This year’s Cartoon Business, held for the first time in Brussels, featured numerous panels centered around analytics and big data. However, Martin Juza, CEO of Prague-based production company Krutart, delivered an inspiring presentation that offered a captivating perspective on a smaller scale.
Before venturing into business, Juza started his career as a filmmaker and an artist and worked as a freelance commercial director / motion designer. In 2014, after several years of struggling to get funding for his own projects, he turned the tables and co-founded Krutart with Filip Veselý and Klára Jůzova.
Since then, the company has grown and produced short films, documentaries, commercials and tv series including Kosmix in 2020, a hit on Czech Television and now distributed worldwide by the French sales agent Dandelooo.
At Cartoon Business, Juza offered a glimpse of Krutart’s diversified strategy: a three-way revenue stream divided between regular animated productions, commissions for museums and sales for immersive media, with its own in-house sales department for immersive media projects and an editorial line with a planned release of one film per year.
Juza recalled:
From the beginning, there was a need to create a sense of togetherness. From the outset, my two co-founders and I have held strategic meetings every two weeks. Krutart launched with a team of five or six people from the start. Surrounding yourself with people who can inspire and propel you forward is crucial, and I believe that our emphasis on collaboration has been a significant factor in our growth.
As a former director, Juza went on to explain how he is now channelling his creativity into Krutart’s business strategy.
I think it all comes down to visualization. As a director, you are thinking all the time and imagining what your film will look like. As a CEO, I just changed the subject of this imagination. This still is a creative process, only I am now applying it to projects, business units or business models. I mean, spreadsheets are the most creative tools in the world! But seriously, it’s a tool of shaping the future in some way, because when you go into the numbers and look at every item in a budget, you really are looking at people, energy, only from a different perspective.
Krutart is currently working on season 2 of Kosmix, on a feature film from the same universe scheduled for 2027, and news IP’s.
More information to be found on: https://krutart.cz/
