Back in August, the Halifax-based animation studio Collideascope closed its doors. The studio, which began in 1995, was one of the first in the world to use Flash for broadcast TV, pioneering on the series Olliver’s Adventures. The shop will close at the end of this month, and co-founder Michael-Andreas Kuttner pointed us to a recent article that serves as “a eulogy.” The Halifax newspaper The Coast featured a story titled Empty Frames last week, which identifies Collideascope as producing nine shows, 90 hours of cartoons and employing around 400 animators from all over Canada. According to Kuttner’s blog, they had 120 full-time employees at their peak last year. It appears that timing was the culprit, as Kuttner points out. They were scheduled to start a new project this Fall but a delay pushed it off, plus the Canadian studios have seen a great deal of service work head to Asia in recent months. Regardless, the legacy they leave behind will live on in the projects they produced and the artists’ careers that were founded and nurtured at Collideascope. Us animators can also enjoy the many wonderful animation tutorials archived on their blog. Congrats on a great run, guys, and a very graceful exit.

In 2006, Mike White and Ron Doucet, who both work at Collideascope Digital Productions in Halifax, found themselves with a small window between projects and an opportunity to create an animated music video for the Toronto-based band MSTRKRFT. The resulting video for the 2006 track Work on You has since been viewed several hundred thousand times on YouTube. As part of the Aniboom/Radiohead Music Video Interview Series, Ron Doucet answered a few questions about the production.

AARON SIMPSON: How did you guys end up partnering with MSTRKRFT on the Work on You music video?

RON DOUCET: Mike and I were between projects, working in the same studio. The timing was perfect, since an upcoming series wasn’t starting up for a couple months, so as one project fizzled out, another ramped up. Beyond that, we had access to our best designers and animators to do this quick gig. Mike hadn’t directed before, so he asked me to come on board to assist him in planning, setting up and eventually adding some FX animation.

AARON: Let’s watch the results of this “quick gig”:

AARON: What was your process for dreaming up the video?

RON: The band had a rough idea for style and story, Mike and co-director Derek Jessome simply started to draw out thumbnails.

AARON: How important is it to keep the animation aligned with the rhythm of the music?

RON: Very important. In fact, at one point we were lining up all the rendered rough character animation into the master file to lay it out with the music and suddenly scenes weren’t lining up with the animatic’s timing. There was a day of panic as Mike couldn’t figure out where we had gone wrong. Was it a frame rate issue? Render settings? We couldn’t figure it out. Eventually Mike just systematically went second by second and tracked down the missing frames that caused the sync to go off.

AARON: Song lyrics can often be suggestive or downright abstract. Do you feel the need to tell a literal story with your animation?

RON: Definitely. “Think Astroboy, Akira, and Transformers” was the initial direction from the band that sparked our imagination. We slowly built the idea of a girl robot and a guy robot in love, partying, getting in trouble, and eventually getting into an accident. It was all conceived in the vein of Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 with most of the video being done as a flashback. At the storyboarding stage it was all about hitting the marks in the music and making the story flow, setting the mood, matching the pace of the visuals to the music.

AARON: How do you break up your process within the software – animatic, rough animation, final?

RON: Rough character and BG layouts were all hashed out on paper. Dave Sourwine did some rough color comps in Photoshop to help nail down the mood and color palette of the locations. Mike, Jeff, and Derek would sketch out background thumbnails and then finally create the bigger and cleaner backgrounds on paper. Then Dave would flesh it all out digitally – painting the final BGs with Painter/Photoshop with the boards as reference.

Chad Boutilier had spent a lot of time creating the final model sheets with Mike and Derek looming over his shoulder. He put a great deal of work into the color scheme of the characters and playing around with the line to give the very clean robot design a shine.

Derek and Jeff sketched out all the posing for each scene, producing the character layouts on paper, scanning them in and importing them into Flash. Once inside Flash, the rough character animators traced over these layouts and then began to breakdown and in-between the animation. Animators had lots of reference poses and expressions drawn up for them and had rough layouts setup in their scenes with the music track for each scene cut on their timeline to hit any beat that needed to be made.

We had Dave Thompson do the 3D vehicle shots where the Chevy Nova was animated turning corners. We then imported it into Flash and painted the headlights frame-by-frame. All glows, sparks, lasers, smoke, explosions, lens flares, and electricity were all done frame-by-frame in Flash – using Transformers and Akira as references for FX design.

Talented clean-up artists then embarked on a separate ink & paint process, going in frame-by-frame to clean, color and add shadows and highlights to every drawing. Afterwards we had Jacques Daigle and Peter Giffen to add After Effects filters to soften up all of the video’s flashback sequences.

I hope to make an Art of MSTRKRFT blog soon that will show a bit of the progression from design to boards and then to final animation.

AARON: Are there any tricks to producing a music video?

RON: Storyboards, design and research are very important, like any music-driven piece of animation. Like any music video that has no dialogue, you must feel out the song, spend countless hours thinking about the story you want to tell and have your visuals match the music’s mood.

Approach it like an animated short film. You have a head start – the music track needs to be studied over and over and broken down into acts. Then you can ketch out what your story needs to show and build up from there.

AARON: When compared to a traditional narrative short, is the storytelling process different for a music video?

RON: With the lack of dialogue and sound effects, it sure does make it more arsty and fun. You don’t know how much you rely on dialogue and sound effects until you’re given a project that has only music, so you try to cram a lot of story and character development in only 3.5 minutes. It’s a challenge as the music is your foundation. It sets the pace and the mood and you must listen to it quite a lot to let the music paint pictures in your mind and then you start to draw to visualize what the environments and scenes may look like.

AARON: Don’t miss the “Making Of” film that was posted here back in 2006.

Comic-lovers should keep their eyes peeled for White’s upcoming strip Pigtails and Potbellies.

First is a step-by-step walk-through on how to build an “energy field cycle.” Not sure what that means? Here’s what it looks like in action (animation by Jake Macher):

Thanks to Ron Doucet for the story tip.

In an email exchange, Scott explained that “the only thing that wasn’t done in Flash was the main background, which i did in Painter to give it an authentic hand drawn/painted look like 50′s animation. The Cartoon Modern book and blog have been a huge inspiration to me over the last year or so.”

Originally spotted on Ron Doucet’s site.

In my mind, this first list should include any type of Flash animation on TV. This would include TV series, TV commercials, interstitials and even title sequences. Below is what I could come up with, but I’m expecting plenty of revisions and additions to this:

BROADCAST FLASH TIMELINE

2000

• Breakup Girl on Oxygen
• The Rosie O’Donnell Show title sequence, produced by Bullseye Art

2001

• Ollie’s Under The Bed Adventures – March 2001, a half-hour special on Teletoon produced entirely in Flash

by Collideascope

• Quads! – November 2001 on Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service network
• TV Warehouse – BBC program – title sequence done in Flash by Elephant Egg

2002

• The Proud Family Shorties – Hyperion Pictures under the Animobile label. Two episodes animated by Animax (The Beach and The Picnic)
• Home Movies – Season 2 – Season 1 was ‘squigglevision’
• Mucha Lucha – first US network Flash series
• The Mr. Dink Show – Canada’s first broadcast Flash production
• Bobinogs – on BBC Two Wales
• Don’t Call Me Judas – an animated music video by Bucket Truck produced entirely Flash

Next up:

Online Flash series
Feature-length Flash animation
Theatrical-release Flash animation

Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4