Western Canada drawing animators

Over the past 30 years, an almost insatiable demand for animated product has transformed Vancouver’s small collection of independent animators into a close-knit community of studios bursting with talent.

‘Animation is just going crazy right now,’ says Chris Bartleman, co-owner of Studio B Productions in Vancouver. ‘I think more man-hours are spent in animation out here now than anywhere else in Canada.’

At Studio B, almost all of the 35 people employed year-round have relocated from Ontario – mainly for professional reasons, but also for the lifestyle.

Foreign markets

Producer Mandy Kealey of Vancouver’s Natterjack Animation Company says of the boom, ‘It helps us being on the West Coast and having contacts with the west coast of the States too.’

American clients, primarily from California, generate much of the animation work in Vancouver. The low Canadian dollar and sharing time zones help, as does the fact that Vancouver studios are typically small, with low overheads and no unions: most keep a core staff and hire freelancers.

At Al Sens Animation, a five-member studio occupying 800 square feet of office space, co-owner Al Sens even answers the telephone.

‘If this was the cbc,’ Sens says with a laugh, ‘it’d probably take six secretaries to get where you want to go.’

Despite the bottom line, ‘a lot of the work from the States comes to Canada because they just don’t have the talent down there,’ says producer Heidi Newell of Carbunkel Cartoons.

And not just Americans. Last year, Natterjack did key animation posing for Felidae, a feature film release in Germany, and will complete three 30-second television commercials for Nike in Japan this March.

Only a smattering of work for Vancouver studios comes from Canadian clients.

Al Sens Animation, which produces its own short films and shoots maps, archival photographs, film titles and traditional cel animation for clients, has completed work for the National Film Board and the cbc. ‘We do a lot of camera work for other people in b.c.,’ Sens says. ‘We’ve done work for people in Manitoba, in Winnipeg, and Saskatchewan and Alberta. I wouldn’t say we get a mountain of work, but we do get work out of the Prairie provinces.’

While clients exist in the Prairies, animation studios are scarce. Almost all of Winnipeg’s animation companies are single-person operations, and Alberta’s industry is driven by independent animators.

Marketing strategies

Bartleman says when he arrived in Vancouver 11 years ago, ‘there was nothing going on.’ To get established, Studio B focused on traditional 2D animation and subcontract work from companies like Toronto-based Nelvana, which it still does.

Today, each Vancouver studio has its own client base and they rarely bid against each other. Although several have advertised or kept agents in American cities, most rely on word-of-mouth advertising, and they network.

‘Our reputation is what gets us work,’ says Carbunkel’s Newell. ‘The two owners of the company are probably more well-known in l.a. than they are here.’

Carbunkle keeps an agent in Los Angeles and has advertised, but Newell says quality work and a unique business philosophy keep the studio in business.

‘If they (Carbunkle owners Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong) take a project on, they commit everything to that one project,’ says Newell. ‘That’s what the reputation is based on, their absolute meticulousness.’

Carbunkle spent 1994 working on The Baby Huey Show, a 13-episode television series funded by The Harvey Entertainment Company in Los Angeles.

Each half-hour episode consisted of two 1950s archival shorts and one newly created short by Carbunkle. Throughout the project, Carbunkle enjoyed complete creative control, employing more than 30 people at peak periods.

‘We did everything from writing to post-production,’ says Newell, ‘which is quite unusual for Vancouver, to do the whole thing for a series. It’s more usual for a lot of studios in town to do piecework.’ Or to do everything for a single half-hour show.

The Baby Huey Show earned consistently high ratings in the u.s. last year, and Carbunkel hopes to spend this year the same way.

‘They’re talking about doing another season, and they will eventually try to work out the old stuff,’ says Newell. ‘So, if we do another 13, they’d put two new shows with one old show.’

Television series work for American clients accounts for about 80% of Studio B’s work.

Last fall, Golden Films in San Francisco hired Studio B to animate 36 one-hour fairy tales for video and foreign broadcast, a three-year project. In December, Studio B began work on The Jewel Riders of Camelot, a 13-episode television series for New Frontier Entertainment in New York that’s scheduled for completion in June. And this fall, Street Sharks, a 13-episode television series done by Studio B for Dic Entertainment in l.a., should begin airing.

For such projects, Studio B accepts a script, designs the show, completes the storyboards, does the exposure shots and often completes the key drawings before shipping the product overseas to be painted and shot.

‘Most series are done overseas,’ says Newell. ‘A lot of companies go to Taiwan. Some go to Japan. We went to Korea. They paint and shoot them there, then we hire somebody to go over and make sure they do it right.’

The arrangement means Vancouver’s studios have less control, but ‘that’s the only way a series can get made, really,’ says Newell. ‘The budget would have to be $10 million if it was done here.’

While it’s more affordable than inking and painting the thousands of drawings in a television series by hand, animation software is still expensive.

Carbunkle is interested in the technology, and Natterjack has had some work inked and painted using computers, but neither has invested in the software yet.

Studio B’s color stylists, however, have practically given up their brushes in favor of recently purchased software.

