A studio born in a borrowed room, rebuilt in a crisis, and renamed around a verb.
Editor’s note
Motionographer and Studio VAS were both born in 2006. We turn twenty in the same year, which makes this story feel less like an anniversary profile and more like two timelines meeting in the middle.
Anniversaries tempt us to flatten a studio into a greatest-hits reel: the clients, the awards, the clean arc from small beginnings to durable success. That is not this story. This is about the less photogenic work of staying alive long enough to become somebody new. It is about play, economic crisis, projects that refused to die, and the moment a founder realized the studio he had built no longer fit the person he had become.
I sent Martín Schurmann and the VAS team fifty questions. They answered most of them, skipped the rest, and gave me something better than completeness: a portrait of a studio in motion. Flor Lioni, VAS’s Global Head of Brand Partnerships, jumped in for a few, including one story Martín would never have told about himself. You’ll find it near the end.
The name changed because the studio had already changed. Everything else follows from that.
Martín as a child in Buenos Aires. Long before Motion Design became a profession, play was already the method. Photo courtesy of Martín Schurmann.
The screen that made the future visible
In 2000, Martín was a second-year Graphic Design student at the University of Buenos Aires, in the Cátedra Wolkowicz, and the semester had just delivered its first Motion Design assignment. As was customary, the faculty opened the project with a talk in the aula magna from someone who had already lived inside the discipline the students were only beginning to name.
That person was Javier Mrad, former director of Canal 13’s Centro de Arte Electrónico, presenting three years of work made for the channel. For Martín, the talk did more than reveal a technique.
“That was the moment the degree made sense to me. The moment I discovered a discipline I could be passionate about. The moment I thought: this is what I want to do.”
The seed was older than the lecture. Ask him about the first piece that made him say “I want to do that,” and he doesn’t name a Hollywood title sequence. He names a Canal 13 ident with a little 3D sun. The Hollywood answer came later, in the titles for Seven, which spoke straight to his love of David Carson’s trash aesthetic.
Backups on CD
Martín spent the next year teaching himself from whatever books he could find and an early copy of After Effects, version 4.0, he thinks. He landed at Canal Do Turista, a tourism channel made in Argentina for Brazil, implementing a graphics package designed by Mrad’s studio, Medialuna.
Then Argentina’s 2001 crisis swallowed the channel. Two or three months after Martín arrived, the job disappeared. Because he had already been calling Medialuna with questions about the package, he knew where to knock. He sat down with Javier Mrad and Florencia Picco, the studio’s principal designer, and they offered him an internship with one warning: there was not much to give him. Except the backups.
“That was my first job in a Motion Design studio,” he laughs. “Backing up the studio’s projects onto CDs. DVDs didn’t exist yet.”
It is difficult to imagine a better first lesson in this business. Before you make the future, you protect the files.
Six people, one FTP, and a continent away
Around 2004, Florencia Picco resurfaced, now leading the Motion Design department at Fox Channels Italy. Being Argentine, and knowing what Argentine talent could do, she proposed something radical for the time: a team of six designers working from Buenos Aires for Italy.
They shared mornings as their overlap window and worked to objectives rather than seats. Promo toolkits, idents, program packages for Fox, History Channel, and National Geographic, plus the occasional full channel branding. They chatted on Messenger, then on the first paid versions of Skype once the audio finally got good enough.
“For files, we had an FTP server to upload to Fox,” Martín says. “There was no Dropbox. Sharing files in the cloud simply didn’t exist.”
The Fox Italia team on the road, October 2006. Remote before remote was a thing. Photo courtesy of Studio VAS.
Four partners, one room, no safety net
Váscolo began near the end of 2006, when friends who sublet a room in a big house called Martín to propose a studio for design, illustration, and animation. “We started as four partners, which, looking back, was complete madness,” he says. The name came from the surname of one partner’s grandfather, Bascolo with a B, softened into Váscolo.
The first office was that room. The first commission was a full broadcast package for a pilot an Andes mountaineer hoped to sell to Discovery Channel: opening, lower thirds, transitions, and 3D maps built from topographic data. The fee paid the bills for a couple of months.
The project that changed the material reality of the company came from National Geographic Music, a channel Martín describes as a kind of MTV for music from every corner of the world. “They had a budget,” he jokes, but the brief was genuinely exciting too: each ident mixed three or four musical cultures. The channel loved the first four and kept them busy for a year and a half, live action included. Most importantly, those projects bought the studio’s first computers. Until then, every partner had been working on a personal machine.
