DVD Label

The Side Show Christmas is set to be released at major retailers across Canada under the TELETOON Presents Label on 10 November 2009. The Side Show Christmas was produced by Cheshire Smile Animation Inc. and Studio B Productions and is distributed internationally by DECODE Entertainment.

It is the beginning of the 09-10 pitch season for broadcasters and I am excited to be pitching Cheshire Smile Animation’s latest preschool property The Littlest Bridge Troll to SCN in Saskatchewan today, and other preschool broadcasters (SCN, Treehouse, and Nickelodeon) at the 2009 Ottawa Television Animation Conference in October.

Billy The Littlest Bridge Troll

The Littlest Bridge Troll was originally conceived as a series called The Bridge City Trolls a variety style show with different trolls under different bridges. The idea lay dormant for a number of years until I had the great fortune of attending Little Airplane Academy last August in New York City. Quite simply this is the most in depth, honest view of what it takes to conceive, develop, produce and exploit a Great Pre-School Television Series.

This blog gets a lot of hits from people who are interested in learning how to pitch and create television series for children. I can tell you, that in all of my years attending conferences like KidScreen, Banff, MIP, and the Ottawa Television Animation Conference, there is no better crash course to be take that can give you a more complete view of the process than Little Airplane Academy. If you are hitting this page because you want to learn how to pitch and create a TV series for children – Go to this workshop – you will not regret it + you get to spend a killer weekend in NYC.

I came away from the experience inspired, and The Littlest Bridge Troll is the result. Check it out.

The Littlest Bridge Troll
Created By: Tim Tyler

Logline: The Littlest Bridge Troll is a 6 x 11 minute pre-school animated series starring Billy, a little boy bridge troll, who can’t help but get himself into trouble. It’s his troll nature! Through honesty, the advise of his troll elders, and the support of his best friends, 3 pigeons, he always
puts things right at the end.

Design Brief: The Littlest Bridge Troll mixes cut out friendly muppet monster style animation designs, with larger than life green screen live action characters, and digital sets that merge surreal perspective photographic bridge imagery with home and life elements such as bedrooms,
kitchens, studies, and back yards to create a distinct collage style reality that is clearly not of our world, but relatable to kids through it’s familiarity to their own lives.

Curriculum: Social Development – honesty, tolerance, and problem solving. Let’s face it everyone makes mistakes. It is important for children to learn that mistakes are a part of life and honesty, tolerance, and problem solving are the best way to deal with them.

Backstory (As told to the producer by Billy):

Hi, I am Billy. I am a little boy bridge troll.

I was born when they started building a new bridge over the Saskatchewan
river. My mom says when they finish it, I will be all grown up.

My 3 best friends are pigeons, Cagny, Scott and Thimm. They live under my
mom’s bridge too.

There are lot’s of Bridges in my city. Each one has it’s own Troll.

There is the University Bridge. It’s the bridge to the university and
Professor Thumpson is a very smart Troll. He is my teacher.

There is the Broadway Bridge. Fran lives under that Bridge. She loves music,
and people and lets me play her Bongos.

The Victoria Bridge is the oldest Bridge in Saskatoon. Mr. and Mrs BrassHorn
are two veerrry old trolls who live under it. They have lived there forever.
Once I was playing Troll Tag with Cagny, Scott and Tom, and broke a light.
Mr BrassHorn was very mad, but Mrs. BrassHorn said it would be OK and I
helped him fix it. I don’t think he likes little boy trolls.

The Freeway Bridge is where the highway crosses the river, Jet, who lives
under it is the fastest Troll I know. He never does anything slowly, he zips
and jumps from here to there, and talks really really fast. When I grow up
he is going to show me how to skateboard.

I live with my mom and dad under the Family Bridge. It’s the bridge that
families cross when they go to their homes at night after work and school.

When I was a youg man, I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem. An incredible dedicated performing arts school. 20 years later it is the only institution I still dream about. There I studied the art of lighting design.

Fiddler on The Roof - as taken by my iphone (hence the crappy quality)

Lighting design has 4 Objectives: Visibility, revelation of form, composition, and mood. Applying these 4 objectives to animation has been the foundation of my approach as an animation director. In this blog I am going to discuss Visibility and how it applies to animation.

Visibility – simply speaking this objective is about all clarity. Creating visual circumstances that allow the viewer to see. As a lighting designer, if you can satisfy only one objective this is the one. Make what is important visible to the audience’s eye. In musicals, this is often achieved by putting a spotlight on the singer who is singing. I have since learned that visibility is also the most important objective of animation.

Visibility in animation is achieved in a number of ways, but primarily though strong visual silhouettes. A silhouette is the outline of a solid object as cast by its shadow.

