The mood at Head Gear Animation is reasonably mellow on a hot day in July, despite the crushing amount of work ahead. Steve Angel, a Head Gear partner, is in good spirits and bleeds enthusiasm as he introduces the staff and freelancers, who are all busily working on 15 all-new station ids for ytv. He reports that all is going well, thus far – but they’ve only just begun.

ytv’s identifiers have traditionally displayed a wide array of animation styles, including cgi and 3D animation. For the fall launch, ytv is getting Head Gear to create a series of claymation spots, each five seconds in length.

‘This year, they want to take a different route and use a different technique, so they talked to us and other companies and [the work] came our way,’ says Head Gear executive producer Persis Reynolds.

Angel says the biggest creative challenge on the project is the fact that each id is only five seconds in length.

‘These had to be visual gags,’ says Angel. ‘Three-and-a-half seconds of it is the animated chunk we are doing and the second half is the tag part. You have to introduce the joke, get to the gag part and let it sink in, all in a really short time.’

What isn’t difficult for Angel is ‘keeping it weird,’ as ytv makes a point of doing. He says the concept for each of the spots is bizarre. Some of the concepts were mapped out by creative director Dolores Keating Mallen and art director Nicholas Kadima of ytv, but for the remainder, ytv left Angel and partner Julian Grey to their own devices.

‘We pushed it in as many different directions as we could to see what ytv would respond to,’ says Angel, adding that the opportunity to be creative in concept ‘is really fun for us, because coming up with things that are our own ideas is sort of our raison d’etre. It’s been really nice because they roughly guided us through the design stage of it and all along we’ve really enjoyed it.’

Admittedly, this is a big job for Head Gear. Along with bringing on additional animators, like Neil Burns (who has worked with Head Gear on pieces for noggin) and Drew Lightfoot (who Head Gear snagged from Fox’s The PJs while the show is between seasons), Head Gear had to take up some additional space on the fifth floor of its building on McCaul Street in Toronto. In the original Head Gear space, the shop is divided, with one half being the construction area and the other serving as shooting space.

Angel demonstrates the model-making process, showing different versions of the plasticine puppets in different stages, while Lightfoot busily sands down one of his creations and Burns continues work on another puppet. Many of the objects are too bizarre for comprehension and in many cases defy description – definitely keeping it weird.

Laughing robots

Angel shows off some robots he is constructing for one of the spots. ‘I’m doing this thing where these robots are just laughing and they laugh to the point where one of their heads pops off into another robot’s lap,’ he explains. ‘They stop laughing and kind of look at each other and they start laughing again. The body is laughing in its kind of way, so they are really small little jokes that have to happen really fast and are kind of silly.’

Most of the puppets are constructed from a combination of plasticine, balsa wood, Sculpey, tubes, armature wire, Styrofoam insulation and glue – apparently lots of glue. ‘We are using all kinds of cool materials that Neil and Drew are introducing to us,’ says Angel.

Making the models, says Angel, is one of the most time-consuming tasks in the process of completing the one much-larger task. ‘Some are more complicated than others,’ he says. ‘I think models, if I were to guess, take between four days and a week to make, each. The backgrounds take about the same amount of time, but it is all staggered. We have two shooting spaces so we’ll have a pretty intensive shoot time – we’ll have two shoots going on simultaneously.’

Paces away, at the designated shoot area, there are two sets already constructed. One is supposed to be the inside of a mailbox, which the camera will look into in order to see the action inside. The second has been constructed to look like the bottom of a tree. Reynolds demonstrates how fabricated leaves will be held in front of the camera to make it look as though it were really an outdoor shot.

ytv expects all 15 station ids by late August or early September, meaning there is still much work to be done. Angel says a plan has been devised to give each spot enough time to come to life under the camera. ‘What we’ve scheduled now is three days for each shoot,’ he says. ‘We’ll be setting up for one day and shooting for two days. These things are so short that more time is actually spent in the construction.’

When shooting, Hear Gear will have digital cameras hooked into digital disk recorders which will be ethernetted into the Head Gear Macs. Although most of the special effects will be done in-camera, the Macs are equipped with After Effects and Photoshop for some small finishing touches. Painting and the potentially toxic elements of the project are being carried out on the roof of the building.

Head Gear is also coming off of a season in which the shop won a whack of prestigious awards from the industry. It was awarded a gold and a bronze for two of its Safe Sex psas through agency Taxi. ‘Partner’ took home the gold, ‘Only Girl’ the bronze. ‘Partner’ and another spot in the campaign, ‘Head Scratch,’ won a first-place prize at the World Animation Festival.

Angel is hopeful for continued positive reaction to the ytv ids, once the daunting task of completing all 15 – on time and on budget – is achieved.

‘Usually when we do jobs like this, we do one or two things at a time – this is 15,’ says Angel. ‘It is a much bigger thing. But it has been fun for Julian and me as well, because hiring a bunch of people who have very different experiences coming from different places and different backgrounds, we are learning a lot more.’ *

-www.headgearanimation.com