Today you are going to know more about Gabriel Garcia, the director of Ed.
Not only the director of the animated short Ed, Gabriel is also the founder and CEO of Hype Animation. Gabriel had his first contact with computer graphics at 15 years old, and since then never stopped using this skill in everything he does.
He started his career as an architecture student in 2002 when he founded Hype which, at that time, only offered digital visualization services for his architecture classmates. He graduated as an architect in 2006 on the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Always in love with arts and technology, Gabriel started learning about storytelling and, in 2012, decided with his partners that it was time to change the course of Hype Studio from architecture to the advertising market.
Gabriel hates being trapped in the comfort zone and it's always looking for ways to be innovative and creative, the architecture and advertising worlds became a frustration point for him and his brother
because they wanted to fly higher and explore all that they could creatively in terms of storytelling and computer graphics, not just attending to the demands of their clients.
"It was really cool to develop this project along with my brother. It was all very new to us and we walked through this path working and learning together"
That's why he and his team had the dream of making a short animated film that was a drama focused on the grown up public and that had a surprising ending. It was time to take the leap! In 2013 Ed came to life and Gabriel supervised the whole project as director. This was his first entertainment project as director and I guess we can agree that he nailed it right?!
"You can't fear challenges. To innovate is to take risks."
The goal was to tell a different kind of story with a non linear timeline and with a plot twist at the ending "we had to be very careful and sensitive to create the gun scene because we knew it was a really strong picture to show to the public".
After Ed's release Hype Animation became a reality, the transition to the entertainment industry was working, and the rest is story, after that Hype closed deals with Disney, Nickelodeon and Netflix and other great companies.
After almost 10 years of Ed's launch, Gabriel is actually excited to revisit his old rabbit pal because after Ed his work turned completely into manage Hype as CEO and there's a lot of loose ends he wants to explore and take care in the feature film.
Gabriel now points that Hype can no longer be called only as Hype Animation because what they work on and their plans go beyond only that. Gabriel and Hype's focus now is entertainment, animation and how the Web3 can help to create a new way of production and distribution in the movie world.
"What we do now is to create incredible universes and memorable characters through great stories. It can be a short animated film, a game, a comic book or maybe even all together, our focus is the entertainment."
When asked about why Ed was chosen to become Hype's first NFT project Gabriel stated that he was already studying NFTs and the Web3, but still didn't think about Ed as a viable option for it. While talking to Cassio Rocha, Hype's Lead of Innovation, they realized that Ed was not only perfect to be funded trough NFTs but also to be a project completely made to the Web3, with the participation of its holders, distribution via blockchain and a lot more.
"Ed lived a thousand lives in his life, why not portrait them into NFTs?
It fit like a glove"
So there you go, this is a brief way to know Gabriel, the guy that works tirelessly to make the world a less boring place and that wants to make Hype become the Brazilian Pixar, investing more and more in its own IPs and looking at each product from more than only one point of view and creating an entire world around that.
I think we can agree that with all his ideas and the amazing team behind it Hype is beyond Brazilian Pixar, Hype is already Hype, the only place where Ed was born.
Let's make a movie!!!!