Tom Baasner - Layout Supervisor - Gets thrown out on the street!

Here's a clip of the footage on the local weather news:


Here's the whole interview, some of the sound is hard to make out with all the background noise, notice the lack of interest from passing pedestrians:

D&J Season 2 Effects Animation Sneak Peek

Here we feature a new villain named Dynamo first seen here. Below are a few stills of some effects Jake worked on.

Here's a short clip from one of the scenes:

Courtesy of Jake Macher.

Inspired by new technology...

Dave Thomas, director of El Tigre (and owner of Wendy's), describes here how he converted from traditional pencil drawing to an all-digital paperless production using the Cintiq.

Even though we've been using Wacom tablets for 9 years, going the very expensive-Cintiq-route has been a fearful and costly idea for us.
We hope to eventually convert our storyboard/layout departments to this model. The quality speaks for itself, as you can see in the samples here.

We've always been paperless for the entire full animation & BG line art/paint process, but not until now have I truely seen the potential efficiencies of using Cintiq for aspects of character/prop/location design, story art, and rough background layouts.

We've been apprehensive about this for too long, if no quality is being sacrificed, and production gets optimized, then why not? Technology has advanced to this, trees will be saved, speed is increased, creativity and draftsmanship is not compromised.... we'd be foolish not to.

Even before I saw that blog, we had already decided to slowly convert our storyboard, design & layout team to this model by next Christmas (avoiding a big confusing switch-over in mid-production). The least we can do is try it out, right?

D&J Season 2 - Sneak Peek

Delilah reveals her new sexy super-hero outfit.

Another mural has popped up in the studio...

Painted by Rachel Morrison & Ian Gallant

A Documentary on Collideascope staff...

Spafford is hired to conduct a "Behind The Scenes" short film on Collideascope Animation Studios to find out what harsh conditions the cartoonists are working under. He makes many disturbing discoveries. Beware: some unforseen dirty language and inapproriate situations occured during the filming of this piece. Viewer discretion is advised.
Watch the video here.

3D Montage

Nearly 3 years ago, I read the first Delilah & Julius Script, and by page 3 there were LOTS of animated vehicles. I knew this new series would not be possible without a 3D animator. There were simply too many diffcult shots with props and vehicles animating in perspective. This posed technical problems that would have our animators spend way too much time animating vehicles and therefore the character animation could suffer, not too mention that animating vehicles can be very, very, very hard to do consistently.

Thankfully we had the genius of Dave Thompson. An animator that just so happened to know 3D Studio and was up to the task of taking the model sheets for each episode and re-create the vehicle designs in 3D.

The results were fantastic. Dave was able to place storyboards into the 3D software, re-create the shot, model any new vehicles (each one taking about 3 hours), set the motion paths, tween away and BAM it was done. After just a bit of research I found software that exports his renders as Flash toon-shaders, the rest is history.

All the 3D blends in with the characters and BGs flawlessly because you can set the shaders & lines to render in any way you'd like. The compositing is all done in Flash with incredible ease, layering the traditional character animation as overlays and underlays directly into Flash, line weight and colors all convert into flat, frame by frame, vector Flash art and makes it all easy to edit.

Thanks to Dave, all 3D elements are done with percision and without difficulty, and no animator needs to worry about drawing hundreds of in-betweens for slowly turning geometry.

Johnny Test - Another 13 half hours - Completed & Shipped Out!

What a crazy 9 months, but we learned a lot and produced one of the best looking cartoons Collideascope has ever had the plessure of working on. We've nearly completed the first 2 of 26 episodes for D&J season 2, and we're preparing for more work coming in this spring. It's going to be another very busy year.

Olliver's Adventures

Ollie is getting a new lease on life through syndication. New audience, new countries, and new time slots are all responsible of Ollie's latest new jolt of popularity amongst kids.
Entirely produced, written, voiced, designed, and animated here at Collideascope. It was our own property and our own creation and it's what got the studio off the ground and into the industry.

Here's some old Hi-Res promotional images:

Post Production

Season 2 of Johnny Test Sound Effects & Music are nearly complete. Paint & Effects Animation on the last episode just got finalised this week! Almost done!

Studio Antics

While doing a clean sweep of our file server I discovered a few funny acts that animators had done over the last few years during what little spare time they usually had.

So here's just a few shots I grabbed that animators had done, sometimes created for an extra piece on their show reel or just to try something different and fun, enjoy these great clips:

Animated by Jacques Daigle:

Animated by Curtis Carey:

Animated by Rachel Morrison, Inked by Adam King:

Animated by Matt Shepherd:

Animated by Rachel Morrison:

Animated by Matt Shepherd:

Animated by Scott MacDonald:

Animated by Rachel Morrison:

Animated by Bianca Siercke:

This Character is a Copyright of
Warner Brothers Feature Animation Inc.

D&J ... Xtreme!

Here's a doodle done by our token caricaturist Don Pinsent of Delilah & Julius.

Snap Shots

Here's some pictures of the the Dec. 22nd IWK run.
We've been told by multiple sources that the story was run through several other provincial papers through out Canada. Go Cappello!

Saturday morning front page news!!!

Collideascope Animation Studios did a little fund raising this year. Instead of doing the usual in-house Secret Santa thing, we decided to pool all our loose change together and see how much money the 75+ employees here could raise in 4 weeks for the
IWK Children's Hospital
(a local care and treatment center for kids with illness).

We raised $2000 total then Collideascope founders/producers doubled it! Making a grand total of $4000 raised for charity! Unfortunately for Mark "The Nature Boy" Cappello, he lost a little wager in the process. His department raised the least amount of money, thus he had to run around the block at -3 degree weather in underwear only. Witness the horror first hand here:

The Tripple Threat

Just thought I'd mention a small tidbit of trivia. I was recently reminded of the fact that during the Olliver's Adventures production there was a funny thing that happened where the character known as Tara was voiced by Tara Doyle and animated by Tara Audibert. I had forgotten that funny little concindence, and now everyone knows..... the rest.... of the story.

Teasers

Here are some of the opening acts for Season One of Delilah & Julius.

Episode-107


Episode-105


Episode-104


Episode-102


Episode-101 The very first sequence of D&J ever animated for broadcast. We got much better as we got used to style in later episodes.


English Intro

D&J Intro - French Version

New Models, Hot Off The Press...