Two of the idents, preserved in their original 2008 standard definition:
The era left quieter lessons too. Ask Martín about his favorite failure and he doesn’t point to a technical disaster. “The failures were almost never creative or technical. They were about the relationship with the client,” he says. He used to take difficult clients personally. Over the years he learned to set limits, to charge for overages when needed, and sometimes to step aside entirely. “To let other people handle the conflictive clients, like a firewall, or a fuse, and appear only when necessary, without going to battle.”
Build it, break it, build something else
The most useful way to understand Martín’s creative philosophy is not through a reel. It is through the LEGO spaceships he built with his brother as a child. They would follow the instructions, play with the finished ships for a few weeks, then dismantle them and make something the box had never proposed.
“For me, design and animation were always a game,” he says. “Solving unique problems with unique solutions. Creating something that doesn’t exist. I never liked repeating myself or marrying one aesthetic.”
The range that followed proves it. For Dell Blue’s UltraSharp, the challenge was animating a monitor, the most static object on the planet. The answer was to make everything inside the screen organic, alive, and colorful, jump-cutting from wide shots to macros so the motion never stops.
For JBL Sonic Stories, made with Versus, the design system and characters were approved before a single frame was shot, which turned out to be the easy part. Shot in the middle of the pandemic, each piece left the team three weeks from receiving the edit to delivering finished animation, storyboard to cleanup, without knowing in advance what the talent would say.
JBL Sonic Stories, made with Versus. A graphic system built before filming, then adapted on three-week schedules. Courtesy of Studio VAS and Versus.
For NEAR’s NearCon, the studio designed the identity of an entire event, spaces, credentials, and screens, working alongside NEAR and production company IRL. “It’s another sport entirely,” Martín says. The lesson: reserve real budget for the final two weeks, because design and animation stayed active until noon on the event’s last day. The reward: standing in the venue and seeing their work at architectural scale. “A truly gratifying experience.”
And his proudest project almost nobody saw? A 2017 spot for Opera Mini mixing Motion Design, frame-by-frame animation, 3D, and stop motion, made with total creative freedom. Five intro and closing versions were filmed in Buenos Aires, and the client was so happy they flew the team to London to film brand ambassador Victor Moses. “Unfortunately, almost nobody saw it,” he laughs. “But I’m very proud of the result.”
Falling as a form of forward motion
The Fall began with a recurring human experience: the dream where the ground disappears and the body keeps dropping.
“It was one of those classic free-fall dreams, and then I woke up,” Martín says. “I wasn’t in a good place personally, and that dream of falling and falling must have been my subconscious making itself heard.” The image stayed with him and became a portal from live action into a graphic world with no way back.
The studio developed the short in its spare time for three years, and yes, they almost quit more than once. “We doubted everything. It’s very hard to work for ourselves.” Near the end, they made a practical decision: finish it, even if the final shots did not reach the level they had imagined. “The last shots in the film are the last ones we animated, and the quality wasn’t the same anymore. But we wanted to finish it and move on.” Perfection had become another way not to arrive.
The Fall became Váscolo’s second non-commercial short. It pushed frame-by-frame animation beyond anything client work had permitted, earned festival recognition, and brought commercial assignments through its visibility. But its deepest return was private. “It kept our heads busy in our free time, making something for ourselves.”
The project you make for yourself is still looking for a client
Years later, another self-initiated project proved the commercial power of play even more directly.
In 2024, after the studio released Sushi Crush, Fox Sports LA wrote with an improbable message: the channel’s VP of Marketing loved the film and wanted to make something with them, whatever it took. “Honestly, we read that email with a certain skepticism, because we couldn’t believe it,” Martín says. The brief was the promo for the tribute game to baseball’s Negro Leagues at historic Rickwood Field, in the visual language of Sushi Crush.
Sushi Crush, the self-initiated film that made Fox Sports call. Courtesy of Studio VAS.
The assignment carried a different kind of responsibility. These were not invented characters. The players had to be recognizable to the families who carry their memories, and the feedback arrived after animation had already begun. Some families asked the studio to make a father, uncle, or grandfather a little more handsome. “We had to redraw quite a few faces, multiplied by quite a few frames,” Martín says. “Definitely the most beautiful and craziest design note we’ve ever received.”
The Rickwood Field tribute to the Negro Leagues, for Fox Sports. Courtesy of Studio VAS.
