V49 collective — film, animation, games and creative technology studios in Rīga

Made his debut feature Away (2019) entirely alone — direction, animation, music and edit. Flow premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, César and two Annie Awards, and became the most-watched film in Latvian history — all made in free, open-source Blender.

He composes the scores for his own films, and is now writing and directing the follow-up, Limbo, at Dream Well Studio.

A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, he has moved between documentary and fiction since his award-winning debut One Ticket, Please (2017). He co-wrote and produced Flow, and at Trickster Pictures has directed the features Neon Spring and Sisters; he now produces Dream Well's next animated feature, Limbo.

Since 2023 he has carried that range onto the stage, directing at the Latvian National Theatre — Maigā vara, which brought him a Spēlmaņu nakts (Players' Night) award in 2024, followed by Nacionālais kanāls and Bastardi — with further productions at the Dailes and Jaunais Rīgas theatres. Live events, theatre, film and animation tend to run in parallel; he is the collective's tireless multi-hyphenate, with several projects always in motion.

Between productions he teaches the next generation of filmmakers at the Latvian Academy of Culture.

Holds a BA in the production of audiovisual and performance arts from the Latvian Academy of Culture, and spent three years coordinating the RIGA IFF Showcase programme. Her producing spans the modern fairytale North Pole (2024) and the anthropological comedy Darwin's Darlings (2023).

Shoots analog photography; her compass points toward arthouse distribution, sales and international co-production.

A graduate of the Latvian Academy of Culture's Drama and Text Studies programme (2022), she writes for the stage around social, political and ethical questions — often the friction between private life and politics. Her best-known work, Soft Power (Maigā vara), co-written with Matīss Kaža for the Latvian National Theatre, premiered in 2023 and was nominated for a Spēlmaņu nakts award for best new dramaturgy.

Her work moves between institutional and independent theatre, multimedia staging and community-based performance — from Saule riet austrumos at Dirty Deal Teatro to Kaimiņš no dzeltenās mājas, a community project made with residents of Seda. She was dramaturg on Matīss Kaža's Degošie (after Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead) and on Apbrīnas ieleja at the Jaunais Rīgas teātris.

Son of mime and ornamental-sign artist Modris Tenisons, raised between Rīga and the Dzērbene countryside. Studied 3D animation in Canada, took a BA in screenwriting and visual semiotics in Wales — then spent five years in Cambodia, filming documentary material from motorcycles and helicopters and creating the national cookbook Culinary Traditions in Cambodia, used by the royal family as a diplomatic gift and recognised as Asia's notable fundraising book of 2014.

On Flow, his job was to think in step with the director — building each scene from the script, placing environments, characters and the rough camera for the Belgian and French animation teams to develop — and then to design the film's whole graphic identity: poster, titles, shirts, banners. The Flow postage stamp (its print run increased after the Oscar) and the Bank of Latvia silver coin are co-designed with Gints; the coin sold out its 6,000 mintage and was named Latvia's Coin of the Year 2025.

He also carries his father's legacy forward — idea author, architect and designer of the Čiurlionis Museum exhibition Modris Tenisons: Movement and Sign.

Ella Mežule is a Latvian artist whose practice is rooted in painting and extends across illustration and animation direction. Her work leans into magical realism, blurring the boundary between physical reality and inner space.

She has exhibited internationally, earning the Brederlo–von Sengbusch Art Prize in Painting (2016) and the Valdemārs Tone Scholarship (2017). Her paintings are held in private collections.

Alongside her fine-art practice, she creates visual identities, illustrations and animated works for leading cultural institutions — among them the National Library of Latvia, the Supreme Court of Latvia and the City of Rīga. Her projects include the visual campaigns 500 Years of Latvian Books and Reading Restart, the illustration of Latvijas Pasts' commemorative 500 Years of the Latvian Book stamp, and the citywide identity for RakstuRīga, later realised as a monumental mural on Krišjāņa Barona iela in Rīga.

She wrote and is directing The Nature of Tide (Paisuma daba), a hand-drawn animated short about perception and emotional memory, developed with Studija Kokles. She also lectures at the Art Academy of Latvia.

The colours of this very page are sampled from her paintings.

With an MA from the Art Academy of Latvia, her scenography runs through productions like The Bastards, Lady Macbeth (assisting MAREUNROL), Burning Ones, Soft Power and Drama Queen — alongside public installations such as A Memorial to the Void, Touch the Shadow and Concrete Garden.

