For veteran Toronto animation house Cuppa Coffee, a thriving spot, long-form and broadcast design business keeps it on the leading edge of trends. For Cuppa kahuna Adam Shaheen, evolving with the industry and diversifying within an open-ended business model are two main reasons this Cuppa Coffee stays fresh.

One of the biggest changes at Cuppa is a move towards in-house post-production. Shaheen says software packages like ‘After Effects and [Pinnacle Systems’] Commotion have really made our lives that much more affordable.’

‘The problem for us for the longest time was convincing people the software was any good. When you look someone in the eye and say, ‘This, quite frankly, is as good as a Flame or a Henry,’ they think you’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes,’ he says.

Shaheen admits the recent proliferation of these software packages throughout the industry has made this sell job easier, and that Cuppa now does 95% of its post-production in-house. Cuppa will go offsite for final conform, however, when a client group is coming in. Shaheen jokes about Cuppa’s lack of a mini bar.

Shaheen believes this one-stop appeal has helped Cuppa increase its commercial business, even while more than half its attention these days is focused on long-form work. One current commercial gig is a seven-spot campaign Cuppa is creating for America’s Best Eyeglasses, through Doner, Detroit.

‘It’s a live-action shoot with talent that we can piece together. There’s a lot of design involved with it, some animation and a lot of post-production. So it’s a bit of a mishmash. And we’re a great company to go with because suddenly we can handle all those things. Often you’d get a live-action company, who would call the animation company, and then you’d go to the post-production place. So probably for half the price of dishing it all out, they’re coming to us to do it all,’ Shaheen explains.

The Cuppa animation sensibility, which Shaheen says ‘is not your typical Saturday morning cartoon,’ is based on a free-form creative style and is not easily affected by the trends that ebb and flow in the animation world.

‘The big thing a year ago – and this comes around every six months – was that stop-motion was dead again. But for me, we’re busier than ever. If anything, there’s a trend back to doing a lot more stop-motion,’ Shaheen says. For example, Cuppa employed stop-motion as an element in its ‘Global’ spot for Fujitsu.

This is not to say Cuppa doesn’t adapt and innovate new styles. Shaheen says the company is ‘a little more flexible with how things are pieced together.’ For instance, Cuppa has a ‘little cel department that just lip-syncs mouths’ to be added to characters created through other animation techniques. Shaheen continues: ‘I think we were the first to be doing that combining which came from the mixed-media thing.’

That ‘mixed-media thing’ has been Cuppa’s signature style, which Shaheen explains was born from his background as a fine artist. As well, in the early days, when ‘budgets were smaller,’ Shaheen and his team had to be more inventive. ‘There were no rules,’ he says.

‘There was a bit of an obsession with doing things low-tech and using Scotch tape and nuts and bolts. It drove an ingenuity and an innovation and a unique style that we still have.’

Cuppa has also embraced the Internet as a production tool. ‘Everything we do now is up on our website,’ Shaheen begins. ‘We have a client-protected page and everything is posted there. We’ll post all our boards, character designs, textures of fabrics, everything. And the time frame for commercials is usually fairly extreme. FedExing is that much slower.’

Cuppa’s creative bent comes into play early on in the commercial production process. Says Shaheen: ‘Some of the type of animation we do is so eclectic that it’s often hard for an art director to board out. Particularly when you’re doing the mixed-media stuff. There are little things that we’ll think of. Things that we’ve used before – little tricks.

‘The stuff I like to get is preliminary scripts. And then we’ll do a board and we’ll work with them and they’ll throw out some ideas and then go through a phase of two or three reincarnations.’

For Shaheen, the key to success is having fun with it.

‘It drives me crazy when people are so blinkered by the business model. Open up a little bit! We didn’t set out to make a lot of money. That’s all residuals and gravy down the line. And time and time again, it’s ‘Lets do the work and let’s do a good job.’ And it’s fun.

‘There are plenty of boards we get that we just don’t do, because it’s, say, for a cereal commercial, where they want to composite traditional cel animation of a little character leaping out of a cereal box from a live-action plate. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s really not our bag. My big mandate is that we always take work that interests us. It is creatively driven work, and budgets are down on the totem pole. My experience is you do interesting work, and that begets more interesting work. And it will probably beget bigger budgets and more exciting things down the line,’ he says. *

-www.cuppacoffee.com