Tangent Studios

Our Story

Let’s start with who we are. Tangent Studios is the parent company of four collaborative business units, with offices in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

With decades of combined experience, the founders of Tangent Studios were determined to set Tangent Animation on a course that broke new ground. After watching the Open Source 3D software Blender’s progress over the years, in 2015 Tangent created a 3 minute short entirely in Blender, with the aim of assessing its production-readiness. While pleased by how mature several modules had become, the areas requiring additional work were quickly identified and a plan was developed. Using funds that would otherwise have been earmarked for commercial Digital Content Creation software licenses, we instead entered into Sponsorship of the Blender Foundation and hired a strong staff of Software Engineers and Technical Directors at Tangent focused on making Blender entirely production-ready; work that was subsequently submitted back to Blender and made available to the entire Community.

In 2016 Tangent Animation produced Ozzy, and went on to produce NextGen in 2018 with our partners at Baozou Media. NextGen premiered on Netflix in September 2018, and we’re currently working on two additional high-profile projects. Tangent Animation currently employs 200+ artists and continues to grow.

In 2018 Tangent Labs was created with the goal of commercializing LoUPE, the cloud-based pipeline created during the making of NextGen. More on Tangent Labs and LoUPE in the following section.

2019 saw the birth of Tangent Interactive — our Games/Online development company. With an incredible team of creatives and technologists, Tangent Interactive leverages the knowledge and experience of Tangent Studios in creating innovative, forward-thinking solutions. Tangent Interactive is currently working on optimized branching narrative tools that empower artists by allowing them to construct stories in a visual editor shot by shot. With a slick extensible interface that can provide custom game functionality to any shot, designers can control characters, camera, localized dialogue … anything they can think of. Our newest company is Tangent Creates — the IP development branch of Tangent Studios where new projects and technology are incubated.

Tangent Studios has been a proud supporter and sponsor of Open Source software development and innovation at the Blender Institute, and has developed key industry partnerships including: Netflix, Blender, AWS, Teradici, ISE, and Intel.