Then the work nearly stopped
The clean version of a twentieth anniversary would keep rising from there. The honest version drops.
About two years ago, Martín believed the studio might end. “It was the perfect storm. Very little work, and the few projects around were chaotic, because nobody knew what was happening, especially with AI. And I was particularly exhausted.” The team contracted from twenty people to twelve, and the founder could no longer locate himself inside the structure he had created.
On the recommendation of the studio’s accountant, he started sessions with Carlos Laborda, an Argentine coach. “At first they were almost like going to therapy. His premise is that the company should be the tool for building the life you want. That simple. But first you have to know what life you want.”
For more than six months, Martín circled the same questions. Where am I now, and in five or ten years? Where is the company, and what is it for? “The midlife crisis found me at 49,” he laughs.
The answers did not produce a new business plan. They produced a change in ownership, not legal ownership but emotional ownership. Martín gathered the studio’s directors and handed over everything that was weighing on him.
“The surprising thing is that they picked it up, and took on the responsibility of pulling the studio forward with me. It’s no longer only my responsibility. We do it together. That is the real refoundation.”
The contraction was not the refoundation. The redistribution of trust was.
The Váscolo team in the Buenos Aires studio, 2016. Photo courtesy of Studio VAS.
The name was hiding in plain sight
The name arrived during one of those nights.
“I think it was one of those nights of insomnia, and I’ve had many,” Martín says. “In this industry, anyone who tells you they’ve never had a sleepless night is lying.” Váscolo no longer represented him, but abandoning twenty years of recognition felt wrong. Running through alternatives in the dark, he saw that the new direction was already sitting inside the old word, first syllable, hiding in plain sight: vas. You go.
Ask him to describe Váscolo and VAS as two people and he doesn’t hesitate. “Váscolo is more rebellious, younger, more transgressive. VAS is an adult, calmer but more experienced. Váscolo liked funk and rock. VAS loves good jazz, a genre with so much improvisation, letting the moment carry you, but with deep connection between the musicians, and with the audience.”
For Flor Lioni, who carried the rebrand to the outside world, the change was evidence more than decision. “Váscolo had a young, rebellious spirit. It arrived with energy and a need to plant a flag: this is what we believe and this is how we want to work. As the studio matured, we understood we no longer had that much to prove. We understood that not having to plant a flag could become our own flag.” Her summary is the cleanest one:
“The name changed because the studio had already changed.”
The launch used a countdown campaign to generate curiosity, but the reveal was never meant to say, look at our new logo. As the team puts it: “Something was changing, but it wasn’t simply a rebranding. It was a movement.”
In Spanish, vas is motion expressed as a person: you go. The studio’s new name is also an instruction.
Exploring the unexplored
The tagline gave the movement a direction without pretending to know the ending.
“Every time we and a client embark on a creative process, it’s very hard to know exactly where it will end, and that is precisely the beauty of design,” Martín says. He believes the pitch culture of the last two or three decades anesthetized that uncertainty by asking studios to promise the result before playing the match, and in a World Cup summer he reaches for football: “It’s like guaranteeing the result of a match before playing it. It takes the joy out of the game itself.”
The second meaning is geographical. Argentina can feel distant to North American and European clients, but the visual language is often shared. The human language is where VAS deliberately closes the gap. Emails begin with a question Argentines ask each other every day: how are you? Calls often begin somewhere other than the work. “We’re genuinely interested in the person on the other side of the monitor,” he says. When the studio finally meets those clients in Europe or the US, greetings come with a hug or a kiss on the cheek. “They don’t expect it. And then they’re grateful.”
“Distance is just a fantasy. You can have a distant relationship with a neighbor in your own building whom you never greet. What matters is the relationship you build with people.”
Atado con alambre
There is an Argentine expression Martín reaches for when the subject turns to survival: atado con alambre, tied together with wire. It’s what you say about a solution that shouldn’t work but does.
“I think Latin Americans are very creative in exactly those situations,” he says. On big projects with tight budgets and no room left to negotiate overages, the studio has rebuilt shots to match a spot’s aesthetic in After Effects instead of Cinema 4D, saving modeling, materials, and render time without the client ever seeing a seam. “We’re used to optimizing resources. It comes naturally, because we live in a society that does it every day.”
