Esteban Valdez, 38, is director of Echo Bridge Pictures, an award-winning St. Petersburg hand-drawn animation studio he founded in 2008 out of his home in Franklin, Mass.
A decade after moving to Tampa Bay, he and his team of 15 have produced television shows, commercials, music videos, documentaries and more for big names like HBO, Netflix, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Universal Music Group, Fuse TV and VH1. Echo Bridge’s head of production, Omar McClinton, has produced multiple films and was a visual effects coordinator for "The Dark Knight" movie.
Echo Bridge was hired to write and direct a music video for one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars, whose YouTube videos have attracted more than a billion views. A short film produced in 2018, "ALONE," was nominated for best animated short at the Miami Short Film Festival.
“Every day it still doesn’t feel real. There are days you wake up and I’m walking to work and think ‘I’ve been doing this for 10 years now?'” Valdez said. “I’m very fortunate.”
As Hollywood is bursting at the seams, spending billions of dollars on new content for behemoth streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and now Disney+, Valdez continues to take an “old school” approach, turning down work that isn’t the right fit, and working with the team and resources they already have in place.
“(The big companies) are flooding the market and at least 90% of the content that’s out there never gets watched. I don’t want to make a production that no one’s going to see because that’s just the antithesis of what we’re trying to do,” he said.
Prior to 2009, Valdez’s career was anything but stable. After dropping out of Lesley University, where his mentors included Oscar-nominated animator Daniel Sousa, he went on to work at all levels of the industry, from small Boston advertising agencies, to Nickelodeon in New York, as an art director in Los Angeles, and for various animation studios and agencies in Canada. While he loved his work, he saw a lot of waste, and a lot of mismanagement.
“This industry kind of beats up a person,” he said. “When I started (Echo Bridge) I didn’t want to make it like the other studios.”
On his own, back in his home town in 2008 working as a sole proprietorship, a big client failed to pay for a major project.
Broke, he moved in with his parents, who had relocated to Tampa Bay after they retired. Trying to pick up the pieces, he invested a few hundred dollars --- a large sum for him at the time --- to file the Articles of Incorporation needed to register as a business in the state in Florida.
“A week after being awarded my EIN number, the bill got paid,” he said.
It was a huge turning point. He found an accountant at H&R Block who took him and his work seriously (she’s now the company’s CFO). A short film he had produced as a freelancer was generating a lot of buzz and new opportunities began to present themselves.
“Florida ended up being fertile ground. You plant the seed here and it grows. In Massachusetts, you kind of have to break concrete first,” he said.
Asked about future growth potential, Valdez is equally ambitious and reserved.
“The end goal is that this place will be around for 30, 40 years,” he said. “I don’t really think about the dollars that much. It’s a tool, we get there but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of ones and zeros … It’s what you use to get by, I just want to know the ride that I’m on is comfortable.”
After all, “it’s more about legacy than anything else,” he said.
