Nov 17, 2015

Boston Studio Cloudkid will shut down

Cloudkid has become the second major Boston animation studio to shut down in the last eight months, following this spring's closure of Home Movies and WordGirl maker Soup2Nuts.

The four-time Emmy-nominated Cloudkid, which billed itself as a “digital creative agency,” produced animated content and mobile games for a wide variety of clients, including PBS programs like Sesame Street and Between the Lions, while also developing production tools and libraries that it sometimes released for free under open source licenses. The studio also counted Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Scholastic, and Hasbro among its clients.

The founders of the six-year-old Cloudkid, Matt Karl and Dave Schlafman, penned a goodbye blog post explaining that while the studio is successful - they've billed over $1.6 million in 2015 alone - they wanted to refocus their goals:

The Cloudkid team isn't totally disbanding, however. In their goodbye post, they announced that they've accepted positions at social robotics start-up Jibo. “Jibo is a perfect fit for our team,” Karl and Schlafman wrote. “It enables us to explore innovative ways of telling stories and building experiences no one has seen; represents a fun and thrilling creative and technical challenge; and gives us the opportunity to work with literally some of the smartest people in the world. Most of all, we'll be building a fucking robot!”

It's unclear how the closures of Cloudkid and Soup2Nuts will affect Boston's already small animation community, but as local animator Alex Berry pointed out on Twitter, it's no longer business as usual for Boston artists:

For Boston area animators who'd like to connect with other artists, a new organization called Animatic Boston hosts monthly get-togethers. Their next meeting this Thursday will feature a panel comprised of former Soup2Nuts employees.