What this site is
chumak.studio is the portfolio of a matte painting and concept art studio in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a set of static pages. There are no accounts, no logins, no payments and no shop.
There are only two ways information about you leaves your browser: the contact form, if you choose to send one, and a visitor counter that runs on every page. Both are described below.
What the contact form collects
The contact page has a form. When you press Send, these fields go with it:
- Your name. Required.
- Your email address. Required. It is also set as the Reply-To on the message, so that a reply reaches you.
- Your company or production. Optional.
- Which service you need, picked from a list. Optional.
- What you wrote in the box headed "About the work". Required.
The form also builds a subject line out of your name, so the studio can see who wrote before opening the message.
The purpose is one thing only: answering your enquiry about work. It is not added to a mailing list, it is not used for advertising, and it is not sold or traded. There is no newsletter here to be signed up to.
Who receives what you send
This site is static and has no server of its own, so the form cannot send an email by itself. It posts to FormSubmit (formsubmit.co), a hosted form service. FormSubmit receives everything in the list above, and then sends it on to the studio mailbox as an ordinary email.
So two companies handle your enquiry before anyone at the studio reads it:
- FormSubmit, which receives the form data and turns it into an email. It is not a Canadian service: its own site is delivered through Cloudflare, an American company.
- Google, which runs the studio's mailbox through Google Workspace. The mail servers for chumak.studio are Google's.
Nothing else sits in that path. There is no customer database, no sales tool and no third service in between.
The form sends you no automatic acknowledgement. Nothing is emailed back to you unless a person at the studio writes to you.
The analytics that actually runs
Every page on this site loads Google Analytics 4, into the property G-27W1WWS69M. The tag comes from www.googletagmanager.com, which is Google.
What it collects: which page you looked at, the page you arrived from, roughly where you are, which Google works out from your IP address, and what kind of device and browser you used. It sets cookies in your browser with names beginning _ga, which is how it tells a returning reader from a new one.
What it is for: counting how many people read which pages, so the studio knows which work and which articles are worth more of. That is the whole purpose. It is not used to build a profile of you, to advertise to you anywhere, or to identify you by name.
The information goes to Google and is handled on Google's systems, which are outside Canada.
There is no cookie banner on this site. If you would rather not be counted, your browser's tracking protection or any script blocker stops the tag from loading, and every page here works exactly the same without it.
What the web host records
The site is hosted by Vercel, an American company. Like any web server, Vercel keeps ordinary request logs: the address a request came from, the browser it came from, which page was asked for, and when. That is what makes a website work at all and what lets a host deal with attacks on it. The studio does not use those logs for anything else.
What is kept in your browser
One thing, and it never leaves your browser: a single flag named acSeen, held in session storage, which records that you have already seen the opening animation so that it does not replay on the next page. It disappears the moment you close the tab. It is not an identifier and it is sent nowhere.
What this site does not do
Each of these was checked against the code rather than assumed:
- It loads no fonts from Google Fonts, Adobe, or any other font host. The type you see is your own system's.
- It embeds no video player. The showreel buttons open Vimeo in a new tab, so Vimeo learns nothing about you unless you click one.
- It borrows no images from anyone else's server. Every poster and every still is served from this site.
- It runs no advertising pixel, no session recorder, no heatmap, no split testing tool and no chat widget.
- It has no mailing list and no marketing automation.
- It does not sell, rent or trade anything about you with anybody.
Where the information is stored
Outside Canada. Google, which handles both the analytics and the studio's mail, is an American company. Vercel, which serves these pages, is an American company. FormSubmit is not a Canadian service either: its own site is delivered through Cloudflare, which is American as well. A network like this may hand you a copy of a page from a machine near you, and the machine that answered your request for this page may well have been in Montreal, but the companies that hold the information, and the law that reaches those companies, are outside Canada. Information held in another country can be reached by the courts and the authorities of that country. That is worth knowing before you decide what to put in the form.
How long it is kept
An enquiry sent through the form arrives as an email and stays in the studio mailbox until somebody deletes it. There is no database here holding it, and no automatic clear-out on a schedule. The studio has not set a fixed deletion date, and this page will not claim one it does not keep.
You can ask for your enquiry to be deleted at any time, at the address below.
How long Google keeps the analytics figures is decided by the retention setting on that analytics property and by Google's own rules, not by anything in this site's code.
Your rights
Under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, known as PIPEDA, you can:
- Ask what personal information the studio holds about you, and ask for a copy of it.
- Ask for anything that is wrong to be corrected.
- Ask for it to be deleted.
- Take back a consent you gave, though that may mean the studio can no longer answer your enquiry.
Write to the address below and say which of those you want. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
How to reach the studio about privacy
By email: anastasiia.chumak@chumak.studio
By post: Chumak Studio, 21 Lawren Harris Sq, Toronto, ON M5A 0T4, Canada
That email address is the studio's own working address, the same one printed on the contact page. Putting the word Privacy in the subject line keeps a request of this kind from being read as an enquiry about work.
Changes to this page
If what the site does changes, this page changes with it. The date shown with this page is the date it last did.
The terms for using the site are on the terms page.