I started off as an illustrator and photographer and fell into animation by accident. I was doing art direction on a spot for MuchMusic, and the creative director saw my portfolio and hired me to do some station IDs. So I figured out animation on the fly. The serendipitous accidents that happened made Cuppa Coffee unique. This company now runs at about 250 people, and it’s satisfying to see other arts and crafts artisans finding a home for their skills.
What’s most stressful is finding consistently good series to work on. We’re lucky to be in a position to be picky-and-choosy.
I don’t interview too many prospective employees any more, but when I do I always ask what they like to eat. People who’ve travelled a lot and have eclectic tastes also have eclectic thoughts in terms of design and art.
ADAM SHAHEEN president and executive producer of Cuppa Coffee Studio, best known for stop-motion animation
It’s my job to make sure all the visuals are taken care of for everything we work on, including a range of iPhone games called Tickle Tap Apps. They’re educational and fun little games for toddlers. The artwork is very simple but bold and colourful. Sometimes you’ll forget your colouring books, but you always have your phone.
I always wanted to be a cartoonist or a comic book artist, but as I grew older, I realized I didn’t have much of a sense of humour, so that wouldn’t really work. I came to visit my aunt in Canada from Bangladesh when I was 12 and took a one-week course that was great and set me on my way.
LARA SALAM animator and illustrator for zinc Roe Design, specializing in games and websites for kids. She has a bachelor of applied arts degree from Sheridan College.
My notebooks in high school and elementary school were littered with drawings. There wasn’t a safe surface in the house.
Computer animation takes place entirely in the computer. It’s an amalgam of stop-motion and hand-drawn, where we work with virtual puppets. I deal with characters that have already been created, posing them out like stop-motion puppets, but I can control them like a 2-D or hand-drawn animator would.
Because all the characters are predefined computer models, I never have to worry about what they’ll look like from frame to frame. I can concentrate on the pure analysis of how the motion works. When you spend hours and hours trying to bring this character to life and you run the test render and it looks alive, it’s extremely rewarding.
I went to a a multimedia satellite division of Centennial College.
BARRY A. SANDERS computer animator at Nelvana. He graduated from the Parsons School of Design and attended Centennial College.
As a kid, I drew hockey games, airplanes, PT boats, obsessively drawing the same things over and over. I do animation using a technique called paint-on-glass, which is making a painting, taking a shot of it with a digital still camera and then changing the picture a little bit and doing this process again and again. I make up the story and everything I’m a one-person operation.
When you finish an animated film – at least with drawing – you have all this artwork left over, and I wondered what to do with it. I thought about flip books and put together my own flip book publishing business. Over the years, I sold about 90,000 of them!
You have to have a lot of patience to be an animator. Every technique is laborious. It’s also physically challenging. A lot of times you’re standing or sitting in the same position, so your neck and shoulders seize.
PATRICK JENKINS independent animator and filmmaker. He studied art at York University. His most recent film is Labyrinth.
Steve Angel and I founded Head Gear in 1997. When we started, it was a very different shop, but we grew our wings.
Learning to animate at animation school can be amazing, but it’s also so focused that some of the kids coming out have no flexibility. When we get a call from an agency and they’re at the very beginning stage with a script and a vague idea, we can be open-minded about visual solutions to bring to them.
Most of the people we work with are freelancers, and they all have varied backgrounds. They’ve done printmaking and silkscreened rock posters, or someone else was into old-school video, so when they’re working on ideas, they bring all that with them.
We don’t really do CG. We’re more traditional – drawing, stop-motion, sticking stuff under a camera. Five years ago, I would’ve said that everything’s going Pixar-style, and it is, but there’s also a reawakening and reimagining of older techniques. The cheapness of technology has made it more popular. It’s made things more democratic.
JULIAN GREY co-founder of Head Gear, a film and animation studio whose clients include Sesame Workshop, MTV, Dairy Farmers of Canada and the YMCA. He studied Art at Concordia University.