Imagine for a moment the movie Aladdin, that incredible moment when Al rubs the lamp and releases the Genie. Did he hold it in close to his body? If a shadow was cast what would we see? Nothing. Aladdin thrust the lamp into the negative space surrounding him so that if the scene was animated only with an outline the lamp would be visible. Was this accident or design? It was direction by design.

Strong silhouettes in the posing of your characters are they first step to creating visibility within your scenes. From pose to pose, what is the focus of your scene? Do the silhouettes support that focus?

Visibility is also achieved through contrast between foreground, mid ground and background elements. In animation it is critical that your characters stand out from the backgrounds.

When picking colors for your scenes it is vital that you consider the relationship between the colors within the location and their relationship to the characters in the scene. Does the wall paper have the same tone as the lead characters skin or is there enough contrast so that character will leap off the background? How can I tell? Simple plop your characters into the file and squint your eyes when you are looking at the monitor. If the characters are not visible with your eyes squinted there is not enough contrast between the foreground and background elements. It is true, you can use lighting effects such as highlights and rim shadows to lift the character off the background however this is only a fix, and these effects would be fundamentally more effective if the desired level of contrast had been achieved from the beginning.

This is also an important consideration in Theatrical Scene design – I designed lights for a play this summer where the walls of a set were a yellow color with almost the same tone as the actors skin. The director kept asking for more light upstage in the house and although I kept increasing the intensity of my front light to give it to him, I was fighting a loosing battle because the walls glowed more with each additional percentage point of intensity, and although there was more light there was not more visibility because there was simply not enough contrast between the actors and the walls to make them be more visible.

When considering the visibility of your scenes there is one other important consideration and it is not visual. Do each of your characters have a unique and distinctive voice? If you were to close your eyes and imagine if you will a field. As you listen to the voices in your cast do they stand apart each occupying it’s own space spread out evenly across the field or do they stand close together in clumps? Each voice needs to have a unique and distinctive sound so that you can tell who is speaking without seeing anything. I went to great effort in the vocal casting of The Side Show Christmas to create this vocal distinction, and I think it work fabulously, however, in casting the french version of the show, I did not pay as much attention, and I have to say I regret it because unfortunately the voices of Sandwell and Santa Clause sound too much like one another, and sadly this causes some confusion, reducing the visibility of both of those characters when they are in scenes together.

Visibility is an objective that I strive for in all of my creative efforts. It is a concept that applies to all kinds of compositions. Is the intended focus visible? It is the most fundamental question. As a director your job is to know the focus of your scene and to understand how to make that focus visible.

Go Canada is an animation/live action documentary series developed by Cheshire Smile Animation, Kids CBC, and SCN, for 2-6 year old children starring Canada: an inspired, animated map of our favorite country.

Inspired by kids, her audience, Canada travels our nation discovering and exploring entertaining, educational and cool stories about iconic elements of Canadian geography, locations and life. Canada is possessed by an insatiable curiosity for the country where she lives. As the host, Canada, leads the adventure, but she learns alongside the children viewing the show as she discovers, explores and experiences special places within the Canadian Community.

Here in Canada, and around the world, as broadcast advertising revenues have dried up and the masses have shifted towards other methods of media consumption, animation broadcasters are being forced to scale back. Playback reported a $54 million dollar drop in animation production volumes in 2008 – wow that sucks for all of us!!

For those of us working in animation, this means we are facing some tough, competitive times and I thought I would share some of my thoughts on how you can survive the Animation Recession in style and hopefully come out of it with a smile on your face and better poised for a successful career in this industry than ever before.

• Have more sex with that special person in your life*

It is true that not only is sex great fun, it is inexpensive! Getting good value for your dollar in tight times is really important. Not only will you feel better about yourself, invigorated, creatively stimulated, and so forth , your partner will too and with all that free time on your hands….

Hopefully those good vibes will translate into support in these challenging times, because, let’s face the facts, it is impossibly hard to make it in this industry in good times without the support, and sometimes sacrifice, of the people closest to you in your life. These days, this support is more important than ever before.

*A word of caution -  make sure that you protect yourself from unwanted pregnancy. All the cost savings from lots and lots of inexpensive high quality sex will be eradicated by one trip to Baby GAP.

• Be Optimistic

Lots of sex will help with this, but the truth is that the entertainers fair well in tough times. There is an audience for you out there, people are watching more television and consuming more media than ever before. When everyone is broke, it is cool to be broke, go with it, don’t wallow in it. Use these times as an opportunity to be innovative and creative in finding your audience.  A lot of great artists cut their teeth during the depression, Orson Wells pushed the boundaries of storytelling in traditional media formats theater and the new media of the day – Radio. The same opportunities exist today but they are magnified by the potential of the internet.