That resourcefulness is now meeting its strangest test. AI arrived at precisely the wrong moment for a founder already questioning his place in the company, and Martín’s first response was fear. His second was curiosity. Today his philosophy fits in four lines, addressed to any frightened 25-year-old Motion Designer:
“AI is a tool, and it can be used to optimize time. It is not here to replace human creativity. AI does not make art; it isn’t moved by its own motivations, and it doesn’t express an idea of its own. We can love it or hate it, but it makes no sense to be indifferent to what we can do with it.”
The studio is experimenting with a hybrid pipeline built on Cinema 4D, playblasts, art direction, and AI, and is just beginning to bring it into client conversations. “Ask me again in a few months,” he says. The distinction he holds onto is authorship. A system may accelerate a route through the unknown. It cannot decide why the journey matters.
Community is not the side project
The refoundation also widened VAS beyond client work.
Martín sees a serious absence of festivals, gatherings, and professional community in South America, and especially in Argentina. He has been discussing it with Joel Pilger for years. FUSIÓN LATINA, the encuentro VAS created with The Forum to celebrate Latin American creative leadership, became an answer, now heading into its second edition.
His ten-year dream for the scene is disarmingly analog. “To stop looking at the monitor and meet people. To hug and laugh. To have a coffee or a beer and look for solutions to the problems we all share.” In a moment defined by technological acceleration, the radical act is physical.
FUSIÓN LATINA, Buenos Aires, November 2024. Community as infrastructure. Photo courtesy of Studio VAS.
The official explanation
There is one story Martín would never choose for an anniversary profile, which is exactly why Flor chose it for him.
Berlin, festival season. Sushi Crush wins an award on closing night, so naturally the team goes to the party, catches up with colleagues, and celebrates a little more than advisable. The next morning everyone flies out early, Martín to Buenos Aires, Flor to Barcelona, on almost no sleep.
Somewhere that morning, Martín announces he slept terribly. Because his feet were too hot all night.
“Not the festival. Not the party. Not the lack of sleep,” Flor says. “The feet. And somehow, that became the story we all remember.”
Twenty years of Motion Design require vision, resilience, operational reinvention, and a convincing alibi.
2036
Ask Martín to imagine VAS ten years from now and he doesn’t describe a bigger headcount or a particular technology. “I hope it’s a platform. A space where the people who work here can do what they love creatively, but above all can grow, professionally and personally.”
At home, his 11-year-old twins have started asking what he does. He shows them Sushi Crush and The Fall, and tells them the studio animated the 3D logo for ONCE, a Disney football series, which, being Argentine kids, is the credit that impresses them most. Would he want them to follow this path? “I only know I want them to choose whatever they love.”
Martín with the mellizos. The next generation is already asking what he makes. Photo courtesy of Martín Schurmann.
And what should the industry think when it hears the name VAS? “That we are a beautiful group of Argentines with strong social values, who believe the result is a consequence of the relationship we build with our clients.”
What twenty years actually teach
I asked him to finish one sentence. After 20 years, the only thing I know for certain is…
“That in our discipline, as in life, everything changes. What matters is adapting to the changes, getting through the hard moments, and above all enjoying the present and the people we love. It might sound like a cliché. But it’s something we often fail to value, and with the years you realize it’s all that matters.”
A boy follows the LEGO instructions, then takes the spaceship apart. A student sees his future on a screen in the aula magna. An intern backs up somebody else’s work onto CDs. Four people borrow a room. A personal film refuses to die. Another personal film makes Fox Sports call. A founder thinks the company is ending, lets other people take the wheel, and discovers a new name inside the old one.
VAS is not the rejection of Váscolo. It is what Váscolo became after twenty years of falling, finishing, listening, and continuing.
The name says it all. You go.
Rapid fire
Mate or coffee? Coffee.
After Effects or Cinema 4D? After.
Mac or PC? Mac.
The forever movie: Star Wars.
The perfect title sequence: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The first piece that made him say “I want to do that”: a Canal 13 ident with a little 3D sun.
The plugin that saved his life: Trapcode 3D Stroke.
Render at night or at dawn? “Leave it rendering overnight and check it in the morning.”
The best advice he ever got: “Keep going, in the good times and in the bad.”
Buenos Aires in one word: “Fascinating.”
One more for the road: the film that made the most static object on the planet move.
Studio: Studio VAS, studio-vas.com
Founder and Executive Creative Director: Martín Schurmann
Additional voices: Florencia Lioni, Global Head of Brand Partnerships
JBL Sonic Stories: made with Versus
Interview and words: Carlos El Asmar
Note: Quotes translated from the Spanish and lightly edited for clarity and length.