On Flow she was a 3D artist — her Flow's Flora grew the film's vegetation — and she built environmental art for Dog of God, blending classical artistic principles with modern technology.

Beyond film, Daniels has worked and collaborated as an art director and generalist on Shibuya, Riot Games and Linkin Park projects.

Proficient across Blender, After Effects, Photoshop, Resolve and ComfyUI, he moves fluidly between 3D, motion and digital art — a true generalist with a distinctive voice.

Now working on his passion project Fishermen — an original sci-fi anime series set on a 500th-century Earth.

GAMMA's Scenographer of the Year 2024 for his concert stage design; his videos and commercials have collected MTV Europe Music Awards, Clio Awards and Golden Hammers — among them BrainStorm's Ogles and VEF Rīga's Colourfully Black & White (Clio Sports Bronze, 2017).

A piece of Latvian hip-hop history: part of Fact — founded 1995, rap-rock with hardcore-punk guitar energy — alongside Gustavo, Ozols and Gonza. Made his short-film debut with Maukurs un Zivs, co-written with Jānis Joņevs. He is also a professional whistler — he calls it his second breathing, whistling outward and inward without pause — and has answered, at various times, to Čižiks and Jurgstulajstus.

His credits run through Latvian cinema — Flow, River of Fear, Touched by Eternity, and earlier work on Nameja gredzens, Bille, Dvēseļu putenis and more. On Flow he was brought in early for an unusual brief: helping figure out how a director who had always worked alone could work with a team.

It started with a camera and a skateboard in Valka and the TV show Block Heads. Today Shade's motion graphics, 3D and art direction run through campaigns like VEF Rīga's Black & White, music videos like Jānis Šipkēvics' Apgaismo mani, and concert visualizations on the largest LED stages ever assembled in Latvia. He also crosses the courtyard to Base Motion, art-directing its drone shows.

His work reaches across Latvia's music scene — the lyric video for Instrumenti's Man patīk, computer animation for Laika Suns' Deju grīdas, 3D on LMT and Instrumenti's Instruments of Winter — and into international commercial animation, modelling on Indeed's Smart & Small series alongside Nauris and Konstantīns.

On Shade's Zoopasta — directed by Papa Či, creative direction by Nauris — he handled the modelling with Artūrs Lācis. The quiet, essential craft layer: turning visual ideas into designed, animated, polished screen work.

Her work focuses on 3D asset finishing, texturing and fine visual detail for stylised animation and commercial moving image. Recent credits include texture work on Shade's surreal Zoopasta animation for Star FM and 3D work on the LMT × Instrumenti Instruments of Winter campaign.

Studied film at the European Film College in Denmark and business management at the University of Latvia; spent years as an editor and director at Film Angels Studio — cutting Vogelfrei and Handful of Bullets, working on Dream Team 1935 and Nameja gredzens — then followed 3D, VR and visual art until drones became the medium.

Under his lead Base Motion has produced over 600 shows. For Super Bowl LVI the team designed and animated the display, inventing new animation techniques for a fleet that size; he now also judges the International Drone Show Competition. Alongside the shows, Base Motion researches film technology — Gaussian splatting included — and with Mārtiņš he co-founded XR Latvia — Keita Neihēfere's community — whose meetups regularly fill the stable.

Her focus is motorsport media: documenting race weekends, drivers and team moments for Base Motion Racing, turning the energy of the track into dynamic footage and social-ready edits.

Alongside racing she works on drone-show projects, where multimedia, animation, timing and large-scale visual design meet — a blend of technical production, creative direction and live-event media.

On Flow, he and Mārtiņš formed the technical-art department: he built the smaller simulations — splashes and spray — researched the film's stylized fur and feathers, and wrote shaders and scripts. The two have since presented the Flow pipeline at DigiPro at SIGGRAPH, Open Source Days and BCON Shenzhen.

His portfolio counts 96 works across 3D, installation, painting, print, video, rigging, coding and stereoscopy — two decades of freelance CG before feature film. He holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Art Academy of Latvia, where he now lectures, and rejects the split between the technical and the creative: both are one practice.

Off the screen, he's an avid climber — and has turned many of the stable's makers onto bouldering.