• Explore the art of story

Buy Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat and write that screenplay you have been thinking about for the last few years. Really. You should do it.

• Make something low budget, high quality that is financed with sweat equity.

Check out www.deadheaven.net – it is an online comic book financed through online advertising, donations, and sweat equity. Wow. If that doesn’t inspire you how about this – The Fox Aniboom Holiday Animation Challenge – invest some sweat equity into this competition and you could end up with a development deal with FOX.

• BEG for a job at the new PIXAR studio they are opening in Vancouver.

That’s right BEG – I am using my BLOG to do this – PLEASE HIRE ME AMIR NASRABIDI – Bring me into the fold, I would love to work with you to make the Vancouver’s PIXAR studio a great success.

• Pitch a film to the National Film Board

Are you an auteur with passion and vision?? Then perhaps the National Film Board of Canada is the film making partner you have been looking for all along.

These are my tips for the times. If you are having issues trying to get motivated just start at the top of the list. Spend as much time on the first point as you need.

At Cheshire Smile we have been developing Go Canada a 26 x 3 miniute preschool series that combines animation and documentary footage in a series of vignettes that explores iconic Canadian destinations with our host – “Canada” a bright green map of – you guessed it CANADA. Part of our development process with CBC Kids has been the creation of a demo / pilot episode. Being based in the prairies we decided that we would explore grain elevators as our theme. They are very cool structures.

We shot the harvest and grain elevator footage last fall and have been working to create the pilot since then. We have a couple of animators working right now (Chris and Jason – you rock!) to get the animation completed. Look for a preview of the pilot shortly.

The project is currently at an exciting point because we are finally nearing the end of one phase in this journey, which brings me to the point of this post.

Ross Nikiforiuk of Cosmic Pad Studios in Saskatoon created this wonderful theme song for the show.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Go Canada, is in development with Cheshrie Smile Animation Inc, CBC Kids Television, and the Saskatchewan Communications Network.

I have been remiss on my blogging of late, and I apologize for that. I seem to have a lot to say but for some reason I have been shy about blogging it up.

Through my wanderings of late, I was at KidScreen in New York, with the purpose of finalizing distribution of The Side Show Christmas, and laying groundwork for the development of new Cheshire Smile animation projects. Overall I think it was a great success. I met some really interesting folks, re-invigorated established existing relationships, and got exposed to some high level thinking on the nature of television for children.

I made an effort to go to various workshops, and 30 minute broadcaster sessions at KidScreen Summit 09. They were great – I found the conference very inspirational – a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed.

One of the reoccuring themes that I carried away from KidScreen Summit 09 about kids television programming and what the creative needs for a show to be successful in this (Highly competative, economically challenged) marketplace are two core concepts. Relatable and Aspirational.

Relatable – Succesful children’s television programs have core qualities that allow the children watching to relate to the program. What makes a show relatable to kids? All kinds of things but ultimately it comes down to making shows with a context kids understand. Dexter’s Lab, Johnny Test, My Gym Partner is a Monkey, Hannah Montana. These are all great shows with strong characters who are kids. Kids understand and relate to other kids, not only that they love to watch kids.

Aspirational – Strong kids programs are aspirational. They have characters and situations that children can very much identify with, aspire to be like, and would like to be immersed within. Shows like Ben 10, Totally Spies, Star Wars Clone Wars and Total Drama Island have strong aspirational qualities. These shows are filled with characters whom children would either like to be, have as their friends, or hang out with in general.

I am lucky, in addition to acting like a kid, I have two wonderful children of my own who educate me all the time about the nature of kid cool. What’s your in to the world of children???

There you go. A little tidbit without the expense of a trip to NY, but you did not get to sample the Halal at 4th Ave. and 53rd Street – widely regarded as the best in NYC. MMMmmm. Delicious.

Karma Film's Anand Ramayya enjoying Halal in NY just across the street from the Hilton NY.

I am attending KidScreen Summit 2009 in NY from the 11th – 13th of February with the hopes of pitching animated shows to television execs from all over the world. In addition to our children’s properties, At Cheshire Smile Animation, we continue to develop adult focused animated entertainment. This latest pitch has been developed with artist Christopher Steininger and screenwriter Jeff Martel

A 6 part hard hitting HBO styled animated drama for adults about the end of the world.

In a near future post-apocalyptic time, FINN, a partly-mechanized security agent, embraces an ancient aboriginal prophecy and rescues a kidnapped group of Cree children held as subjects of a genetic experiment by a technological empowered city state.

Eve Of Infinity is based upon a short film we did in 2000 called Postcards from the Other Side of the Apocalypse.

>>>>Watch it on YouTube<<<<