Go Team Canada! All we can say is: We are in AWE. This project was such a special treat for us. We partnered up with Wrestling Canada Lutte to "gamify" the introduction for Canadian wrestlers Erica Wiebe, Danielle Lappage, Amar Dhesi, and Jordie Steen. We had so much fun animating this, and are so honoured to have been chosen to create something that will take part in the history of the Olympics. We know each and every one of the athletes representing Canada in the upcoming Olympics has trained hard and earned their place. To everyone in Team Canada: Good luck! #TogetherWeCAN #WrestlingCanada #Olympics2021 #Animation

Four years ago, a little (but not so tiny) game called Cuphead parry slapped into our hearts with a peashooter and a splash of milk. But it wasn't just a game. It was an interactive work of art. At the time of its launch, its competition was big studios trying to optimize gameplay by pushing 3D graphics to the limit using ray tracing and a lack of invisible walls - all to make an immersive experience seemingly only pixels away from real-life. Cuphead took a different stance. Pulling the visual style of the 1930s cartoons, it paid an homage to the classics, using color offsets and dust and scratches on the screen to look as though it was created in that era. The artists behind the game used traditional 2D animation techniques then scanned them into the computer and coloured them digitally. This created an illusion that the player was playing a cartoon. This game stood out among the others. From the passion of the creators that inspired them to use early animation techniques, to the final product that revived a deep appreciation and nostalgia for childhood cartoons, Cuphead changed the gaming philosophy for good. Not all games have to look real to be immersive. Some games just have something special that connects to us differently and will stay with us far past the realism of future graphics, and bring us right back home to the "good old times". #Cuphead #Animation #HistoryFriday #Cartoons

This is called the Commuter Mask by @emberhurst. And it is one of our previous 3D projects. The brief: to create a 3D model that highlights features and uses of Emberhurst's innovative mask that is newly designed and multipurposed. To tackle this challenge, we started by understanding what the client wanted - we looked at the actual product, and took many pictures, in and out of use. We inspected every element, from the texture of the fabric to the interior layers of the product. By the end, we knew how to duplicate it digitally. And with the help of Blender, we did exactly that. It began as a wireframe, but we wanted the realism to play in. So, we gave it texture. We paid extreme attention to the way the fabric folds on itself when it's worn, creating the illusion of flexibility and softness. But that's not it. We also set up lights in the 3D scene to replicate real-world lighting that would make sense to how a person observes an object. This also helped in recreating the look of the material because of how it interacts with light. What you see in the video is the final render. Our digital clone of the product allows someone to see the internal mechanics and the ingenious engineering of the mask without needing to hold it in their hands. And this, is another beautiful way that animation can bring something to life. #Animation #Render #3D #ClientWork

Break down the term “storyboard” and you get a “board for the story”. Even though many processes have turned virtual, from analog to digital - a storyboard is one of the few things in the development process of a movie, television show, short film, or video, that hasn’t changed much. A storyboard is a visual representation of a film sequence broken down into individual images, usually drawn on index cards or (on computers/tablets) panels. They go in order of how the story moves and what the camera/audience sees on screen. The storyboard is so important because it lays down the foundation of shots for a film. If you are building a house, you need the blueprint. If you’re shooting or animating a movie or video, you need the storyboard. It is what helps transform a script into the final product. So next time you want to develop a movie, figure out what you want the viewers to see. Make it dramatic. Make it exciting. The best way to do this? Sketch everything out into a storyboard! #Storyboard #Animation #Processes #HistoryFriday

A few months ago, we worked on a really cool project for a company called Yr Plans. They are a Canadian platform for employers to sponsor their employees' student loan repayments. It's a great solution to help employees in any company receive student loan aid on top of the already-provided benefits. For this project, we had a lot of material to play with, namely their unique brand identity and visual styles. Vector animations allowed us to create clean and smooth animations that are not only memorable, compelling, but interesting, too. From the storyboard to asset creation to finalizing the product, we focused on creating something that would fit right in with the rest of Yr Plans' content, but also bring something new to their marketing. Check the full video out on their website www.yrplans.com #Animation #Clientwork

