Producer Adam Shaheen explains how he and partner/fellow reality-warper creative director Bruce Alcock of Toronto animation/illustration and design house Cuppa Coffee wielded their media-blender ways on FrenchKiss, a francophone music/culture program on MuchMusic. The pair worked with Michael Heydon of Much, to perk up an award-winning opener for the show. Alcock, whose training was originally in music, worked with the composer in designing music and image together.

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cuppa Coffee’s animation has been traditionally mixed media. Everything is fair game. ‘French Kiss’ typically recognizes our ability to work with many different mediums.

The opening is frame-by-frame 35mm stills sequentially put together to create an interesting sense of Natalie Richard (the show’s host), spinning around the room. Movement and color are always accentuated, adding to the sense of the anarchic! Our methods are often traditional low-tech, offering an energy that has been lost to a proliferation of computers of late in the broadcast world.

The scene then cuts to an accordion player drawn in pencil with watercolor wash. As this pans across, the edges of the image are torn to reveal a cafe scene done in chalk, and this tears away to reveal a watercolor of Mount Royal. Abstract Haitian dancers creep into frame, artworked in ink and crayon.

These three scenes are typical of the layer animation that defines the rich images of Cuppa Coffee.

A simple series of black-and-white photo copies of the same image of the Arc de Triomphe are cleverly art worked up to create the illusion of late night Parisian traffic. A hand-crafted Mardi Gras mask flies in (very apropos, as Cuppa Coffee just won a Bronze award at the Broadcast Design Awards held last month in New Orleans for ‘French Kiss’).

A photocopier is again utilized to simulate lace fabric revealing an animated version of Van Gogh’s ‘Cafe in Arles.’ A Moroccan waiter moves over a ‘boiling’ painted representation of a Paris hotel into a North African desert scene painted on glass and backlit for luminosity. An animated frame-by-frame sunset using oil paints takes us back to the hills of Quebec which, through pixillation, mysteriously smear away to reveal another sepia-toned photo sequence of Natalie Richard blowing viewers a kiss; and in signature Cuppa Coffee style, the words ‘French Kiss’ in red oil paint, spill from Natalie’s lips.