Today we’d like to introduce you to Maze Road.
Hello Maze Road, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
Being born and raised in Southern California, I have been surrounded by the entertainment industry. Film sets, artistry, music creation, and more have easily led me to pursue a career in the animation world, specially 3D animation. Following my dreams in this field, I eagerly accepted my first animation studio job as an animator, which allowed me to cross paths with my current business co-founder, Ahren Diers. The animation production and video editing company Maze Road was formed by myself and Ahren’s passion to create unforgettable visuals for our clients to see their stories, products, and visions come to life.
Where to begin… for me, and this is Ahren Diers by the way, my background has been in multimedia production since 2006. By multimedia, I mean visual editing, videography, graphic design, motion design, and animation, all for commercials, feature films, short films, music videos, documentaries, and other advertising visual mediums. I received my BFA back in 2015 at the University of Oklahoma, moved out to Los Angeles with some colleagues, and continued to stay plugged into the ongoing evolving software and hardware technology that I work with while enhancing my career working for a few different visual production companies in different areas of LA, and getting to know the city. But one of the highlights of working in this industry is meeting amazing people, and I got to meet and work with a talented animator, Rick Ochoa, which was back in like 2018. Since then, our friendship grew, and thoughts to build a company together were discussed during the pandemic, but it wasn’t till 2022 when we really stepped on the gas to bring Maze Road to life.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a Maze Road. I think some of the struggles we have faced have been finding the balance between focusing on our company and handling the work from our clients that have been coming to Maze Road since we’ve founded the company. We’ve been wearing multiple hats at the same time and juggling the business side with the creative side of our company since we are a full design and production studio. At this point in the company, we the owners physically do the work along with others that we hire for contract or bring on as a permanent role. The external workload has been greater than the internal.
Technology obviously continues to excel, and being in an industry where you have to adapt every day with so many software options becomes a challenge trying to keep up with all of them. We have to stay up to date and decipher which ones are most useful.
Obviously, every company has competitors in their career field, but we really never thought that Artificial Intelligence could be a potential competitor in this industry within the near future. AI can provide a fast and useful product, but we as human creatives can produce a more meaningful product. We believe the communication and social interaction between actual individuals will always have more impact compared to an automated computer-generated solution.
As you know, we’re big fans of Maze Road. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about the brand?
Maze Road is a one-stop shop for you or your company’s visual needs. We specialize in motion design, animation, graphics, content creation, video editing, and video production.
We’re currently known for doing the animation and visual effects for an upcoming feature film, Second Chances.
What has set Maze Road apart from other companies is that we have, from the start, been connected with different creative industries, such as music and entertainment.
We’re always proud brand-wise with what we create for our clients.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Both of us as owners had to take the risk, or as many would say a leap of faith into creating and developing our own company. The transition from being an employee to an employer and hoping that our new business venture would be successful was indeed a scary risk!
Fortunately, since we started just under a year ago, we have been consistently busy, worked on some cool projects, and have so many awesome potential clients and work in the horizon this year.
Every day is a risk as new things pop up, leaving us in a decision if this is something we want to tackle as a company or if a certain project is something we want to do under our umbrella of work.
Contact Info:
- Website: mazeroad.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/mazeroadcreative?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mazeroadcreative
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maze-road/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/MazeRoadOFFIC
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mazeroad
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@mazeroad
Image Credits
Shion Uza
Ahren and Rick
Robert Ochoa
Areeb Razvi