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, a filmmaking duo endearing called Lord and Miller, are propelling the quality of stories and visual originality in the animation world. One of their first works is “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, but their work on “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” delivered to audiences a spectacle of surprise and brought their names to popularity and reverence. Their objective is to always make sure that each of their films is pushing the boundaries of what animation can do. And their newest movie, The Mitchells vs. The Machines - did just that. MvM focuses on humanity and all of our flaws. The visual philosophy replicates this theme and is reflected on every frame of the movie. The creatives behind the scenes wanted everything to seem like a beautiful hand-drawn illustration, using organic shapes, hand-drawn lines, and watercolour textures. Even though Spider-Verse was stylistically groundbreaking, they pulled references from the comic books. MvM was completely different. It highlighted the human imperfections of our world in an artistic and new way. The artists wanted to essentially animate the concept art. It was a difficult process, but they achieved it with the help of an innovative outlining tool that mimicked textures and lighting in a scene. It provided a more hand-drawn feel and a cohesiveness between the character and their environment (which included a lot of nature). From there, they turned light and shadow textures into painted dynamic brushstrokes so it imitated a painting. Even though MvM is a 3D animated movie, its style borders on a hybrid look between 2D and 3D. It visually conceptualizes the theme of humanity vs. machines. The team behind MvM hit the nail on the head with theme and story, but they’ve also introduced an originality to mainstream animation that opens the door to perhaps a new wave of creativity and storytelling. #MitchellsvsMachines #Animation #HistoryFriday #Loaf #Dog

Interactive media began in the 90s when the internet revolution came about. Improved technologies such as smartphones and computers, allowed for the consumption of a different type of media than the traditional forms. The new medium was meant to enhance a user’s experience using a mix of elements from moving images and graphics, digital text, video, animation, and audio. If you think of Choose Your Own Adventure games or Virtual/Augmented Reality nowadays, these are exactly what interactive media is. Interactive Media can be seen as a more personal and customized experience of gaming, watching, absorbing of media. A lot of it can be composed of animations and visceral designs that provide an otherworldly feel for the user. We recently had the honour to work on a once-in-a-lifetime project with the wonderful team at Je Me Souviens, French for “I remember”. They are an important educational program created by high school teachers that provides free teaching materials to help students learn about Quebec’s role in military conflicts throughout the last century and more. Our role was to design and develop an online game that centered around the Canadian medical and technological efforts in the Great War, putting the player in the shoes of Nursing Sister Miriam Eastman Baker at the front of war and at an English general hospital. Visit www.jemesouviens.org to learn and play the game. #JeMeSouviens #Animation #Game #HistoryFriday

George Lucas arose at a time when most movie magic was still a practical camera “trick”. Being influenced by one of the pioneers in stop motion animation, Ray Harryhausen, Lucas wanted to use similar techniques with new technology to bring a space adventure to life. What ended up on screen changed the world forever. Star Wars paved the way for science fiction and fantasy movies - even though Lucas deemed the franchise as a “fantasy film and a space opera”. It’s not surprising that the crew on Star Wars: A New Hope and the others in the series, were also inspired by Harryhausen’s work in Jason and the Argonauts, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, where he animated miniature models of creatures and filmed them alongside real-life actors. This same method allowed the crew to make the “giant” All Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT) to seem as though it stands more than 20 meters tall, and the arctic kangaroo-lizard Tauntauns to look like probable modes of alternative transportation. For each spaceship, the crew would create a few models of the same ship, all different in size. If they needed an extremely detailed shot, they would use the biggest model - which would sometimes be as big as four meters; but if they had to use a far-away shot, or one with other elements in the scene, they could use a smaller model, some as small as one meter long. Most of the time, there would be backdrops of blue screens that they would later on do some CGI magic to change it into space. Sometimes they would paint background details on glass and make it look like a life-size production set. Because of their expansive and creative use of their camera effects, Star Wars became known as one of the firsts, and definitely one of the greatest - in transporting us into a new world. Think about the beginning of movie magic, and Star Wars will always be one you find. #StarWars #HistoryFriday #GeorgeLucas

