Caillou Series Turns To Flash
Post Magazine recently posted an article by Ann Fisher titled 
‘Animation For TV Shows,’ which starts off with an update on ‘Caillou,’ the animated program for children 2 to 6 that has spawned several DVD releases. ‘Caillou,’ is based on a series of books by Christine L’Heureux and illustrator Helene Desputeaux, and it has been airing in Canada on Teletoon and on PBS in the US. For the upcoming Fall season, the show’s producers have turned to Flash to animate the episodes.
Porting over to Flash has allowed Ottawa-based Cookie Jar Entertainment to bring the show’s animation production back to Canada, while improving their work flow and maintaining ‘Caillou’s hand-drawn look. The animation, produced by Pip Animation, is completed in Flash, but the animators still draw poses by hand and then import their work into the software.
Below are a few highlights of Fisher’s piece, but you can read then entire article at the Post Magazine website.
“…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, ” (Cookie Jar Entertainment executive producer Lesley Taylor.)
“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.”
Tags: Caillou, Canada, Cookie Jar, PBS, Teletoon
