Autodesk Media & Entertainment
Starting an animation studio at 22 is ambitious anywhere. Doing it in Colombia, far from the industry’s traditional production hubs, adds another layer to the challenge.
But Felipe Fierro has been finding his own way into animation for most of his life.
He began studying Autodesk 3ds Max at an Autodesk Authorized Training Center at just 12 years old, later becoming the first Latin American winner of Autodesk’s Artist of the Month award at 17. He went on to work on projects for companies including HBO, Hasbro, and Marvel Comics, teach Autodesk Maya at universities in multiple countries, and earn professional and instructor certifications along the way.
Then, in 2015, Fierro co-founded Pigmalion Animation Studio.
Today, the Colombian studio creates animation, visual effects, characters, and branded content for clients ranging from local companies to global brands. And as the demands of that work continue to evolve, Fierro is still doing what he started doing as a kid: experimenting with new tools to see what they can add to the creative process.
One of the latest is Autodesk Flow Studio.
Building a studio around character and craft
Much of Pigmalion’s work comes from advertising, but Fierro and his team approach those projects with the sensibility of filmmakers and character animators.
That can mean filling a Super Bowl spot for Badia Spices with animated ingredients, building digital versions of retail environments for Pepe Ganga using LiDAR capture, or developing and animating brand mascots.
Character work has become a particular specialty.
Fierro’s own influences stretch back to traditional animation, and he brings that thinking into Pigmalion’s 3D work. A mascot isn’t treated simply as a model that needs to move. The team thinks about personality, silhouette, expression, performance, and how the character fits into the larger story.
It’s an approach that has helped Pigmalion build long-term relationships with brands, but it also creates a very modern production challenge.
Clients increasingly need more content, in more formats, on much shorter timelines.
When a two-week turnaround is already too late
That challenge became particularly clear when one of Pigmalion’s mascot clients wanted its characters to participate in social media trends.
The creative ask sounded simple: take an existing 3D mascot and have it perform a trending dance or movement.
The timeline was the problem.
Using a traditional character animation workflow, Fierro estimates that producing the animation could take a week or two. On social media, by the time the finished piece was ready, the trend could already be over.
Pigmalion began experimenting with Flow Studio as a way to tackle that bottleneck.
Instead of animating the performance entirely by hand, the team could start with footage captured on a phone, use Flow Studio to extract the performance and apply it to an existing 3D character, then continue working with the result as part of its established production pipeline.
For Pigmalion, that meant a different kind of turnaround.
“When we need to animate something quickly, we use Flow Studio. Then we return to Maya and continue with the lighting and rendering. The quality isn’t affected. Flow Studio helps us animate faster, and the rest of the pipeline stays on track.”
A process that could previously take a week or more could now help the studio respond to a client within days, while the team’s existing character, lighting, and rendering workflows remained in place.
Testing AI-powered motion capture
For Fierro, Flow Studio also opened up possibilities he had rarely been able to experiment with earlier in his career.
Growing up and learning animation in Colombia, access to traditional motion capture was limited. Fierro remembers encountering a full motion-capture setup only once at university.
“They said, ‘This is the motion-capture studio, the mocap suit, and the mocap camera. Enjoy it, because this is probably the last time you’ll see one.'”
Years later, he wanted to see what a much lighter-weight approach could do.
For one personal experiment, Fierro created a realistic alien character that wouldn’t feel out of place in a sci-fi film. He built the character and environment in Maya, then recorded himself on his phone performing the movement he wanted: a simple, mysterious turn.
He brought the character and performance footage into Flow Studio to create the animation.
The simplicity of the process caught him off guard.
“Products are often marketed as requiring only a couple of clicks, but usually they aren’t really that simple,” Fierro says. “I was surprised that Flow Studio was.”
The experiment also gave Fierro a chance to push beyond the broader, more stylized characters he had seen in other tests and see how the workflow held up with a more realistic character.
A pipeline fit for superheros
For another experiment, Fierro went in a completely different visual direction.
A lifelong comic book fan, he created his own take on Green Lantern, combining a 3D character with the graphic qualities of 2D illustration.
Fierro modeled the character himself and rigged it in Maya using a HumanIK control rig before incorporating Flow Studio into the animation workflow.
This time, speed gave him room to concentrate elsewhere.
With much of the character performance handled through Flow Studio, Fierro could spend more of the project’s short production schedule on the visual development and stylized finish he was interested in exploring.
“It was released after only three or four days of work,” he says. “Flow Studio allowed me to do that.”
For a studio like Pigmalion, experiments like these aren’t separate from production. They’re a way of figuring out which new techniques are useful enough to bring into client work.
Finding the right place for Flow Studio
Fierro isn’t interested in replacing the tools or skills Pigmalion has built its work around.
Instead, Flow Studio has found a specific place in the studio’s pipeline: performance and animation when speed matters.
The team can capture a performance with an ordinary camera, use that footage to help animate a character in Flow Studio, and then bring the work back into tools they already know and use like Maya for the rest of the production process.
Brand mascots need performances. Social content needs fast turnarounds. VFX projects can call for digital characters and doubles. And smaller studios don’t necessarily have access to dedicated motion-capture stages every time a project needs one.
For Fierro, the opportunity isn’t about changing what Pigmalion does. It’s about expanding what the studio can take on, and how quickly the team can get an idea moving.
Still experimenting…
There’s a fitting symmetry to Fierro’s relationship with Flow Studio.
At 12, he was the kid studying 3ds Max at night alongside students twice his age. At 17, he was sharing his work with Autodesk’s artist community. More than two decades into that journey, he’s still testing new tools, putting characters through their paces, and figuring out what deserves a place in his studio’s workflow.
That curiosity has become part of how Pigmalion operates.
For Fierro, experimentation isn’t about adopting new technology for its own sake. It’s about finding where a tool can make a meaningful difference in the work. With Flow Studio, he and the Pigmalion team have found new ways to approach character animation, respond to tighter production timelines, and spend more of their time shaping the final creative result.
And if Fierro’s career so far is any indication, he’ll keep experimenting to see where it takes the studio next.
Want to hear more from Felipe? Catch him at Autodesk University 2026 in Las Vegas, September 15–17, where he’ll share more about his AI-powered workflows with the Autodesk community.