Celtic & Insular Myth
Mabinogi cycles, early Irish saga, the Brythonic hero traditions. Advises on every script set in the British Isles or in diaspora.
Founded 2017 · Austin, Texas
A working studio that forges modern cinema from the molten core of ancient myth.
Anaïs Veyrenc and Tomás Reyes-Kellogg have spent eight years building Mythic Fire into a small, exact, festival-tested production house — three features, fourteen shorts, and a journal that treats old gods like research, not decoration.
The Founders
Two obsessions, one studio, no shortcut.
Anaïs Veyrenc came up through documentary, then cut her narrative teeth on a slate of festival shorts about retold saints' lives. She kept arriving at the same wall: the scripts that moved her most were the ones that treated inherited story — Gilgamesh, the Mabinogi, the Bhārata — as a living source text, not as a vibe. Tomás Reyes-Kellogg had been scoring Mexican and Texas independent films out of a small East Austin room when the two met on a 2016 short that ran forty seconds over schedule and won them a Sound Design Award nobody expected.
By the spring of 2017 they had registered Mythic Fire Pictures LLC in a converted print shop on East 6th Street. The first commission — a thirteen-minute adaptation of the Welsh tale of Branwen — was scored with a single cellist and a borrowed Nagra. It played at SXSW the following March. It has not stopped playing since.
The studio's operating principle has not changed in eight years: research is a pre-production department, sound design is not negotiable, and a script does not move into production until a scholar on the Mythological Research Council has argued against it in writing.
By the Numbers
A small studio, a long resume.
Eight years of slow, deliberate work. Here is what the ledger actually shows.
17
Films released
14 shorts · 3 features
14 shorts · 3 features
41
International festivals
across 19 countries
across 19 countries
12
International awards
incl. 2023 Fantasia New Fears
incl. 2023 Fantasia New Fears
58K
Dispatch readers
312% growth, 2021–2024
312% growth, 2021–2024
$6.4M
Independent production funding
across three feature cycles
across three feature cycles
90
Working collaborators
27 staff · 63 freelance
27 staff · 63 freelance
The Mythological Research Council
Nine scholars. Every script. No exceptions.
The only thing that distinguishes a Mythic Fire screenplay is that a specialist has argued against it before a single frame was shot. The council is convened quarterly and meets in full at the start of every feature cycle.
Near Eastern Epic
Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite narrative — Gilgamesh, the Descent of Inanna, the Kumarbi cycle. Reads every draft against primary cuneiform scholarship.
Hindu Narrative Cycles
The Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa in regional recensions. Brings philological rigour and a long memory for regional variant readings.
West African Orature
Yoruba, Akan, and Mande oral traditions — Èṣù's trickster epistemology, the Sundiata epic, Anansi's diaspora. Holds the studio's line on attribution and consent.
The council also seats specialists in Hellenistic myth, Slavic folklore, Mesoamerican cosmology, Norse saga, and Japanese mythic cycles — five more scholars rotating across active productions.
We are not in the business of dressing modern stories in togas. We are in the business of reading the old ones closely enough to hear what they were arguing about — and then arguing back, in cinema, with a full orchestra behind us.
Anaïs Veyrenc & Tomás Reyes-Kellogg, co-founders
Milestones
Eight years, eight markers.
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Spring 2017
Studio founded in East Austin.
Veyrenc and Reyes-Kellogg register Mythic Fire Pictures LLC at 1801 East 6th Street, Suite 304. First commission — Branwen, A Branch — is scored with a single cellist and a borrowed Nagra.
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March 2018
First festival run.
Branwen, A Branch premieres at SXSW. The studio's first of forty-one festival selections across nineteen countries, a run that would later include Sitges, Fantasia, Clermont-Ferrand, and Busan.
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Autumn 2020
First feature cycle completed.
The Pyre of Arawn enters post-production with a 47-piece score recorded at the Prague FILMharmonic. The Mythological Research Council is formalized as a standing body of nine scholars.
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July 2023
Fantasia New Fears Award.
The Pyre of Arawn takes the New Fears Award at the Fantasia International Film Festival. The studio's twelfth international prize across three feature cycles.
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February 2024
Dispatch crosses 50,000 readers.
The Mythic Fire Dispatch, the studio's weekly editorial newsletter, closes its 312% growth run between 2021 and 2024. Subscribers now vote annually on the next feature's source tradition.
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September 2024
The Atlantic feature.
The Atlantic names Mythic Fire to its 2024 list of "Studios Rewiring Genre Cinema," citing the Mythological Research Council as the studio's defining production methodology.
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Spring 2025
Third feature cycle enters production.
Score sessions move to the London Cinematic Orchestra. Original cue library crosses 220 commissioned pieces, the largest in-house score archive of any independent North American studio.
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Today
Still small. Still slow. Still here.
Twenty-seven full-time staff in Austin, sixty-three trusted freelance collaborators worldwide, and a Dispatch that arrives on Thursdays. The next myth is already in pre-production.
Read every step as it happens — the script notes, the score drafts, the festival rejections.
Subscribe to the Dispatch