Te lo Cuento

Te lo Cuento was an animated 3D series adapting Venezuelan folktales at the production quality of first-world TV. Six years in production. Closed before public release.

The pitch came from a gap. Venezuelan folklore is rich, layered, and almost entirely absent from international media. We set out to put those stories on screens at a production quality that could stand next to first-world animated TV.

My Role

I co-founded Rabipelao Studio with one partner. On Te lo Cuento I served as Creative Director, Technical Director, and Producer. The roles overlapped because we were learning every part of the process as we built the studio around the show.

The hardest problem was that almost no one on the team had professional 3D animation experience, myself included. Most of the studio’s first hires had never shipped 3D production work. The hardest reality was accepting that I’d be running a studio and training the people in it at the same time. I taught the artists in classes and mentoring sessions, and the show became a six-year training program with a final cut at the end.

I’m proud of the people that project trained. Most of them are still in the industry doing work they love.

The bet that defined the project’s technical identity was Blender. In the early 2010s Blender was a capable tool, but it was not yet the industry standard. My partner had doubts. The rest of the studio was learning anyway, so I argued the case: standardize on Blender, write everything internally, and use the freedom of the open tool to design a pipeline that fit Venezuela’s resource constraints. Looking back, the bet aged well.

From there I designed the file system, the asset-sharing protocols across machines, the rigging conventions, the render pipeline, and the post-production stack. Everything in Blender except for textures, which we routed through Substance Painter. Cycles for final renders. Some Eevee experiments. Custom rigs across every character.

I had no formal management training. Leadership was intuitive and learned in real time. The only edge I kept was a habit of feeding myself with whatever I found interesting and could pull into the studio.

Stack & Tools

Blender (from 2.69 in 2013 to roughly 2.8x in 2019). Modeling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, and compositing all in Blender. Substance Painter for texturing. Custom rigs across all characters. Internal pipeline scripts and file management systems.

No AI in the pipeline. The technology was not there yet.

Independent project with private financing. No NDA.

Outcome

We produced 8 of the 10 episodes of the first season before the studio hit financial trouble. I keep the specifics private. Rabipelao closed in November 2019, and the series never saw public release.

Episodes screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, including El Silbón, an adaptation of the Venezuelan folk tale of the same name and one of the episodes I’m proudest of.

What I learned from Te lo Cuento is most of what I do now. Team leadership without a manual. Art fundamentals: composition, narrative, lighting, color. And technical art. This is where I fell for it: clean topology, intelligent rigs, file systems that hold under pressure. The studio is gone. Those six years are still the foundation underneath everything I build.