The Animation House director Terry Godfrey is in production on what he’s dubbing his ‘first child.’

The Toronto studio installed a digital graphic paint and compositing system from Toon Boom Technologies in late October and Godfrey is currently walking his firstborn through the system – a ‘Big ol’ Bug’ psa for Drug Free America through Saatchi & Saatchi New York.

Although the spot won’t be wrapped until the end of January, Godfrey is enthusiastic about the initial results. ‘Whereas we used to paint by hand on celluloid, now we can color the animation frames and put our highlight and shadow tones right in the computer and composit it over the backgrounds,’ he says of the system, the first of its kind in Toronto and one of a few in use in Canada. The system has been in use in the u.s. for a little over a year.

The Toon Boom system will allow The Animation House to slowly make the change from hand-painted to electronic cels, edit in-house, and give a final output to digital Beta. Godfrey says the switch is needed to meet the quick turnover times clients expect.

New creative windows will also be opened. ‘It allows us to explore more 2D and 3D combinations,’ explains Godfrey.

‘The Silicon Graphics base of the machine allows us to import factors coming off other sgi machines.’ This is crucial, he says, because most of the 3D work is now being done on Indigos or Indies, and with the Toon Boom system these elements can be imported more efficiently.

Working from the creative supplied by Saatchi & Saatchi producer Liz Sloane, art director Sean Kiener and copywriter Ken Opalsky, Godfrey spent a month on development of character design and color concept.

The fully animated psa targets the five-to-12 crowd and features a young boy who decides he would sooner eat a bug – which is slowly sliding down a spoon handle towards the camera – than take drugs.

Against a number of scenarios where the boy is pressured to take drugs while also learning how they will hurt him, an up-tempo score rhythmically plays ‘I’d sooner eat an ugly bug than ever take a stupid drug.’

Animating traditionally from pencil to paper, Godfrey developed a loose, scratchy line style of animation for the characters to convey the simplicity of the message.

‘We don’t often get to use this style in commercial work, usually the animation is slicker, with a heavy thick line.’ says Godfrey of his love child. ‘But we left some roughness in it, there’s an innocent feel with the colors spilling over the edges and gaps where we don’t paint to the full line.’

Working with Animation House animator Jennifer Sherman, producer Christine Davis, and production manager Monika Storr, Godfrey scanned the drawings into the Toon Boom system and painted the characters with bright primary colors. The backgrounds, produced in Photoshop, are graduated and drab in color to create what Godfrey calls a ‘non-real world with a limbo, 1970 semi-psychedelia sort of feel.’ The scenes were then imported into the paint system and composited under the animated characters.

Godfrey is currently working on the final compositing, playing with color tones and shades of background grabs as he tests the waters of the new paint system.

Aiming to underscore mood changes as the boy is confronted with positive and negative influences, Godfrey is echoing emotional shifts via backgrounds, moving from lighter colors to a heavier vein.

Before the Toon Boom system, Godfrey had the time-consuming options of either producing the backgrounds as an airbrush element on paper, shooting onto film and compositing in Henry, or shooting cels on top of the background.

Instead, he produced 37 background elements electronically and spent a mere hour at the paint system shuffling the possible backgrounds underneath the painted artwork to select the desired mood for each scene.

No wonder he’s raving about the system.

‘Its ease of use is incredible,’ says Godfrey. ‘It gave me greater flexibility with my color palettes and allowed me to make color adjustments without costing my client time and money.’

Even with all the animation development and color experimentation, he is impressed with the speed of production and the spot will soon be ready to be handed over to Dave Giles at Axyz Edit for editing.

Post ‘Big ol’ Bug,’ Godfrey is looking forward to future Toon Boom-generated offspring.

‘There are avenues this system will offer that we haven’t even explored yet,’ says Godfrey. ‘As more artists get a chance to push the limits of this system, we will expand styles of animation and creative ways of compositing and manipulating images for a better product.’ CB