Ask Neil Williamson about computer animated commercials and he just talks about cartoons.

Williamson, founder of Toronto-based Calibre Digital Design, says he never aimed to build a post-production house whose creative impulses were ruled by technology.

Instead, he and his staff have looked to make cartoons, using computers.

And the result has been award-winning animated commercials since Calibre was established in 1987.

Williamson says he set the company up like a production company that takes on entire projects, producing and directing them, coming up with innovative designs.

‘We wanted people to come to Calibre as they would a live-action company – hiring us on the basis of a director or reel, not our technology,’ Williamson explains.

In effect, Calibre harnesses computers to combine traditional animation disciplines – stop-motion, cutouts, photo montage, computer 3D animation – producing animated commercials that, whenever possible, push the creative envelope.

‘The computer is like a glue: you can take one animation style and mix it with others, incorporate sound and a variety of different disciplines to come up with new ones,’ says Williamson.

Call it mixed-media animation. Example: the quirky mixed-media inserts the company developed for Nelvana’s Beetlejuice cartoons.

Another example: in the commercial field, Calibre produced ‘Crunchberry Cravings II,’ a 30-second spot for agency Bayer Bess Vanderwarker of Chicago on behalf of Quaker Oats’ Cap’n Crunch Crunchberries, that incorporates live-action, 2D and 3D computer animation, along with traditional animation for the Cap’n Crunch character.

The commercial has a young boy, suffering from ‘Crunchberry craving,’ travel through a magical computer-generated grocery store, only to discover it is out of his favorite cereal. A frantic search through town ensues, ending atop a high-rise building where Crunchberries are found.

To complete the spot, the staff at Calibre split into two animation teams. Rob Coleman and Andrew Grant focused on the 2D and 3D computer animation, using SoftImage and Crystal software on Calibre’s staple sgi platforms to create lively backgrounds.

Cap’n Crunch spot

Meanwhile, Keith Nicholson and Rich Draper concentrated on animating the Cap’n Crunch character to his usual trademark specs, complete with dimensional shadow levels. The inking and painting was done by Nancy Choi and Andrew Kim, before Coleman digitally composited the layers.

Calibre’s live-action/animation combination work originally caught the eye of advertising agencies with its 1991 Certs Minis spots for Backer Spielvogel Bates that featured candies ricocheting in a man’s mouth, stretching his cheeks and mouth.

3D wire fram

Williamson’s strategy was to develop a digital system in which a 3D wire frame was built onto the computer screen in the shape of the young man’s face, and the film was placed over the wire frame.

This solution came to Williamson when an experiment for another project went wrong, but in the process, produced a new application.

Such experimenting at Calibre, while wholly encouraged, is now easier with the recent introduction of the onyx supercomputing workstations from sgi.

As for software, Calibre drives SoftImage and Eddie from Montreal’s Discreet Logic. But the onyx supercomputers give staff animators more than 3,000 software applications to work with, all linked by a central server and accessed from any workstation in the facility.

Williamson adds that the onyx is useful in that Calibre will now evolve based on software, and not hardware. ‘When you buy a black box, it does what it does. But the onyx software will continue to evolve.’

Though animated spots are Calibre’s bread and butter, Williamson now sees the facility branching out into longer formats, not least tv. He points to Nelvana, which started out in commercial work before developing its own properties in the tv and film sectors, as an example to follow.

‘After five years of trying to hold true to what we want to do, and survive and grow by doing spots, now we are looking to the future. Now, more than ever, we have all the bits in place to take off in new directions,’ Williamson says.

This new quest will be made easier with the addition of Rob Coleman. His background in cel and computer animation and character design includes work in tv series and commercials.

Williamson’s optimism comes, of course, as the animation industry itself is moving beyo nd recent renaissance to impending take-off, especially with the recent success of animation in Hollywood.

‘We can work at anything,’ he says. ‘European format, hdtv, imax, feature films. The technology we have allows us to do what we currently do in TV.’