Halifax: East Coast toon talent came together to focus on the potential of Atlantic Canada’s growing animation industry at the first Halifax Animation Festival April 24-25.

Animators and students from Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario participated in the two days of seminars, discussions and screenings of work.

The idea for a festival was conceived in the fall of ’97 when Rob Cohn, vp marketing at Halifax’s pixelMotion, joined the five-year-old company and began to research the industry. He realized that while there was plenty of activity at individual companies, no one was working together.

Cohn assembled 10 key players on the Halifax animation front to discuss the biz. A second meeting followed in January 1998, which hosted 25 people, and from that came some ideas about what needed to be done in order for the industry to move forward.

Three initiatives were laid on the table. One was to develop a joint project since no one company had enough series experience to develop a proprietary project. The second idea was to stage a festival, and third to offer an animation tax credit.

So far, two of the three initiatives have come to fruition. Local animation companies pixelMotion, Adner Animation, Marshall Media and Windhorse are in the process of nailing down a broadcaster for their animated series The Legends of Glooscap based on the primal aboriginal myths of Nova Scotia. The group has received $25,000 in development funding from the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation covering one-third of the cost.

As for the animation tax credit, Cohn is keeping his fingers crossed that a 15% credit, which would help bring in outside service work, will be unveiled in this month’s provincial budget.

Cohn projects that within the year more Nova Scotia animators will be working with companies from outside of the province, and Canada, as coproductions are vital to the local industry’s growth.

The festival kicked off with keynote speaker Mark Voelpel, director of cgi at R. Greenberg and Associates Digital Studios, live from New York via Proshare teleconferencing, sharing his wisdom on the future of visual effects and computer animation.

Following that was a discussion on how to keep the quality of animation up and the cost down. The session was led by Halifax animators Steve Comeau of Collideascope, Steff Adair from Adner Animation and Lulu Keating of Red Snapper Films.

A panel on the process of project development, funding and where to go for what was led by Frank Taylor of Ottawa’s Funbag Animation, and private pitch sessions were held where animators had the opportunity to give Madeleine Levesque, director of original programming for teletoon, a sampling of the goods coming from the East Coast. Session followed on the opportunities that exist between animation and new media, and on training issues.

McLeod best sums up the Halifax animation industry by associating it with San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury area, urging the group of animators present and future to ‘remember what you are seeing here because we are about a year away before the rest of the world discovers it.’