Animation for TV shows: know your audience, know your vendors, update your pipeline

Post, July, 2005 by Ann Fisher

CAILLOU IS ONE OF THE MOST popular children's animation shows in Canada, and simplicity has been its hallmark, from its visual style--traditional 2D--to the show's premise: the ordinary life of a four-year-old boy. Currently, the producers are busy revamping the show for this fall's season on PBS in the US and on Teletoon Canada. A look behind their animation process reveals that a new 2D digital process will allow Cookie Jar Entertainment (www.cinar.com), the show's production company, to bring production back from overseas and keep it in Canada, plus allow them more flexibility with the plot and visual aesthetic. Best of all, says executive producer Lesley Taylor, "I love not spending money on the things that don't get on the screen."

This show, and the others highlighted below, illustrates the continuous flux of the producer-vendor relationship, the impact of FTP sites on the animation process, and the enormous research put into attracting the demographic, in this case some very particular three to five year olds.

Originally, there were two half-hour versions of Caillou (which means "little pebble" in French), an all-animation one in Canada and a combined animation/live action version for PBS because of its slightly longer broadcast window. Research done in Chicago and New York uncovered several things. One, the kids thought the live action parts were commercials. Two, they loved Caillou's perfectly normal family who spend all their time focusing on him. New season episodes, then, will be solely animation and include some parenting techniques. The plot will be more aspirational, giving Caillou and his creators more leeway with daydream scenarios.

The switch this season to 2D digital, says Taylor, was for "control of the product. Before, part of the shows were sent to Taiwan. We also have a lot of drawings. We're actually doing [much of] Caillou in [Macromedia] Flash, so a lot of the drawings are scanned from previous series. We have a lot of what would be called 'reuse': it's already been animated. The idea is to make it, obviously, less expensive to produce, to keep it all in Canada where we can access funding for it, keep control of it, to have the show look the same as the previous series."

Using Flash is a technique that's worked. "Flash can manipulate existing drawings," says Taylor. "It can make them smaller, bigger ... it could flip them. It used to be we'd get a video of Digi Beta of the show that would or would not arrive, depending on shipping. And now we go to Web site links and we just look at a whole film for mix approval. It's not television size, it's 6-inches across, but there's no more distance. There's still time differences but distance is gone. And we're getting more and more digital in how we work with FTP sites and artwork," she says. "We still want the handdrawn component of it, but there's less of that and I'm not paying customs anymore. I love that I'm not paying shipping."

Animation is now being handdrawn or created digitally, then imported in Flash: backgrounds are created in Adobe Photoshop on Mac G5s. Their animation pipeline is a cyberspace chainlink of vendors: Cookie Jar (Montreal) writes the scripts. Storyboards and the animatics/leica reel come from Guilty Kiwi (Ottawa) where the director is based. Flash animation is done at Pip (Ottawa). English voices are recorded and edited at Technicolor (Montreal). The French dub will be done in either Toronto or Montreal. Post is done at Technicolor (Toronto). Taylor is part time in Ottawa and Montreal. It takes about four months to produce an episode from script to delivery.

"I never quite know where I'm waking up," she says. Cookie Jar itself, only a year old and built from the remnants of Montreal-based Cinar, is spread out. The main office is in Toronto, Taylor's boss is in Los Angeles, the head of licensing is in Rhode Island, there are staff in Tokyo and salespeople in London and Paris. "The managing of the actual show is simpler because we're not in the Far East. If you say that you want a Charlie Chaplin walk and you send that over to China, they have no idea what you're talking about," she says.

STOP MOTION CIRCUS

JoJo's Circus, animated by Cuppa Coffee (www.cuppacoffee.com) in Toronto, one of the largest stop-motion animation studios in North America, is a half-hour show that will begin its third season this fall on Playhouse Disney, the morning children's programming block on the Disney Channel. NYC's Cartoon Pizza (www.cartoonpizza.com), the creators, sold it to Disney who selected the stop-motion style. The story focuses on a little girl living in a circus town. She learns life lessons and tries to keep everyone energized, including the preschoolers at home.

"The story has to be engaging right off the bat," says animation director Tim Snyder, referring to the specific challenges of attracting the pre-school audience. "We'll add in whatever kind of flash and sparkle we can to catch their attention here and there but it has to come from the story. JoJo will talk to the camera and ask for responses and tell the kids to get off the couch and jump around. When we first started the show my kids were the perfect demographic,, so I brought home animatics--simple storyboards set to the voice. No music, no sound effects, very dry but it gives you an idea of the story and the timing of things. They were answering, they were jumping up, they were talking to the television before any of the animation or special effects or anything came on board."