WeAnimate 2025-09-22 | wam#0066

Space Office is a joint venture of the husband-and-wife team of veteran character animator Stine Sørensen and noted visual effects artist Jonas Ussing. Their combined credits include everything from Denmark’s Checkered Ninja series to Marvel blockbusters, along with extensive work in the game industry. Together, they have been nominated for an Emmy and several Robert Awards. The company has recently made a stir with their cinematic trailer for Trailmakers:Pioneers, a hotly anticipated update to the popular vehicle building game. We caught up with Jonas and Stine to talk about their work and life in the creative industries.

WA: Could you tell us a bit about your background?

Stine: I went to The Animation Workshop as one of the first students in the character animation bachelor program, and I actually went straight into feature animation. I had gotten an internship on Morgenthaler’s Princess, so me and a few other students spent our summer holiday working at Zentropa. When I came out of school, they were crewing up for Æblet & Ormen, the first feature film at Copenhagen Bombay. Because I had already worked for Anders Morgenthaler, and I had done a good job, they asked me if I wanted to work on it. It was an easy way for me to get that very hard-to-get first job out of school, so that internship paid off. And I’ve been in Danish feature animation ever since. I’ve worked on some computer games here and there, Limbo and Cocoon and some other small games, but mostly Danish feature films. I just finished working on Checkered Ninja 3.

Jonas: For me, I think I’d always wanted to do some kind of film or visual effects work when I was a kid, because of Star Wars mostly. But I got sidetracked by regular jobs and education. No one in my sphere was able to tell me how to create visual effects, or how to get that career.

All we heard from people growing up was ‘No, you can’t be creative, you have to find a regular job.’  But creative people often have an inner impulse that demands to get out, and needs to be expressed, and that often can’t be done in a ‘regular job.’

 

– Stine Sørensen

Jonas: So I studied computer science, and I got a job as a computer programmer in a bank. And I would probably be fine, at least financially, if I were still there now, but I was dying a little bit inside every day. So I ended up quitting that job, leaving the company with four months severance. My plan was to spend those four months making a showreel, and then break into the effects business.

As crazy as it sounds, there wasn’t even YouTube when I learned this stuff, so I had to teach myself everything using books and online forums. My showreel project ended up taking a year, and I had to take out a loan on the apartment, but I got my first job at Ghost twenty years ago, making a CD commercial, and I have been working in VFX ever since. A little bit of computer games and commercial work here and there, but mostly working for Jussing Film, my own visual effects company, for these twenty years.

WA: And how did Space Office come into being?

Stine: For a long time we had been talking about working together, but we also felt that it was a bit dangerous to put the entire economy of the family into one project. I mean, I have very regular jobs in feature film animation…

Jonas: But my invoices can be really random for one month to the next month. Overall more than you would get from a steady job on a feature film, but there are some good months and some not so good.

Stine: So his salary is higher than mine, but more unstable, so it was a risk. But at some point, we just decided to jump in, and we created Space Office VFX.

Jonas: It made a huge difference to be working together as a company, instead of just sending out emails as myself. We’re a team.

Stine: It also helps that I’m a woman and an animator; it makes for a more wholesome company, with a better image. We immediately started getting bigger and better jobs. Most of our projects are still related to visual effects, though, and not character animation, so I continue to work as a freelancer for other companies.

WA: What have been some of your favorite projects along the way?

Jonas: I worked for Wil Film for two years. Originally I was just gonna do some Lego advertisement compositing, but then they had an opening for an art director for Lego Star Wars, and I just couldn’t say no to that. I was using all my accumulated Star Wars trivia, like ‘A star destroyer has blue exhaust!’ and thinking to myself every day, ‘I’m actually being paid for this!’ They even let me direct an episode. That’s probably the most fun job I’ve ever had, outside of what we’ve been doing together at Space Office.

Stine: We were nominated for a Robert Award for our work on All I Want for Christmas: The Magic Time Machine (Julemandens Datter 3), and that’s probably the biggest project we’ve done together so far. We had to hire about 14 people that year in order to complete some commercials, game trailers, and a feature film. We had a Christmas party for everyone, with dinner and cocktails, and we brought them all to the Robert Awards show.

WA: How did you find this particular niche with game trailers?

Jonas: Flashbulb Games called us a few years ago about a trailer for their game Rubber Bandits. At the time, they just wanted to animate something in the game engine to make the trailer. They had called another animator who was busy at the time, so he recommended us instead. When we talked with them, we said ‘Yes, of course we could do the animation, but what about rendering and compositing? We could make it look really good.’

