CBC has high hopes for Poko, its new flagship kids series, although with the news of Salter Street Films closing its doors, a second season is in doubt. Playback recently visited the show’s Halifax studio, where the Salter team was hard at work on season one.

Halifax: While another painstaking day of production is underway on Poko, program creator Jeff Rosen is showing how it gets done.

‘Okay, just go around to the other side there,’ he says, directing us through the tight space of a stop-motion animation bay. A large camera is focused on a small, highly detailed backyard set for puppets Poko, a young boy, and his dog Minus. ‘But try not to touch anything!’ Rosen adds sternly.

Later, when animator Colleen McGrath plays back what she has recently shot, Rosen, line producer Katrina Walsh and director Chuck Rubin laugh like hell as the boy and his dog perform a quick tiptoe gag inspired by Harpo Marx.

‘It is a meticulous process,’ says Rubin, as McGrath shows what she’s done. ‘In between each frame she stops, takes a picture, then physically moves the puppet’s leg – and she’s doing this in unison.’

McGrath is on her third day of this one shot that runs only a few seconds. Such is the life of a stop-motion animator.

‘It’s worth it,’ says Walsh, proudly. ‘It’s a beautiful shot.’

Poko, which has been in production for more than one year, is brought to life at Halifax’s Electropolis Motion Picture Studios, where 48 full-time staffers have been working long hours manipulating these silicone puppets one frame at a time. It is the East Coast’s first studio dedicated to stop-motion. Rosen, Rubin and executive producer Michael Donovan, president of the now-defunct Salter, have worked hard to balance the theme of children’s emotional intelligence with comedy that will entertain the show’s preschool demo at the top of CBC’s Get Set for Life program block.

‘Poko always faces an obstacle he has to overcome, which prompts an emotional reaction,’ says Rosen. ‘The narrator suggests any number of coping skills to help the child manage the emotion, and [then we] move on to the resolution. And in between it’s schtick, schtick, schtick.’

The episodes also feature short Flash-animated pieces called Mighty Murph, where Poko’s toy monkey, Mr. Murphy, is depicted as a superhero. The pieces are animated by Halifax’s Collideascope Digital and serve as ‘eye candy and a break in the show,’ says Rosen.

Donovan’s contribution to the creative process, Rosen explains, was an insistence the show remain as simple as possible story-wise, featuring two characters with which the young audience could identify. What isn’t so simple is the production.

Rubin says Poko is a true collaboration, all the way from script to storyboards to animation to screen. When Rosen and Salter decided on the stop-motion format, they enlisted the talents of animators from the U.K.’s legendary Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace & Gromit, to help launch things in the Maritimes. Rubin, who worked with Rosen on Salter’s kids series Pirates!, was brought in to direct. He had never worked in stop-motion before, but brought with him a strong reputation in kids programming. Remaining staff was assembled from a pool of East Coast artists, many of whom were stop-motion novices.

‘There are a lot of young people who had this great desire to work in stop-motion, and they are being trained here, which is a great opportunity for them,’ says Rosen. ‘It was a gigantic leap trying to build this stop-motion facility in Halifax, because the expertise was not here.’

‘The general ability here is going through a learning curve, and that’s what is exciting to see, because it started out good and it’s only getting better,’ adds Donovan. ‘It could have been a disaster, because you can’t tell people how to create magic with metal and silicone. It either happens or it doesn’t, but it seems to have happened.’

As the animation talent continues to improve on the production, so does the Poko studio itself. Although the sets and props, which come in large quantities of handcrafted multiples, are designed and built on-site, the Poko and Minus puppets are created in the U.K. Walsh is confident that within the year the armatures and puppets will also begin to be created in Halifax.

The Poko studio is also serving as a beta test site for Stop Motion Pro, new software dedicated to the format. Rubin explains that Poko is shot and then saved to computer, where the animation process occurs, and the software helps speed up production.

As the director, Rubin shares with Rosen the task of keeping the team inspired throughout the sometimes-tedious process.

‘When they see a final show, full-mixed with voices and music, that really motivates them,’ Rubin says. ‘They see what an incredible production it becomes from [what] they generate.’

Poko began airing on CBC Dec. 1, bumped up nearly two months from its scheduled premiere to try to connect with its young audience over the holidays. Meanwhile, CBC had already ordered a second season of the show, funded by the pubcaster and the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, before Alliance Atlantis shuttered Salter. AAC would not comment on the show’s fate by press time.

-www.salter.com

-www.cbc.ca