The lines between digital animation shops and post houses continue to morph, in part due to the systemic shift of post systems in the creative process, and also attributable to the effects capacity of animation systems – all evolving in response to new demands.

There’s a new and improved perception brewing for 3D computer-generated graphics and animation. People are less aware of what they’re actually seeing, but they like it a lot more.

Like those Coca-Cola polar bears, three recently produced commercial pools for the Dairy Bureau of Canada, La Presse and Petit Larousse dictionaries help make a convincing case for 3D.

In the Larousse spot, set over the drifting sands of a desert, an army of ants pieces together an illustrated map in puzzle form.

Created entirely with Softimage’s 3D Creative Environment animation, the spot’s production technique is impressive. But Danny Bergeron, design director at Big Bang Technologies, Montreal, says the key to the successful production is that it downplays technique in the service of creativity and concept.

Computer animation and design companies no longer sell themselves as hourly, technical service shops, says Bergeron. Instead, they’ve become ‘a la carte (project-by-project) specialists’ who share projects with people and companies they used to compete with.

While Big Bang produced the 3D animated ants in Publicite Martin’s Larousse spot, the ant design was assigned to traditional Montreal animation house, Productions Pascal Blais.

The ants had to be appealing, and placing them in the desert instead of the kitchen was no doubt a first step in the right direction. Blais’ task was to find the right cross between the excessive realism of cold computer imagery and the too comic tonality of cel-animated cartoons. After Blais and the agency had cemented the storyboard, the job was transferred to Big Bang.

In all, 20 people contributed to the production, four full-timers over six weeks. And the cost was tres reasonable, less than $100,000.

Well before it became the accepted dictum, Bergeron, cofounder of the computer-graphics department at Universite de Quebec a Montreal in the early the 1980s, was an advocate of the theory that the best special effects shouldn’t be created as attention-getters; in fact, handled really well, they shouldn’t even be noticed. He says animation should create an overall impression, a sort of visual personality or signature.

Big Bang, Pascal Blais and commercial film house La Fabrique d’Images teamed on another eye-catching computer-animated/live-action pool last fall, three 30s for the Dairy Bureau featuring bedtime fables as told by mice.

The boards, out of agency bcp and directed by u.s. tabletop ace Greg Ramsey, visualize a world of exotic cheese as told by a respected mouse adventurer, tourist mice on a bus replete with omnipresent cameras, and a mouse mom reading a fable to baby.

The high-resolution transfer for the pool was done at Eastman Kodak’s digital film post-production center, CineCite in California.

Big Bang’s commercial for La Presse and bcp is 80% computer animation and 20% live action. The spot opens as a paperboy doing his rounds on his bike lets fly with the newspaper. As it rises to eye level, our pov darts inside a tastefully designed computer animation and graphic representation of the newspaper’s features, style and general coverage.

The way things work at Big Bang, incorporated in March 1993 by Bergeron, a 10-year veteran of Montreal’s computer animation and design scene, and Mario Rachiele, producer and company president, is a faithful reflection of the medium’s new style – less expensive and ‘light’ in overhead and equipment terms, desktop in decor, with a happy and marked absence of humming air conditioners, once common at computer-crunching installations.

Bergeron calls Big Bang ‘a creative production house using the latest digital technologies.’ Servicing the film, video and print markets, the company offers concept, image processing, digital editing and compositing, 2D and 3D computer graphics, and special effects production.

Big Bang’s Softimage applications include Creative Environment, the flagship 3D animation software; Eddie, the resolution-independent editing package; and Liberty paint application. The workstations are SGI Indigo 2. Regular staff number as few as four or five.

Bergeron says the marketplace reception for computer animation has evolved – for the better.

‘It seems that since the release of Jurassic Park there’s been this sort of breakthrough. There is the perception that in terms of quality, computer animation has become acceptable. The feeling is `it’s ready now,’ and this has created interest from many sources,’ says Bergeron.

And the wide-screen success of the movie Forrest Gump, filled with waves of rather subtle computer images, won’t be lost on agency creatives, either, he says.

Much has changed since Bergeron pioneered computer animation in Montreal as design director at Onzieme Ciel 10 years ago.

‘In the private sector, when I was with Onzieme Ciel in the 1980s, broadcasters were our best clients, asking for logos and station openings. All of this was done by outside suppliers. But by the end of the 1980s, the broadcasters had all purchased their own hardware, things were done in-house, and then the market collapsed.

‘By the early years of the 1990s the quality (of computer animation) began to approximate art directors’ expectations. We hardly do any broadcast work anymore, but advertising has filled the void,’ says Bergeron.

One of the reasons agencies have really started to master computer animation’s potential is the wide-scale use of Macintosh computers and other pc-based technology by creative personnel, especially in print advertising, he says.

With the light, software-based production style, staff expertise becomes the main selling point.

‘It’s a little like a photographer,’ says Bergeron. ‘Anyone can go out and buy a Nikon and half a dozen lens, it only costs $5,000. It’s the same thing for music, which can be produced digitally in a friend’s basement. The question is, who has the right style?’