-by Maya Shenoy, Founder & Business Head, Creative Code
It all dates back to 2008 when me, along with my two business partners (then just friends) had finished our animation course in Bangalore and were not very sure about our next career move. Animation was very new in India back then and hardly was there any company absorbing freshers and even if they did it was for a very poor salary package and one had to be prepared to move out of the city.
Chethan, one of my partner and I had finished the course and were hunting for a job in the city and Naveen, our other partner was yet to finish his course. We started our career in a small production house in Bangalore. However, the owner of the company agreed to hire only one person and for a very petty salary. He asked us to decide on who’s going to stay and who’s going to leave. I asked him to hire Chethan while I preferred to still work there for no pay and instead learn the work.
Chethan’s salary was sufficient for him to pay for the fuel every month as he would stay far off from the work place. Still we decided to work and understand film making process. Chethan was good at editing while I attended client meetings along with my boss. However, things turned sour in couple of months. We were slogging our guts out and were not appreciated at all. Let alone increase in the pay, we were not even seeing any growth there. By now Naveen had finished his course and he found his interest lying in production. Camera was his best friend now.
Chethan and I decided to quit our job and this fact was not well received by our boss. He was all angry and threw a lot of tantrums before we left the place and decided to never look back. That was the day when we decided to start on our own as we knew we were capable of creating some awesome stuff which the clients had appreciated us for. We started taking up freelancing work and soon Naveen partnered with us. We were not sure if we were on the right path but every enquiry and all those small projects that we initially did, motivated us to do more.
We decided to register our firm and named it Creative Code. We started off with Zero Investment. The only investment was the three computers that each one of us had. We started operating from my house. A small room in the beginning. And within a couple of days we registered our firm in the year 2011 under the film production house category and there has been no looking back since then.
The journey definitely hasn’t been a bed of roses and trusts me, being an entrepreneur is not easy. Getting business was very tough. We were either denied a project for the lack of experience or expected to work for peanuts. The whole startup revolution has begun now and startups were not encouraged back then. However I’ll never forget how our families supported us in this venture and stood by us throughout.
Soon, business started picking up and more and more companies approached us. We worked for a smaller amount in the beginning as we wanted to have some reputed brands in our clientele and that’s how we managed to build a strong portfolio. We have gone through the ups and downs like any other startup and have a whole bunch of memories attached. The first video shoot, the meetings where we were nervous , the trial and error experiments at workplace etc have been a part of these memories.
Today, we have turned 5 and are proud of some of our achievements. We have had the opportunity to work with some of the best brands across the globe from different verticals. We are a video production company in Bangalore and we specialize in corporate films, documentaries, Motion graphic videos, explainer videos, product launch films and so on. Combining creative outlook & imagination with modern digital technology, we at Creative Code develop powerful videos for strong impact & effective promotion.