‘With the computer, it’s so easy,’ Bartleman says. ‘You just scan the character in and color them right there, and boom, boom, boom. And if you don’t like it, you change it in a second. It’s just really great. And you don’t have all those paints floating around and spilling on the carpet.’

The technology offers control and portability: Studio B can simply send a disc to a client.

This year, Studio B plans to buy software capable of handling an entire project start to finish.

‘If we did a commercial,’ Bartleman says of the new software, ‘we could have the whole thing on computer and not even shoot it or do any post-production on it.’

Vancouver’s studios are moving closer to full-production capabilities, but Bartleman says it will be some time before Studio B owns the 50 computers needed to do an entire television series without sending it overseas.

Sens expects larger companies, perhaps computer companies, to begin offering inking and painting services and fill that niche in the industry.

Computer effects

‘Before, when you used to do effects,’ Sens says, ‘you could spend maybe a week or two doing a few basic sorts of effects, and the client would be waiting and everybody was patient knowing this took time. Now, those same effects could be done literally overnight.’

If the cost drops, however, traditional studios could face their demise.

‘Five years ago, a lot of this was just almost non-existent, or priced out of the world,’ Sens says. ‘Now, it’s still pricey doing these things, but they can be done, all that keeps you from doing it is you have to have the money.’

cd-rom applications have touched Vancouver’s animation industry. Natterjack is pursuing cd-rom work and Studio B has landed a cd-rom project. As well, Studio B is developing its own animated interactive cd-rom involving a creature called Blinky who teaches children safety rules.

Many Vancouver animators expect studios will be called upon for 3D animation in video games or interactive educational videos. ‘That’s going to be a massive growth industry,’ Sens says. ‘If I was 20 years old right now, I would certainly get into computer graphics.’

The onslaught of computer technology has opened some doors but closed others. Over the years, Al Sens Animation has lost its logo and typesetting work to computer companies.

Still, many traditional animators don’t fear extinction at the hands of computers. They view computers as one tool among many the industry will always require.

Computer technology has made its biggest inroads in 3D animation, used mainly for television commercials, which comprise only a sliver of Vancouver’s animation industry.

‘There’s not a lot of big consumer-based companies here,’ Sens says, ‘and those are the ones that advertise. You don’t sell logos to the average person. It’s a tougher world here in terms of getting tv commercials.’

There is also the concern that by bidding on a commercial, a Vancouver studio might alienate a client.

Sens, for example, rarely bids on commercials because it puts him in a ‘dicey’ position: he might bid against local studios hiring him to shoot projects.

Winnipeg-based Kenn Perkins and Associates, which does computer and traditional animation as well as special effects, does about 60% of its work for television commercials, another 25% for corporate clients, and the rest for television and film producers. Kenn Perkins, however, doesn’t expect to pump out such a high percentage of commercials in Mindscape Imaging & Fx, the full-production animation facility he’s opening in Vancouver March 1.

3D expansion

Perkins is expanding to Vancouver because the industry there is booming, and despite his Winnipeg studio’s success in satisfying clients across Canada and the u.s., there remain potential clients opposed to conducting business from a distance. ‘Basically, you’ve got to get into their backyard,’ Perkins says.

Perkins will commute from Winnipeg initially, and later oversee Mindscape using teleconferencing. He’s equipping Mindscape with nearly $500,000 worth of computer technology, an investment he expects the bustling Vancouver market to support.

In addition to expanding the Softimage 3D modeling and animation software he’s been using in Winnipeg for more than five years, Perkins is purchasing a 2D paint software package for image processing and special effects.

As well, he’s buying motion-capture technology – magnetic sensors that attach to the joints of a person or object and transmit the motion of those joints into a computer in real time, enabling that motion information to be applied to computer models. Perkins says it produces realistic 3D images formerly a ‘nightmare’ to create.

‘The actions always looked very stiff and mechanical,’ he says, ‘or else you had to go through a laborious process that would have taken literally hundreds of times longer to accomplish the same result.’

As television series work is difficult to do in 3D without expensive computer technology, says Newell, most Vancouver studios will stick with traditional 2D animation for now. As well, limited animation will remain in higher demand than full animation because it’s cheaper and easier.

Vancouver studios will continue their progression toward full-production capabilities. Studio B plans to have a pilot out in April for its own television show, and Carbunkel is fielding offers from companies that want to fund development work.

With Vancouver becoming a hot spot for live-action filmmaking, Bartleman and Newell predict the city’s animation studios will follow suit, doing more feature film work soon.

Speaking of which, the year-old unconfirmed rumbles that Walt Disney plans to open a studio in Vancouver both excites and terrifies Vancouver animators.

‘The big problem we have in Vancouver,’ says Bartleman, ‘is that everybody’s trying to always snag all the best artists, because there just isn’t enough to go around.’

But that initial impact likely wouldn’t give way to extreme competition, because few local studios do Disney-style animation.

Bartleman hopes it happens.

‘In the long run,’ he says, ‘it would boost the whole economy. And in fact, just them talking about coming up here has been good locally, because all of a sudden every tv station in town is knocking on my door, putting me on the camera, saying, ‘What do you think of Disney coming up?’

Bartleman says the awareness generated by the rumor has been positive: both the public and the government are beginning to realize animation in Western Canada is an industry with potential.