Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Animation has always managed to stay in the forefront of Canada’s broadcast design marketplace. One of the reasons for this is named Justin Stephenson, an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between working at Cuppa Coffee and working on his own independent films.

Stephenson, Cuppa creative director/director, has an impressive list of credits that includes Turner Networks, Italy’s cni, and tsn. He is currently working on show openings for newly launched American specialty channel Oxygen.

‘Oxygen has been one of the most substantial broadcast design packages we’ve done,’ says Stephenson. ‘They are very serious about it and have put a lot of resources into it.’ (Oxygen is co-owned by Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, Vulcan Ventures, aol and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Entertainment Group.)

Stephenson says helping to shape the look of the new women-focused network is providing the Cuppa team with a strenuous creative workout.

‘It is really rare to work for a startup network, and it is doubly rare to work for a startup network whose product consists of 100% original content,’ says Stephenson. ‘They are making all of the programs, they aren’t buying anything. So for the sense of design you are not working with something that has been pre-established with a pre-established set of rules. They don’t have a giant Oxygen bible of dos and don’ts in terms of how to go about designing openings and bumpers, so it is pretty fantastic.’

Stephenson has already done the design for Oxygen’s sports package We Sweat and series Exhale, starring Candice Bergen.

He says his current Oxygen project, an opening for a comedy show called Outskirts, is the most challenging to date. The concept involves a surreal flight through the mind of a woman. After meeting with Oxygen creative director Bea Murphy, it was decided the opening would be partly 3D animation, which is being handled by Toronto’s Loop Media.

‘What [Murphy] is interested in is seeing stuff that is not on my reel and not on Cuppa Coffee’s reel – stuff we had never done before,’ he explains. ‘In one sense it was terrifying and in another it is a treat, almost a relief to be asked to do something you’ve never done before.’

Because the virtual animating space Stephenson is working in is three-dimensional, he contacted two architects to help develop the sense of space needed for the opening. The architects, Paul Mezei and Simon Eagar, designed the blueprints of the space with which Stephenson will work and the 3D element of the opening.

‘The whole thing we want to get at with the 3D animation is to have it done in a way where we don’t know where the organic stuff begins and ends and the computer stuff begins and ends,’ says Stephenson. ‘We are going through the mind so quickly and we want to choose a series of images you can read really fast, but as you pass them you are thinking, ‘what the hell was that?’ ‘

Stephenson hopes the Outskirts images will be every bit as bizarre as they are engaging. He says the true challenge is in trying to make a 3D animated opening which is traditionally metallic looking seem a house blend of organic and synthetic imagery.

‘It will give a whole sense of moving into a space, but the space is never fully formed,’ says Stephenson. ‘It’s always kind of in progress. Like a thought, it is never fully complete.’

In case you’re wondering how much insight one man can offer on the inner workings of the female brain, Stephenson reports he had a few brainstorming sessions with some of the women at Cuppa, many of whom contributed ideas to the script