Ira
Vorobieva

Situation

A live-action commercial required a complex CG character — a Kraken emerging from water to capture a pirate ship. After estimating, the client found the cost too high. Cutting other production elements wasn't an option.

What I did

Proposed a creative-production optimization: instead of animating the full creature, we'd show only 3–4 tentacles per shot. We approved with the client exactly how many tentacles appeared in each frame — enough to establish the character convincingly and show real physical interaction with the actors. Fewer tentacles meant significantly less animation work. The story, drama, and impact stayed completely intact.

Outcome

Budget approved. Animating 3–4 tentacles instead of 8 actually reduced CG complexity — no extra work for the team, no margin loss for the studio, no creative compromise for the client. They got the Kraken they envisioned, just smarter. This case became an internal reference for finding a win-win when budget and creative ambition collide.

Situation

A vetted freelancer — someone we'd worked with successfully before — was assigned a key production task. Status calls were consistently positive: "everything on track, will be ready by deadline". But dailies weren't coming through, visible progress was thin, and what did arrive didn't meet quality bar.

What I did

Instead of waiting for a last-minute crisis or hoping for a miracle, I brought in a second specialist to build the same asset in parallel. The first freelancer was recalculated to reflect their actual deliverable, so the cost of two artists doing one task stayed within the original single-artist budget.

Outcome

Project delivered on time with no crunch and no budget overrun. Two artists working the same task cost no more than one, because the first was paid for what they delivered. The lesson: past performance doesn't replace active monitoring, and a silent Plan B changes everything.

Situation

An internal DevOps/HR project stalled: the engineer reported to the CTO, but tasks were assigned by HR. Priority conflict led to no movement for 2 weeks.

What I did

Initiated a three-way alignment meeting: engineer, CTO, HR lead. Documented full scope and a shared Definition of Done. Built a phased Gantt with explicit ownership per stage. Introduced daily 15-minute standups until delivery. Ran MVP testing with an internal focus group before release. Made it structurally possible for three people with different reporting lines to ship something together.

Outcome

Project delivered in 3 weeks from the point of intervention with no over-engineering and no missed requirements. The cross-ownership model — CTO and HR co-sponsoring internal IT work — was documented in the knowledge base as an algorithm, preventing the same deadlock by design on future projects.

Situation

Team doubled from 30 to 60 people in 6 months. Leadership decided not to expand the back-office, with no new IT support or HR/Recruiter headcount. Volume of internal requests and freelancer sourcing grew proportionally. HR team was managing leave balances, overtime, salary changes, and employee records manually in spreadsheets — error-prone and time-consuming as the team scaled.

What I did

1. For IT: a Telegram bot with a guided troubleshooting flow and self-service system, pulling answers from the internal knowledge base, covering the most common issues without involving a support specialist.

2. For Recruiter: a structured freelancer database tagged by skill, tool, rate, and availability, letting producers find and book the right contractor independently, without going through a recruiter for every task.

3. For HR: initiated and led the development of an internal HRIS with the DevOps team: defined requirements, documented scope, facilitated alignment between HR and engineering, and oversaw delivery. The system gave HR a centralised dashboard to track leave balances (vacation and sick days), monitor overtime, log compensation changes, update tenure, and maintain full employee records — all without manual spreadsheet work.

Outcome

Back-office load stayed flat despite team doubling. No additional admin headcount was needed — OPEX kept in check while delivery capacity scaled.

IT bot cut 40% of routine manual requests.

Producers reduced freelancer sourcing time from days to hours.

HR moved from manual spreadsheets to a self-service dashboard. Time spent on routine data management dropped by 60%. Data accuracy improved — no more version conflicts or lost entries. HR could focus on people work rather than admin.

Situation

As the studio grew, three bottlenecks kept surfacing: incoming client requests required too much back-and-forth before a producer could even qualify them; document flow (contracts, briefs, invoices) was manual and inconsistent; and internal operational data was scattered across tools. Leadership couldn't get a quick picture of the business without pulling from five different sources.

What I did

1. Client intake: Built a Telegram bot via n8n integrated with the studio CRM. The bot collects full project specs from prospects (budget, timeline, style refs, deliverables), automatically sends the company deck and 3 relevant case studies matched by keywords, and generates pre-filled Asana cards.

2. Contractor finance docs: Automated document flow via Airtable + Zapier. Contractors submit documents once via a form; OCR extracts key data (amounts, dates, tax IDs) and auto-fills the Finance Base. Missing documents are flagged automatically with alerts to producers via Telegram or email.

3. Finance & ops dashboard: Built a custom ERP system to unify operational data: project tracking, financials, team load, and reporting — in a single interface built specifically for a CG studio's workflow. Defined requirements, documented scope, built MVP via Codex and Claude Code.

Integrated role-based access:
• producers see their project budgets and team load;
• HR track leave balances, overtime, and compensation history;
• CFO gets cross-project P&L and cashflow;
• CEO has a single control panel aggregating all of the above.

Data from separate tables, projects, and departments feeds into one place — no more pulling reports manually or reconciling conflicting spreadsheet versions.

Outcome

Client intake: 2h → 10 min (−90%)

Contractor finance admin: 15h → 45 min/month (−95%)
No finance manager hire needed for document processing

CEO and CFO have real-time cross-project visibility without requesting reports.

Back-office headcount: unchanged.