In its new 14,000-square-foot Flash studio, Vancouver’s Studio B Productions is producing 52 11-minute episodes of Yakkity Yak for Teletoon entirely in-house. Using traditional animation, the labor-intensive animating process would usually be done overseas to cut costs, but creating the children’s TV series with Flash allows Studio B to keep work in Canada.

‘Producing Yakitty Yak entirely in-house will probably add between 30 and 40 [Canadians] to the production that otherwise wouldn’t be there,’ says Chris Bartleman, co-founder and partner at Studio B. ‘I am hoping that between 30% and 50% of all our productions can be done in Flash in the next few years.’ The series, coproduced with Australia’s Kapow Pictures for Nickelodeon and Teletoon, is budgeted at US$250,000 per half-hour.

Flash, the latest emerging animation technology, has expanded from its roots in Web animation to broadcast, and although the cost of producing an animated series using Flash is comparable to the cost of producing a series using traditional animation, the Macromedia technology offers Canadian animation houses considerable advantages. By eliminating the need to use cheaper labor overseas, work is kept in the country and prodcos are able to take advantage of provincial and federal labor tax credits.

However, Bartleman also says he thinks it is only a matter of years before Asia catches up to North America in Flash skills and experience, which will make animating overseas an attractive option once again.

For now, in addition to increasing domestic animation work, producing in-house with Flash gives Canadian animators and producers greater creative control. At Studio B, for example, Bartleman can simply walk into the Flash studio and watch the series coming alive rather than waiting for footage to be returned from overseas.

Halifax-based imX communications is also using Flash to create animated series for broadcast. The company is producing 13 episodes of the children’s show Crafty Cow for CBC at $450,000 per episode, a standard budget for an animated series.

Local Flash animator Edgar Beals, who works on the series, believes that if producers were to forego the traditional studio model in favor of a virtual working environment, Flash series could be produced for considerably less than traditional animation by avoiding overhead costs associated with studio space.

‘You don’t have to have everybody working in the same place at the same time with Flash because it’s so modular,’ says Beals. ‘There’s no reason why you can’t get away from the bricks and mortar of the studio.’

However, Michael-Andreas Kuttner, COO of Halifax-based Collideascope Digital Productions, which produces the Flash series Olliver’s Adventures for Teletoon, does not see the virtual studio as an option. ‘I think the whole idea of a virtual studio is a little bit oversold,’ says Kuttner. ‘There’s nothing like having all these people in the studio working together because of the energy created by interaction between animators and directors.’

Olliver’s Adventures is the first animated series out of Halifax and the pilot episode, Ollie’s Under the Bed Adventures, won a Gemini last year. Colliedeascope produced 13 half-hour episodes, aired as three seven-minute stories per episode, for $3.4 million.

‘We’re not trying to low-ball here. What we’re really trying to do is deliver some really primo content that is going to be able to have a long-term shelf life and that is going to impress kids who are saturated with cartoons and are looking for something a little better than the ordinary,’ says Kuttner.

Collideascope created its Flash studio because it was the most cost-effective system and allowed the prodco to use techniques Kuttner feels create the best overall style for the series.

‘We were able to achieve things stylistically that we simply would not have been able to achieve had we sent it over to Asia for animating,’ he says ‘As far as the overall look goes, I prefer what we’re getting out of Flash compared to the look of the more traditional stuff.’

Kuttner points to the consistency of color, drawing style and increased speed his animators have been able to achieve on Olliver’s Adventures as stylistic benefits of Flash.

‘The fact that Flash is a very good animation solution and is quite cheap allows for a level of creativity to be applied to a project that it might not otherwise have the budget to do,’ says Kuttner. ‘To that end I think it is allowing people to produce much better animation, but on the other side, because it’s cheap, those people that want to do knock-off, quick and dirty animated shows are finding it much more possible to do on ridiculously low budgets, so it’s also allowing some crap out there.’

Jason Belec of Ottawa’s Noitaminanimation, who conducted a seminar at the 2002 Ottawa International Animation Festival on emerging animation techniques and technologies, agrees. Although he believes Flash has given many people opportunity to showcase their work, he says there is not a lot of high-quality animation being done with Flash.

Belec is concerned with producing polished, high-end style animation, but that doesn’t mean high-cost projects animated overseas. He also has a strong interest in keeping animation work in-house and in Canada. Noitaminanimation, Belec’s two-year-old CGI and animation house, has developed software that greatly reduces the time-intensive process of generating high-end animation digitally, resulting in high-end quality animation produced at a fraction of the time for a fraction of the price.

Noitaminanimation has developed software called Socket, which is used with purchased software including Pixels: 3D from San Diego-based Pixels Digital and Pixologic’s Zbrush with RenderMan-compliant rendering hardware from Montreal’s 3Delight.

According to Belec, Socket can create in four minutes a frame that would take around 280 minutes using comparable animation tools like Alias|Wavefront’s Maya with Pixar’s RenderMan. With Socket, ‘a lot of the work that is repetitive and boring can be taken care of,’ he says.

Belec is currently completing a pilot for the animated series The Dragon and the Phoenix, which he hopes to have completed by November. Using Socket, Belec says four animators working for one month could complete an entire half-hour of the series. With animation quality that he claims will compete with high-end feature animation, a season of The Dragon and the Phoenix (13 x 30) would cost between $3 million and $6 million compared to approximately U.S.$3.3 million for a season of Yakitty Yak, $5.8 million for a season of Crafty Cow and $3.4 million for a season of Olliver’s Adventures.

-www.studiobproductions.com

-www.collideascope.com