We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Seby X Martinez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Seby, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?
When my partner Kurt and I started Negative Kitty in 2021, it was pretty much just the two of us. We had a handful of creative collaborators we’d worked with in the past and wanted to work with again to make some crazy stuff, but it came down to the two of us to get the company off the ground and set the direction for where we wanted to go.
In 2023, however, our team saw some major expansion. For one, we were starting on some larger projects, including our upcoming animated pilot Beef Creek. At the same time, we saw the need to produce more original content and build our community online.
So we set out to meet new people — animators, writers, editors, musicians, voice over artists — and quickly connected with lots of really awesome and talented people using Craigslist and LinkedIn.
Today, we have around 17 freelancers on our roster, consisting of old friends and new. Taking the step to work with new artists was a massive leap forward, and I’m looking forward to fostering these relationships with these talented folks.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a New York native who has been a storyteller since birth, spending childhood free time enacting wild plots with my Dragonball Z toys and creating epic choose-your-own-adventures using stick figures and hyperlinks in Powerpoint.
When I graduated college with a film degree in 2016, I set about getting any experience I could — I worked as a script reader, a feature film editor, a random small-time videographer, and other odd jobs. Along the way I started to build a name for myself making music videos, with my first major project being the “Space Train” music video for David Liebe Hart from Tim & Eric and other Adult Swim shows. The music video sector was really exciting for me, due to my own musical background and the highly experimental nature of the genre, historically.
Eventually after my highest profile project — directing and editing a music video for Ice-T’s band Body Count — I decided to start Negative Kitty with my frequent collaborator, animator Kurt Vinci. We wanted to bring our wacky, colorful, and narrative-driven style to clients in music, business and beyond.
It’s hard to put into words what makes Negative Kitty stand apart, but I think it has to do with our fearless attitude toward creation and our willingness to explore uncharted territory with our clients. Our ability to take a client’s wild vision and translate it into a compelling visual story has produced amazing results for some of the people we’ve worked with. We really love to dig into what makes an artist or brand great, and identify the ways in which they can strengthen their connection with their audience. I tend to be really analytical when it comes to solving problems like this, so I leave no stone unturned during our discovery phase, carrying that attention to detail through delivery and making sure we’re bringing pitch-perfect creative to the table.
We also make original content at Negative Kitty, mostly centered around music and film (like our blog at negativekitty.com/blog), as well as funny short-form series we’ve been posting lately on our socials, like “90 Second Drawing Challenge” and “What Goo Is This.” We’re currently wrapping up production on our first animation pilot called Beef Creek, and we have more original animated content in the works as well.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Kurt and I met in New Haven, CT around 2015. I think I was 20. One of the bands I was in around that time was playing a house show in some kid’s attic, a DIY-venue dubbed the “Fish House.”
My ol’ pal Liz brought along some friends of hers to check out the show, and Kurt was among them. Finding out that he was a skilled young animator, I expressed my shared love of animation and digital art, and a partnership was forged that would shake the foundations of the very Earth. A shining light radiated from the ether as our two fingertips touched, and thunder clapped in the sky as if to herald the coming of a new era. Unicorns were present.
We immediately set about making our first short cartoon: a sketch where Pac Man pays the red ghost to have sex with his wife.
We continued to work together over the years on various client projects, also collaborating from time to time on some original little animations which were mostly for fun and practice. We also started stockpiling scripts and art for some original animated series.
Eventually in 2021 we felt that the time was nigh we make this thing official and go into business as our own studio. We wanted to create a proper outlet for our and our friends’ creative energy, unifying us into an efficient production machine for future clients and original projects. We have a lot coming up in 2024 and are excited for what the future holds!
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We’re at a point now where our audience growth is really starting to take off. In the years before starting Negative Kitty, Kurt and I worked on various little shorts that we’d post, thinking that they were so hilarious and special that they’d surely go viral and we’d be showered with attention and lucrative business deals. But of course, this wasn’t the case!
It took us a long time to learn the lesson that consistency is key. You can’t just drop a piece of content and expect the whole world. When that random viewer, a total stranger, clicks on your profile, what else are they going to see?
We adopted a mentality based on this quote I heard on a podcast — “build a long tail, and you’ll eventually knock something down.” Showing up consistently is the best way to grow your community and keep your audience engaged. To that end, in 2023 we launched our blog and our short-form series for our socials — both of which are going strong — and we’ve got more on the way like new animated shorts and our first video game, Kitty Pellets.
One thing that sparked major audience growth in 2023 was us boosting a few key posts of our work — we posted a teaser for our upcoming Kitty Pellets game and a clip from a particularly explosive animation we made for the brand Mythical Meats, who make exotic meat snack sticks. Since these posts had killer visuals, we decided to take a couple hundred bucks each to boost them on Instagram. This led to our Instagram following nearly doubling over the course of just two months.
Boost or no boost, when building a personal or business brand, you always want to be testing in this way. Identify the content you post that resonates the most with your audience, and once you’ve found the winners, let them shine.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.negativekitty.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/negative_kitty
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/negativekitty/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/negative-kitty
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@negative_kitty
- Other: www.negativekitty.com