A lecturer at EKA University of Applied Sciences, she co-founded the games company LowpolyNation with her husband, Aivars Neihēfers, and has worked as Game Designer and Team Lead at Estoty Rīga — her game and level design spanning studio titles and a VR escape game. A speaker at RIGA COMM.

She founded XR Latvia (2018) — the Rīga non-profit community of AR/VR/XR developers and enthusiasts — and ran its monthly meetups, the gatherings that now fill the stable.

An EKA Computer Game Design graduate, he works across game design, 3D visualization and interactive VR. With the HyperVR Games team he has built playful, physics-driven titles including Shave & Stuff — a top-selling VR game on the Meta Quest Store — and Pets & Stuff, accessible VR simulation centred on creativity and physical interaction. With his wife, Keita Neihēfere, he co-founded the games company LowpolyNation.

Part of a new generation bringing Latvian game design and VR production to an international audience.

Working at the intersection of computer graphics, film, animation, games and creative technology, Mārtiņš combines artistic direction with deep technical research — real-time rendering, atmospheric effects, water simulation, procedural systems and advanced visual tools. His add-ons, including Physical Starlight and Atmosphere and Physical Open Waters, bring physically based light, sky and water rendering to artists, studios and filmmakers worldwide; on Flow he worked on the film's water system, rendering and technical visual development.

With a background in fine art, 3D, programming and visual effects, his path runs through a decade as lead technical artist on VR medical-training simulators at Surgical Science (SenseGraphics) in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany; 3D artist at France's Folimage on the feature Phantom Boy; and programmer on Chris Milk's WebGL landmark 3 Dreams of Black for Google. He authored the officially approved virtual model of the Biķernieki race track, teaches physical lighting and materials at the Jaņa Rozentāla Art School, and gave the Blender Conference its GLSL-shaders-for-artists workshop in 2013. Co-founder of Base Motion and XR Latvia, and — with Alina Dolmate — Riga Innovation Group (RIG Collective).

With his brother Mārtiņš, Kārlis founded Physical Addons in 2021 and built it from a small independent toolmaker into an internationally used software brand. Its plug-ins — Physical Starlight and Atmosphere, Physical Celestial Bodies and Physical Open Waters — bring physically based atmosphere, planet and water rendering to artists, animation studios, game makers and film studios worldwide.

His role spans the business side — product direction and company strategy, growth, and hands-on customer and community support across forums and marketplaces — the work that turns a pair of brothers' tools into software relied on in 100+ countries.

Away from software, he is one of the founders of Capoeira Latvia — the Brazilian art that blends fight, dance, music and play — which he started in 2006 with Rolands Andersons. Known in the roda as Perna Pomba, he has taught capoeira for years, and the group today runs branches in Rīga, Jelgava and Tukums. He calls it a lifestyle as much as a sport.

Ēriks develops Drone Show Studio — software that turns Blender into a professional drone-show tool: laying out formations, animating the transitions between them, coloring the swarm and exporting flight paths ready for the field.

It sits exactly where V49's two strengths meet — the drone-show craft of Base Motion and the Blender-tool engineering of Physical Addons — turning Latvia's drone-show expertise into software others can fly.

Away from software, he is a fire and flow-arts performer with eight years of fire shows behind him — his poi piece Kodama shown at events like May Fire Fest 2022, and a performer at Phoenix, the largest fire show in Europe. The same feel for motion and light, off the screen and into the dark.

As EIT Community Officer for Latvia — a role she holds through 2028 — and former Head of the Innovation Ecosystem Development Division at RTU's Science & Innovation Centre, Alina connects academia, government, industry and international partners. Her unit runs 10+ innovation projects a year, including EIT Hubs and major EU-funded programmes — Horizon, Interreg and LIFE — across climate tech, agrifood, deep tech, materials and mobility. She earlier led EIT Food Hub Latvia, strengthening the country's agrifood-innovation community.

Her path runs from global brand strategy — four years at Adidas, then strategic planning at DDB Latvia — into creative technology. As a partner at VIVIDLY, one of the first Baltic VR studios, she helped digitalise and visualise Rail Baltica's Rīga Central Station; in 2019 she co-founded Riga Innovation Group (RIG Collective) with Mārtiņš Upītis — a production studio for creative and immersive technology, from VR to 3D sound. She also lectures at Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences and serves as a mentor and jury member in innovation programmes.