the answer to a question. Just take a breath. Take a minute and figure it out. Learn from whatever the client is saying or the issue and you can move forward. We sometimes feel as if we need to say “yes” or have an answer right away. There's that service side of what we do that pushes people to overcome it or to say that they know how to do something when they don't. To your point of being introspective and taking a look at why we are doing something, that's meaningful.
Marcel Ziul:
When we do post mortem on a project--we do that a lot at STATE--after we finish a project, we get everyone together and talk about it. What did we learn? We did a project for this big client that I'm not going to disclose because, of course, they're my friends, but we did a project for this big client. I was trying to work with them for five years. Five years! Going to meetings, visiting, taking them to lunches and dinners, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, everything. We got the project. That's cool. We start the project. Good budget and everything, and then financially, the project was a disaster.
How the hell we blew up that budget, I didn't understand. Looking back, the client was confused most of the time. They didn't know what they wanted. I think they became so excited about the relationship, that when they got to work with us, they wanted to do everything at once. After we delivered the project, we came back to our post-mortem to talk about it and something that came to my mind was the price of education. We pay for education. You go to college, you pay. You want to take a class, you pay. It's the same thing in business. Sometimes you have to pay to learn from your clients.
Marcel Ziul:
So, we blew up the budget. There's a way to go about processing that. You can either look at it as you blew it up because you did the project wrong, OR you can see it as a learning experience. We were learning how to work with that particular client. Now, if we do another project with them, we know how they work. You can always see things as an absolute failure or you can analyze the negativity that came with it. There's always something that you learn through mistakes.
Meryn Hayes:
That's so true. The value of a project, even when it doesn't go right, is that you learned how to work with the other person, which is different from client to client. Sometimes when you're going through it, it's a struggle. Then you're able to step back and breathe and really look retrospectively. Do you always do post mortems with the clients?
“we pay for education. you go to college, you pay. you want to take a class, you pay. it's the same thing in business. sometimes you have to pay to learn your clients.”
Marcel Ziul:
Only sometimes with the clients. Some clients are not open to it. We always do it internally though because there's always something you're going to take away. When you're in the middle of a project, it can feel pretty awkward and uncomfortable. What I learned is that the biggest issue with our industry, there are a lot, but the biggest issue is communication.
For example, let's talk about notes. You get a note from a client that has five paragraphs. All they want to say is to make the composition a little brighter. But instead of saying that in one sentence, they write a novel to you. Communication is a huge deal. Not a lot of people know how to communicate with a few words.
Meryn Hayes:
You have to translate what they're saying.
Marcel Ziul:
Then you read it and realize that all they want is to make that object in the background red.
Meryn Hayes:
It's like…you wrote all that to say that?
Thinking about the business side of what we do is something that's not learned in school. The other thing is communication and providing feedback. I went to art school for photography and we had all kinds of critiques, but it's not inherent. You have to learn to give good feedback. That goes both for other creatives and for clients. To your point, education is so important. Sometimes it's lost on us because we live in this world. We know what feedback we're looking for, but if this is the first time that the clients have worked with us or the first time they've ever done video animation, we forget that they might not know everything. You don't know what you don't know. That education is just so crucial.
Marcel Ziul:
This is so silly. How many times you were on a call and then the client gave you a note and you're like, “Okay, cool. No worries.” Then you hang up and you're like, “I have no clue.” It happens a lot.
Meryn Hayes:
It happened like three times today.
Marcel Ziul:
One way that I learned how to make sure you and the clients are on the same level is just through honesty. They give me a note that I don't understand, I tell them I don't understand it. There was a moment a couple of weeks ago, we were on a call with this huge client. He gave me an explanation of what he wanted and then asked if I understood. I immediately said, no. I could tell that he got uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable too. We were on the same level. We talked through the notes, and he explained it to me again. I went back to the team, fixed the problem, and sent it back. He was like, “dude, awesome, approved!”
Meryn Hayes:
Perfect.
Marcel Ziul:
If I had said okay and went back to my team, I would have had no clue what to do. All you want is to be on the same level as your client so that you can all understand each other, which is hard to do. It's not easy to say I don't understand. We feel the pressure to say we got it. We're so smart. We understand everything you say. No, sometimes there is confusion too.
Meryn Hayes:
Totally. It goes back to what I was thinking earlier, the pressure of feeling you're always supposed to know the answer. You can read the client's mind, it will, to your point, save a lot of back and forth and confusion to just clear the air and be like, “I don't understand.” But it's hard for people.
Marcel Ziul:
It's hard to be vulnerable. People are afraid and that goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. It's so key to feel comfortable being vulnerable. It's fine to not have an answer. I make bad decisions too. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing and that’s ok.
Meryn Hayes:
That's so important. That's great. Let's see. How has the last year been for y'all? Do you feel the pandemic in the last 18 months has shifted how you work?
“it's hard to be vulnerable. people are afraid…it's so key to feel comfortable being vulnerable. it's fine to not have an answer. I make bad decisions too. sometimes I don't know what I'm doing and that’s ok.”
Marcel Ziul:
Well, yes and no. For STATE, diversity has always been a big thing for us. I have always worked with people from all around the world. I don’t care if someone is in whatever country, different times. I kick off artists at midnight. No problem. If they're in Europe and I want to work with someone there, I'll do it. In that aspect, it didn't change much.
What did take a little bit of time for the team was understanding how to work from home. It took us about one to two months to understand that flow. I have to say, workflow didn't change as much because we're always busy, but I did miss seeing other people. I'm a people person. I miss that interaction. But as far as the studio, it was a smooth transition. I care about how people feel these days, because of mental health, especially Zoom. I can do three Zooms in a row, but I need a 15-minute break after. I’ll even push calls unless it's with a client.
Marcel Ziul:
We had to adapt a little bit here and there, especially with the servers. I'm sure you guys have to do the same, but we had the system already set up. It wasn't that hard. The only big thing that happened was we signed a new lease for a new space a week before the lockdown.
Meryn Hayes:
No!
Marcel Ziul:
We have a new space that no one has ever been to.
Meryn Hayes:
Oh my gosh. That's wild.
Well, we are almost out of time, but I just want to say this was awesome. I am so looking forward to your presentation and hearing everybody celebrate and clap for you. We'll grab a beer after and celebrate. Thank you so much for giving all your insights. You have such an interesting story. I know everybody at the Bash is going to be stoked to hear what you have to say.
Marcel Ziul:
I'm super excited. I have so much respect for what you guys are doing, so whatever I can support I'll be up for it.
Meryn Hayes:
Thank you. We really appreciate that.
Marcel Ziul:
Bye Meryn, bye.
Meryn Hayes:
Bye.