Post-production and its powers are personified in this column. We’ll cover new techniques, technologies and the creative personnel and companies giving them vibrant visual life.

After concentrating its efforts in the longer-format market for the past year and a half, Toronto’s Calibre Digital Pictures has launched an aggressive push to re-establish itself as an animated commercial producer.

With animation director Willy Ashworth at the helm, the shop recently put out the call for commercial work, and is starting to get the attention of some international clients.

‘We’re aggressively attacking jobs creatively,’ says Calibre president Pete Denomme. ‘We do a lot of the up-front work so we can go in and be more aggressive in our pitch. This enables Willy and I to go in with not only attractive budgets but a hell of a good pitch package, and this is one in a long line of what we’ve been working on this year.’

He says a new strategy is being deployed to get the shop the commercial work it desires.

In today’s competitive market, ‘aggressively pitching and being creative before you even get the job is what we’ve got to do,’ says Denomme. ‘If we really want commercials and character animation commercials, that is exactly how we have to approach them.’

Calibre marked its commercial comeback recently with a two-spot job for the Atlantic Lottery Corporation’s Wild 5 lottery, featuring a wizard character created by Ashworth.

Atlantic Lottery was so taken with Ashworth’s wizardry, it has asked for more of the same in the coming year.

‘Based on the success of the spots, the client is planning to do a big launch [featuring the wizard] in the new year,’ says Denomme, adding the new spots will be much more cost-effective for the client. ‘Obviously, the cost of the character being built is the majority [of an animated ad’s price tag]. Now that the character has been built, all we have to do is animate it. The amortization of that cost over the next campaign is going to be huge [to the client], and they are going to want to take advantage of that and the professionalism of the animators.’

Other animated commercial projects currently underway at Calibre include spots for Bright Homes from the Tokyo chapter of Young & Rubicam and a Scrubbing Bubbles spot out of Foote Cone & Belding in Chicago.

The Bright Homes ad runs 15 seconds and is about a popular and well-known Japanese robot who, without a Bright Home to call his own, is stuck out in the hot sun, then the freezing cold, and is even sits through an earthquake.

‘What they are doing is telling the audience that [the robot] represents the home and can withstand all of the elements, but the other part of it is he wants a home and is sad because he doesn’t have one,’ Ashworth elucidates.

According to Mark Palowich, a 3D animator on the Bright Homes case, the commercial is coming along rather quickly.

‘We are at the stage where we are getting all the movement down, the rough camera moves and everything, and we are bouncing ideas back and forth with the creative team in Japan,’ says Palowich. ‘The storyboards were pretty thorough so there wasn’t too much guesswork going on. We are on the verge of starting to animate it and get the effects into it.’

The Scrubbing Bubbles spot is predominantly live action with an animated element. About 12 seconds of animation, actually. The boards call for a split screen featuring a woman using Scrubbing Bubbles on one side and another trying to carry on without the product on the other. The job of Calibre cg animator and 3D textures artist Mike Pieczonka is to animate the tiny, bubbly character who stars in the ad.

‘[The character] is a bubble with bristles underneath that spin around like a scrub brush,’ says Pieczonka. ‘He is basically personified as a cute little character that comes in, scrubs away and takes off. He’s just a good-natured character.’

Ashworth, speaking for the Calibre animators in this instance, says the team is excited to be back in the commercial market while maintaining the longer-format work the shop has become known for.

‘It’s really very exciting,’ says Ashworth. ‘We’ve done more character animation in the last six months than we’ve done in the last two years. There is a lot of stuff down the pipes, too, even if only half of them come to fruition.’

Denomme agrees, saying he hopes the Calibre name will once again be top of mind with many Canadian and internationally based ad agencies and clients. He says Calibre is devoting much attention to its new, old initiative to make sure this happens.

‘If you’re not in their faces, you’re out of their faces,’ says Denomme. ‘The commercial market is finicky and respective; they are young and aggressive and if you’re out for a year they forget about you. We’re not gone. We’re a 10-year-old, brand new company.’

-www.calibredigital.com

*Burn baby, burn – the Soho Inferno

Toronto post house and graphic design company Soho is undergoing renovations to accommodate a new Inferno suite, which will undoubtedly attract some new commercial clients. That is the hope, at least, of Soho executive producer and partner Douglas Morris.

‘We’ve been operating with Henrys for several years and the Inferno is a piece of gear that the market really demands,’ says Morris. ‘The commercial market likes Inferno, and between our Henrys and the Inferno, it really expands our level of creative options. It allows our clients to call us and say ‘I need to do this,’ and we can come up with the best way to create certain effects. It is a very valuable tool.’

Henry/Inferno artist Terry Rose will be manning the suite when it is completed. Soho first used the Inferno on a Budweiser commercial for Palmer Jarvis ddb.

The shop also recently completed a number of projects in the broadcast design area for cbc, tvontario and espn.

For the cbc, Soho created openers and bumpers for the pubcaster’s new dinner-hour national news, which included some extra work creating openings for the local newscasts that follow the main event.

The tvo job involves six station ids, which reinforce the ‘Television That Matters’ tag line.

The espn job is larger in scope: Soho was asked to create an entirely new look for the channel’s block of outdoor shows, which includes programs on fishing, hunting, dog trials, etc.

‘We created the opening animation and then the transitional element and just a whole package that allows them to present their outdoor block and weave it all together with a graphic look,’ says Morris. ‘All those programs come from different producers, and what we’ve done is provide a common thread so that everything looks like it comes out of one source.’

Projects aside, Morris is excited to present his new toy to the world.

‘I’ve been a little reluctant to sell it until we are ready to sell it, before it is in its final room and before it is presented the way we wanted it presented,’ says Morris. ‘It’s a great alternative to Henry, but it is nice to have both of them and nice for us to present creative options for our clients.’ *

-www.sohodigital.com