From the heart of the Ottawa new media belt, Midnight Stranger helmers Animatics Multimedia Corporation are readying to launch Toast on the Internet next month. Animatics topper Alfredo Coppola isn’t committing to any details just now, other than to describe Toast as an interactive social after-hours cafe.

In other new media news, Animatics has inked a deal with Corel for the development, publication and distribution of two new cd-rom entertainment titles – Mode and Studio Z.

Described as interactive social dramas, both will be released early in ’96 by Corel under its new Corel CD Home product line (Windows ‘you make a grown man cry’ 95 and Mac compatible). Coppola says the advent of long-awaited Windows 95 will make life easier, and he expects fewer tech support calls.

Animatics is a Mac shop, and Coppola says the tools are more robust now for cross-platform development, mentioning Indeo, Intel technology digitizing Codex, delivering optimized performance of video on pc for Windows. In a mastery of understatement from one who jumped into the cd-rom game early, Coppola describes the fact that the video files will be one file as ‘nice.’

Likened to primetime soaps, the casts of the new titles discuss social issues with the user in a variety of backdrops. The plots twist through funny, suspenseful and passionate avenues, depending on the user’s response, and once again employ the ‘mood bar’ interface tool used in Midnight Stranger.

Coppola says the mood bar has evolved to reflect a wider gamut of emotional intimacy, and therefore the writing has become more complex. Live-action production values are up too. Midnight Stranger was shot High-8, and the new titles are a Betacam mit boom mike production.

Mode takes the user to a party thrown by a mad fashion designer in a ritzy hotel. The user traipses through theme rooms and encounters ‘romance, betrayal and terror’ (very soapesque) while trying to uncover curious goings-on, including a murder mystery and a clandestine power cult.

Studio Z (formerly Cast Call) is premised on the movie biz, and is of the role-playing genre. The user is cast as a producer wannabe, and the location is a movie set. And yes, the user can achieve mankind’s ultimate goal – direct a movie (in the virtual world not even beauty pageant contestants click on world peace) – or be accused of committing a crime or intriguingly ‘deliver strange packages.’

The srp is likely to be in the $50 range, and the budget (partly financed by Animatics) is just over $200,000 each.

Tough audience

In other toast news, Toronto’s Spin Productions did a spoof on 1950s-style kitchen gadget ads as a promo piece for Side Effects Software. The logo, character and all animation was done, of course, on Prisms. The star gadget, Sesinator, turns into sundry other kitchen devices illustrating the range of Side Effects product via some humorous icon puns.

The video came under pretty authoritative scrutiny when it played at the company’s siggraph booth, where the l.a.-assembled computer acolytes could get their mitts on the data and animation files in client demos. The task of plotting the cg path of a promo you can play with – in a crowd where not only is everyone a critic, they’re all producer/editors too – fell to Spin’s John Coldrick, Kyran Kelly and Rob Jones and Side Effects’ Kim Davidson.

Remote religion

Toronto-based Live Wire’s mobile has been on a diverse event prowl this summer.

Rigged with a 48-track Studer digital recorder and six Tascam DA-88s, Mike Plotnikoff, who recorded Van Halen’s latest disc (Balance), manned the truck for the band’s Molson Amphitheatre gig. mtv Unplugged series chief engineer John Harris mixed the opening act, Our Lady Peace. The show airs this fall on MuchMusic here and as ppv stateside.

In a completely different stadium outing, the mobile taped five Billy Graham tv specials over a week at the SkyDome, entailing 118 inputs and 96 tracks of adat. After capturing the 5,000-voice choir of the Grahamstravaganza, other recent stops for the mobile, like the taping of a ppv special on jazz diva Holly Cole in Montreal, must have seemed like a piece a cake.

DDR news

Abekas Video Systems, of digital disc recorder fame, recently released an improved and fleeter version of RotoPhoto, which includes a plug-in driver for Adobe Premiere 4.0 enabling snazzy compositing without a high-end price tag.

In the company’s quest to bring uncompressed video standards to the desktop, Abekas partnered with Diaquest, and Animaq/Digital, the software version of Animaq, now supports Abekas ddrs, resulting in speedy (on average less than one second per frame) transfer.

RSB takes the CD plunge

An RSB Video demo cd-rom distributed to participants at the recently wrapped Montreal World Film Festival symposium says the company has invested more than $500,000 in multimedia hardware and hired 10 full-time staff, including three programmers.

rsb’s multimedia division offers cd-rom authoring for both Macintosh and Windows pc platforms in addition to production services such as media digitizing, interactive cd technical consultation, cd mastering and burning, duplication, mpeg compression, page layout, 2D and 3D animation, and rendering.

Hardware acquisitions include digital scanners, the AVID Media Composer 1000, plus new workstations.

A spokesperson for the company says there’s a growing demand by producers for ‘asset integration’ services, the out-of-house integration of film, video, music and script content on cd-rom and cd-i.