Stine: They decided to trust us with the project, and it was a great fit. They were very happy with that first trailer, and we ended up doing two more trailers for the same game. So when they wanted another trailer for the expansion of Trailmakers, they called us again. There’s a lot of trust there, so we don’t have a long list of endless nitpicking revisions. They had some specific points they wanted to include, and some shots in mind, but we really collaborated to tell a great little story in one minute.

Jonas: These trailers are the most fun, and the most fulfilling, type of work that we can do together. Our joint capabilities allow us to achieve great quality, just on a smaller scale.

WA: Tell us a bit about the Trailmakers trailer.

Jonas: This trailer is for a major update in the game, which adds story and campaigns to what had previously just been a sandbox game. We had to make sure the trailer appealed to the existing fan base, while also attracting new players. So we chose to make the trailer basically an opening cinematic, a prologue that ends where the game begins.

Stine: We used as many game assets as we could; it saved time and budget, but also remained true to the design of the game. We have to make it look good, without deviating too far from the game aesthetic. So we upres geometry on various assets, and replace realtime textures with upgraded materials. We had to re-model and re-rig the main character, and I designed an expression sheet, to make him capable of greater action and emotion than he is in the game.

Jonas: We did everything in four months. With our combined backgrounds, a client can come to us with an idea, and we can shape it into a story and create a Hollywood-quality trailer. That doesn’t just help to get the attention of new players, but Flashbulb uses it to help gain attention from publishers.

WA: So how do you balance your personal creativity and inspiration, and your desire to be expressive, along with the needs of making money and living in the real world?

Stine: Oh my I could do a whole speech about that. Being a creative professional is a paradox. Because they’re two different things. Art takes time, and you have to wait for your inspiration. But being a professional, you have to deliver on time and address client comments. So it’s inevitable that you will be in a situation where you have the briefing from the client, and you put your heart and soul into the work, and then they say, ‘That’s completely wrong. You’ve got it all wrong.’ If you have put your creative heart and soul into the first version, it’s gonna take some time to readjust. But, as a professional, you still have to take that feedback and work with it.

Jonas: There’s this interview with Phil Tippett when he complains about this type of client feedback and he says, “Eventually, it’s just a matter of, ‘okay, where do you want your sofa? You want it there? Do you want it there? I’ll put it wherever you want. Just tell me what you want.’” And sure, that may be pleasing the client, but then you are not really doing your job. You’re supposed to use your artistic talent and creative investment in it to make it good. They hired you because you’re really good at this. So you have to be so good that even when you have challenging feedback, you still deliver good stuff. That’s one of the reasons why we want to focus on the game trailers, because we have so much artistic interest in these projects.

Stine: I think we have also been very lucky with Flashbulb as a client. We can really apply everything we know from all of our many years of experience and pour it into the project.

It’s the best case scenario when you’re actually collaborating with your clients. You can say, ‘I care about your project, and I care about your product, and I care about your customer. And here’s what I can add of value.’

 

– Stine Sørensen

WA: So with Space Office you have kind of created the kind of company you’ve wanted to work for?

Jonas: Yes. Firstly, we want to just make a living making visual effects and animation. Second of all, we want to actually have fun doing it and have a good quality of life.

Stine: We’re not aiming to be millionaires. We just want to not stress about paying the rent, and we want to have evenings off to be with our kids. It should be possible. I mean, we can’t do this until we retire if we get burnt out. We can’t go like this until we are 70 or whatever.

All these visual effects artists have to move around the world to wherever the work is, and work six days a week for ten hours a day to manage crunches and deadlines. They’re working sixty hour weeks, and they have to deliver 300 shots to finish the movie. And then the studio still goes out of business. So what was even the point of it all?

 

– Jonas Ussing

Stine: I think this conversation is kind of working its way throughout the industry, about what this career is supposed to look like and what we’re trying to create for ourselves.

WA: So what’s next for Space Office?

Jonas: Our focus right now is on being a really cool place to work for, so that people want to come back and work with us again. With our flexible model, we depend on being able to contact freelancers, and find good people who can help us meet our goals. That’s one of the qualities of a good leader: recognizing your weaknesses, and that you can’t do it all yourself. You have to hire people who are better than yourself.

Stine: Our mission for the company is to have a place where we, and people who work for us, can have fun doing creative animation, with a decent salary. When we say this, it sounds like we are very unambitious, because we don’t want to work all those long hours, but we just think that you should be able to balance everything if you work smart. And why can’t we, in our business, have a decent quality of life?

Our studio will never be the new Ghost. We’re not going to be crazy big. But we could find a sweet spot where we can still do ambitious projects, and have fun, and also have time with our  family.

 

– Stine Sørensen

See Stine’s work in the latest Checkered Ninja film, opening soon, and follow Jonas on LinkedIn for great insights into the art of VFX. And keep an eye out for more work from Space Office, especially in your favorite game trailers.

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