Commercials: 30 seconds of experimental ground where animation/fx/post artists launch innovative styles and techniques, pushing the boundaries of their craft, or, stagnant play-it-safe packages offering few opportunities for cutting-edge work?

Ask director Marv Newland, who’s in the midst of a Converse spot at Vancouver-based animation house International Rocketship. ‘It’s conventional animation,’ he says of the spot. ‘We’re compositing archival footage of a basketball, ’70s-style graphics – which is old hat – and one live shot of a basketball player. It’s easy to do, we do it all the time, just a number of ordinary types of production hooked together.’

Newland says most of the spots he’s working on these days are just like this one: ‘blasts of visual material and splashes of mediums, and not very challenging.’

3D animator Livio Passera at Toronto’s Dan Krech Productions has observed another changing tide on the animation front, which, in his view, isn’t for the better. He says most of his current work is in designing animation to look like it was shot live. He points to a recent Nytol herbal remedy commercial where, instead of filming the plant live, he was asked to recreate a life-like animated version because it saves on production costs and time.

‘When you are building something to look real there isn’t much room to get creative because you are going from a picture that already exists,’ he explains.

With 38 years of animated spot production under his belt, Michael Mills agrees commercials aren’t pushing the envelope, instead they are sticking to conventional styles and techniques. ‘I have been doing animated backgrounds for 30 years,’ says the animator/owner of Michael Mills Productions in Montreal. ‘Unless it’s done better or with some experimentation it becomes mundane.’ Mills calls cereal commercials ‘the least adventuresome animation,’ noting how they all look the same and have remained relatively unchanged for 20 years.

On the creative post front, editor Debby Tregale at Coast Mountain Post Productions in Vancouver is fed up with ‘the more cuts you can pack into 30 seconds, the better the spot’ approach to editing, and what she calls the ‘roving, hand-a-camera-to-anyone, guerrilla-cam kind of thing’ which has become a mainstay of commercial production.

But others don’t see the animation/post scene in such a bleak light and applaud the rapid influx of new computer technology for offering new opportunities for experimentation.

Editor/designer David Buder at Atomic in Toronto is currently working on a Heritage Canada anti-racism psa where he is playing with mediums, combining 16mm Bolex, video and Hi-8 and creating multilevel composits.

Buder insists that ‘from an editorial point of view it’s more creative because more than just cutting pictures is involved.’ He says the challenge is in using the technology to make the commercial graphically strong and captivating to watch.

Passera is another artist making the most of the latest technology. He argues that working with new 3D animation software like Prism’s Houdini gives him more control over his work. The software allows him to create animation, composit it, output it as a texture, and manipulate images, all in one package, whereas in the past this often meant involving other people on other systems.

But the case is being made that commercial artists are getting drunk on technology while starving for originality. Used in moderation, post can enhance traditional mediums, argues Cordell Barker, a freelance animator represented by Montreal’s Les Productions Pascal Blais. The danger zone is when artists get lost in the techno-craze. ‘The morphing thing, turning people into liquid and floating graphics is getting tiresome,’ says Barker.

And now that animators have the technology to highlight and shadow 3D characters for a luminous look he says ‘they can’t restrain themselves. You see it time and time again. I don’t think animators will ever do a character again without it.’

Newland says the animation and post community is relying too heavily on the same computer library of programs, resulting in a repetition of effects and styles and ‘a generic look’ from spot to spot. ‘Eventually the viewer’s eye catches up with these programs, it doesn’t take long for the effect to wear out,’ he says.

The demise of traditional animation techniques is being mourned by Barker, who prefers the more individualized style created by painting on cel.

‘Animation that’s computer inked is so flawless and perfect that something is lost,’ he says. Mills has a similar view: ‘The good animation is still done by hand,’ he says.

Although the technology issue is under debate, animation/post talent agree the pressure of compacted production turnaround times is the main culprit zapping creative energy.

There isn’t the time to experiment is a common complaint running through the industry. ‘In the past we would have a month to come up with a design,’ says Mills, who is now working within three-week time frames. ‘We can produce animation very fast, but only animation we are familiar with, so we keep repeating styles and techniques.’

A shortage of experienced animators in Canada compounds the problem. Mills says many of the most talented artists are lured to Hollywood by the likes of Disney and Fox Animation. As well, he says, the big Canadian studios are failing to foster the young talent coming out of colleges because actual animation work is being shipped abroad. ‘I’ve interviewed animators who have been working at places like Nelvana and Cinar who do only the posing so they don’t get the animation experience.’

The result, he says, is a high percentage of junior animators, who are talented but lack the crucial production experience and speed required to produce quality work under the constraints of tight deadlines.

On the editing scene, the advent of Avids and other technology has made it possible to wrap post much faster. Although expediency is achieved, quality suffers.

‘My feeling is that a lot of stuff on air is rough cuts,’ says Tregale. ‘Back when we used to cut on film we had two weeks to cut a commercial; now I get rushes in the morning and they want to see a cut the same day, which is absolutely insane.’

The creative lull on the commercial front is also blamed on the tight economy. Faced with limited budgets and cautious advertisers, the tried and true concepts are recycled.

‘The trend is ultra-conservatism; agencies take less risks, they are less adventuresome than in the past,’ says Newland, adding that his biggest challenge these days isn’t the actual animating but convincing the client and agency to go with his design.

‘Ideas and approaches have to go through a chain of command and be sold down the line to so many people whose jobs hinge on the success of the commercial,’ he explains.

Newland says the ‘real crazy stuff’ is approved only by big-name clients who can afford to take a chance or the little guys at the bottom with such meager budgets they are willing to try anything to attract some attention. ‘At the end of the day, those risky spots don’t happen much,’ he says.

But in Vancouver, Tregale says team spirit between agencies and post houses is starting to rejuvenate the creative. Agencies have recently begun to quote post direct whereas in the past costs would go through the production company. This is giving post houses more creative input at the agency level. As costs of technology like the Flame and Inferno decrease, and agencies become more aware of their capabilities, they are becoming more receptive to their use.

Although the jury is hung on the opportunities for cutting-edge work, the animation/post talent all have a strong vision of where they would like to see commercials go.

Tregale is leaning towards spots with ‘more classic film cutting, beautiful pictures, and the sense that the creative is more important than the style.’ Spots where ‘editing enhances good creative as opposed to being the only creative.’

Commercials should lighten up, Mills suggests, noting how Canadians love the best of Cannes commercial awards reel every year and laugh at the British and Australian spots. ‘We never seem to get our commercials on that reel, and it’s because they are boring,’ he says. ‘It’s time for everyone to be less serious.’

Instead of throwing a jumble of styles and mixed techniques onto the screen, Newland would like the novelty of working with a single, strong concept that’s completely animated. ‘I would love to sit down and take one character and put life into it with voice, expressions, design and color,’ he says.

‘We are creative people,’ sums up Newland. ‘We like to have something new to do, fuss around with new styles or take the old tried and true and lay it onto a new character or technique. Now that’s a challenge.’