Who is behind it

Bryant Duhart, Founder. He established Shimti Multimedia in 2007 and has directed its work since.

Background

Bryant Duhart was born and raised in Stockton, California. In 1996 he moved to Germany, where he learned the language and where he has lived and worked ever since. Working internationally was never a milestone he arrived at one day; it was simply the shape his career took from the beginning.

He brought two things with him. The first was art, which he had been making for as long as he could remember and has never put down. The second was an ease with machines. It began with learning to type, grew into Windows, Linux and macOS, and turned into IT work — the kind where a computer is stripped down to its parts and built back up until it runs. In time the two came together. He began writing code to make games, and one language led to the next.

What he is called in for

For most of his life he has been the one people turn to when they can see the thing they want and have no way of making it real. They come to him with something half-formed — an idea, an image in their head, a rough sketch on a page — and he builds it into something that exists, works, and looks the way it was always meant to look. Nineteen years of that, several hundred projects, and a good deal of it spent leading other people rather than only doing the work himself.

Why the studio exists

He started Shimti Multimedia in 2007 for a simple reason. He had grown tired of building other people's visions and wanted to build his own. Everything since has followed from that. The studio is where the judgement is made in-house, by someone with something at stake in how it turns out, rather than passed up a chain to a person who will never see the result.

Range of practice

Design, engineering, and the business that carries both sit with the same person, which is why the five practices can share a roof without work being passed between departments on its way to being finished. It is also where the second half of the name comes from — a multi-talent, and so multi in the media.

He taught himself all of it. That is less a gap in the story than the method behind it: nothing was handed to him, so nothing he does is borrowed.

Standards

There is one rule he will not bend. A thing is finished, or it is not delivered. Nothing gets padded, no corner gets quietly cut, and nothing goes out simply because the date arrived and the work had not. Authenticity and craft are not what he trades away when a schedule tightens. They are the reason to hire a studio in the first place.

Most of what goes wrong in this field goes wrong for unglamorous reasons — haste, and an unwillingness to sit with a problem long enough to actually solve it. So when a project turns difficult, his response is the boring one. He stays calm, and he keeps working at it until it comes right.

Where this is going

The idea behind the studio has not changed since 2007. What changed is that every part of it is now AI-powered, and more of it every month.

He is direct about why. The industry is moving toward AI-powered production whether it cares for the idea or not, and he has no intention of standing on the sidelines watching it happen. He would rather help shape it, and make a contribution of his own that serves the people it will end up affecting, which is everyone. For the studio, the effect has been hard to overstate. Everything improved — the speed, the scope, the quality of the work — and something else changed along with it. A one-man operation taking on work at this scale was simply not possible before. Now it is.