The producers at Richmond, b.c.-based Waterfront Video Productions, Paul and Robin Winskell and Gerry O’Day, added another dimension, or two, to the net-surfing host of their magazine-style animation series pilot, The Animators.

When we heard an animator lament, ‘The most frustrating thing about being an animator is that there is no way to get your stuff shown!’, light bulbs flashed above our heads.

Always on the lookout for fresh programming ideas, a series about animators and their work sounded right up our creek. With Gerry O’Day’s work as a casting director for Gordon Stanfield Animations, and Robin Winskell’s work in 2D and 3D graphics, the team already had some understanding of how both traditional and computer animation is done.

A timely article in Playback (Aug. 16, 1993, ‘Canada On Location Preview’) confirmed what we had already heard: Canadian animators, Canadian software and Canadian hardware are among the best in the world. This is a story that needs to be told!

cbc (Toronto) agreed to explore the concept further and contracted Waterfront to research and develop a series and coproduce a pilot entitled The Animators. Post-production on the pilot wrapped May 31.

The Animators is a magazine-style show that will include the best from Canada, National Film Board shorts, profiles, and a `How did they do that?’ segment, covering the full range of animation styles.

The challenge was to come up with a unique way to present the material. We wanted an animated host but felt that it would be difficult to meet the deadlines of a weekly show. The solution was computerized image processing. We could shoot the host on video and transfer this tape to computer.

The next step, performed by Absolute Design and Post, a division of The Lunny Group, was to take each video frame and run a series of filters on the image. Senior effects designer Bruce Woloshyn, along with Alan Harrison and Chris Taylor, used the Mac Media suite and Photo Shop to process the video.

We tried numerous looks, from charcoal line art to fresco painting. The challenge here was that with four minutes of video, at 30 frames per second, this meant we had to process about 7,000 frames in two days. Bruce’s team created a program that would automatically filter each video frame.

We wanted to show cbc several different looks for the host, so it was decided to also try texture mapping the host’s face onto a computer-generated 3D robot.

The host was first shot with his head in a brace to ensure that no up/down or sideways movement would occur as he said his lines. Using Alias software on a Silicon Graphics computer, the host’s face was then cut out of the video, frame by frame, and pasted onto the computerized robot with all facial movements intact.

Now that we had given our host a reality adjustment, we thought, ‘Why not have him living inside the computer?’ So Alan created a futuristic ‘windows’ type environment for our host.

This computer setting gave us an easy way to link segments; our host would be connected to the Internet, thus allowing him to tap into the film libraries of the nfb, Canadian art colleges and animation houses.

The program is being reviewed by cbc for consideration as a weekly series. We hope to soon be offering a national venue for this incredibly talented group of Canadians, The Animators.