An inspiration to many, and a legend in the movie industry. Before there was CGI, there was an artist named Ray Harryhausen. He was known for his stop motion model animation called “Dynamation”. His innovative style won him an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and inspired countless other filmmakers like George Lucas, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and J.J. Abrams. Harryhausen himself was inspired by Willis O’Brien’s work in the 1933 King Kong movie, whom he met and showed work to. In taking O’Brien’s advice, Harryhausen began classes in graphic arts and sculpture, then later on taking direction, photography and editing. This led to his taking full charge of technical effects for various sci-fi and fantasy films, like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”, and “Jason and the Argonauts”. In many of the films, because there wasn’t CGI, Harryhausen had to use in-camera practical effects to bring his cyclops, dinosaurs, skeleton army, Medusa, and more, to life. To integrate live-action scenes and his stop motion models, he would use a miniature rear-screen background, matte the unused half of the foreground in black, and record his models in stop motion; then he would rewind the film and matte the other side to record the live-action. This created the illusion that the models and the live-action elements were recorded in the same space and time. This became known as his style: “dynamation”. Even though CGI is booming nowadays, the beginning of it all remains deeply planted in the works of today. Harryhausen carried on to be known as the special effects titan, and will always be remembered forever standing as tall as his giants. #RayHarryhausen #Animation #StopMotion #HistoryFriday

If you break down the name “nickelodeon”, you get “nickel” and “odeon”, the greek name for “theatre”. In the 1900s, these theatres were extremely popular, the entry fee being a single nickel, hence the name. But the famous kids’ cable channel didn’t begin as Nickelodeon, it was called “Pinwheel” when it was founded in 1979. When it started, its initial programming included Pinwheel, Video Comic Book, America Goes Bananaz, Nickel Flicks, but no original animated series of its own. It left no significance in the cable world until “You Can’t Do That on Television”, a Canadian sketch comedy series debuted on Nickelodeon, becoming its first hit. But it took another decade and a half for the insignificant channel to skyrocket from last place to the number one spot in basic cable networks in 1995. How did they do that? Viacom, its parent company, saw potential in Nickelodeon, and invested in changing its live-action shows to a campaign called Nicktoons. And in it, they launched their first cartoons: Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats, and Doug. These were key to the beginning of the Nickelodeon you know today. From that incredible start, they developed other cartoons including Hey, Arnold, Cat Dog, Invader Zim, Jimmy Neutron, Spongebob Squarepants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and even kicking off into live-action teen shows like Drake & Josh, Zoey 101, and iCarly. From its humble beginnings to its uniquely recognizable and praised career, it has left a huge Nickelodeon-shaped mark in history. #Nickelodeon #Nick #Animation #HistoryFriday

You see them in movies and in bookstores. You or your best friend, sister, uncle, or grandma grew up with them. But comics, what are they? The history of comics started not from one place, but many. Very simply, a comic is a sequence of illustrations or images that together tell a story. And stories - well, they’re everywhere. All that’s happened, all that might happen, both fiction and nonfiction, can be told through a comic. The earliest traces can be found in Rome’s Trajan’s Column, medieval tapestries and paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and an illustrated bible. Then, when the printing press was invented, comics transformed from educational material to more satirical and humourous forms of entertainment. In the 17th and 18th century, dialogue was added using speech bubbles. In 1845, comics began to appear regularly in newspapers and magazines. And by the 1930s, both adults and children read them. They became sources of intrigue, telling stories of mystery, action, and adventure. In 1938, a Kryptonian swept the world by storm in blue tights and a red cape while Japan established manga. They evolved into graphic novels, illustrated diaries, superheroes, memes, and webcomics. Any of which you might have seen around the street corner, on page 8, or while browsing through Instagram. #Comics #HistoryFriday #Manga #Animation