the journalists of Punch, a celebrity magazine. Zany humour abounds in the journalists’ everyday lives as they cover out-landish reports and feature stories that parody popular brands and celebrities the likes of: Celine Dion, Pamela Anderson, William Shatner, the President, the Prime Minister, even the Queen! The show takes a crack at everyone and everything in short reports ideal for multiplatform viewing, namely televi-sion and internet.

NETWORK ANIMATION SOLUTION

Knowing Quebec has a long tradition of humour, it is no surprise to fi nd a Montreal animation studio using the Toon Boom pipeline to produce satirical and comic animation. Kiwi Animation, leaders in parody and satire, just launched Punch!, the edgy series totally animated by Toon Boom products. Led by Yves St.-Gelais, a seasoned producer and director passionate about animation, Kiwi Anima-tion prides itself on its one-of-a-kind humorous concepts it brings to the small screen, targeting adults and families during prime time. When dealing with humour, satire and parody, Yves is a fi rm believer in keeping the entire production under one roof to ensure the spirit and essence of the jokes remain true to the original ideas. The studio autonomy is critical in keeping the gags as edgy as possible. In that context, Yves’s approach is to bring the best directors, writers, actors and comics togeth-er with experienced animators to deliver engaging drama and hilarious comedy. His impressive track record speaks for it-self and testifi es to his know-how when it comes to managing animation productions on tight deadlines. Worth mentioning is the fact that Yves provided the animation for Le JourNul (Production Zero), the only show to be animated and aired in the same day – a feat which earned him a “Guinness World Record” as the fastest producer of animation. Yves is also the Executive Producer of Et Dieu créa Lafl aque, a highly popular satirical show broadcast on Radio Canada. The show regularly pulls in a 25% market share in primetime. Now in its fourth season, it has garnered several awards, such as: “Best Come-dy”, at the Banff Television Festival, and a “Prix Gémeaux” for Best Writing in the Humor, Variety and Talk Show category.

Kiwi Animation has embarked on another audacious project titled Punch!. In this new comedy series for Teletoon’s De-tour block, the action revolves around the backroom antics of

The Star System Takes a Punch in Harmony

NETWORK ANIMATION SOLUTION

Harmony enabled us to keep the entire produc-tion in Montreal from start to fi nish, all under one roof. In addition to that, our timeframe was very tight and we had to deliver 20 minutes of ani-mation per week. The chosen technology had to support the speed of delivery and artistic con-cept we need for this project,” continued Yves.

To add to the project’s incredible technical challenges, Punch!was produced in high defi nition, generating fi les of 800 megs to one gig for certain characters. Per episode, the team needs to store 800 gigs of fi nal elements, including storyboards, ani-mation, designs and post-production fi les. The entire season requires 16 terabytes of storage capacity. “We had to be even more audacious than the series to come up with the right set-up in this project. Consider-ing the heavy requirements the series requires, we implemented a robust and reliable network that caters to all production teams in a seamless manner, using fi bre optic,” commented Alain Mi-chaud.

Once the scripts were approved, actors recorded the voices in a Montreal sound studio. The series was scripted, recorded and edited in French. The English version was dubbed from the French master. Special care was given to preserve the hu-mour and edge in both language versions. In some sketches, the production team had to swap the characters’ heads to adapt the content for different markets. The script writers were experienced in humour and entertainment and knew how to use animation to express ideas. “The animatic was criti-cal in this process, and helped really nail and re-fi ne the pace and timing of the jokes,” explained

In addition to Yves1, the key production team includes: Rox-anne Boutet2, producer, Erick Roy5, production manager, Jesse Giroux6, technical coordinator, Jean-Martin Casséus3, assistant art direction, Antoine Tavaglione7, animation director, Émilie Gervais, editor, and Alain Michaud4, system administrator. In total, Punch! kept a crew of 60 people busy in the production, with 12 peo-ple dedicated to scripting, 30 to story-boarding and design, 16 to animation and 2 to editing.

Punch! is a series of 20 t w e n t y - t w o minute epi-sodes. In each episode, there are eight celebrity reports that parody stars, brands, rockers, royalty and billionaires. The sketch structure enables fl exibility when short reports may be interchanged to adapt to various international markets. Rely-ing on cut-out animation techniques transposed in an all-digi-tal pipeline, Punch! draws its visuals from a database of 47,000 pictures of over 500 celebrities. “When you create parody, you are allowed to make fun of public fi gures, whether they are politicians or movie stars. As long as we don’t focus on one celebrity in particular, we are fi ne. So, rest assured, our radar is screening the star system diligently and fi nds plenty of candidates to feed into our jokes,” commented Yves.

Each character image is cut into pieces, and then customized and rebuilt. Some characters can have more than a dozen mouth shapes, eye brows and eye elements to convey dif-ferent expressions. The hands library has an average of 50 images, each used in various contexts. Each set of these el-ements is sometimes reproduced and altered to fi t into as many as eight different axes, allowing characters to be ani-mated in different angles. In some cases, we can swap heads on a body, in order to adapt the character as required. “As we continuously work with multiple elements simultaneously and pull in new and better images from the library to spice up the jokes, our workfl ow had to be fl exible enough to allow non-linear adjustments. Our jokes are inspired by current events, so it was strategic to retain this versatility during the produc-tion process. This is why we chose Toon Boom Harmony.

1 2 3 4

Client

Harmony Server

Client

StorageLinux RedHat 64 bit 7 Tb for Harmony

3.4 Tb for Final Cut

Final CutMac OS X

Backup ServerWindows 64 bit

Library / Storage50 tapes - 2 drives

Render FarmLinux Cent OS 64 bit

Fiber-optics networking

Network for the Punch! Project

Switch

Yves. They did all the required adjustments at the animatic stage before moving on to the next department.

The team used Toon Boom Storyboard Pro to maximize its animatic capabilities to the fullest. To build the storyboard panels, they used a combination of paperless drawings using tablets, a library of pre-drawn characters, and photo images to build the visual story. Some of these elements were co-loured. It was important to keep all the elements in the right proportions to preserve the scene perspectives, and size rela-tions. Further down the road, the production team relied on these storyboard animatics for design, layout, posing, anima-tion and even edit.

“We exported our digital storyboards in four different for-mats. The fi rst is in PDF to have a fi nal hard copy and digital reference. The second is in QuickTime for the entire team to access and use for timing and other purposes. The third is in Harmony fi le format to recover the scene structure and tim-ing for Layout and Animation purposes. The Scene Prep team imported the characters, backgrounds and props into each scene, and organized these elements in their proper position to facilitate start of animation. The fourth is in AAF format for

the editing team to import into their Final Cut system and re-cover essential information to start working effi ciently,” stated Erick Roy.

The visual research team worked at full steam to fi nd the prop-er references and images, in the right angles and the right quality and resolution. They had to calibrate them to keep consistency between each individual character’s poses as well as between all the characters. “It is critical to recognize the celebrity at fi rst glance, so the design group worked very hard to adapt and fi x images in Photoshop. We also took pictures of 50 extras and built 125 bodies to use as templates. The facial pictures had to represent a wide array of expressions that would be needed at one point during the production,” explained Yves.

Using Wacom Intuos tablets, the design team had to demon-strate creativity and stamina to come up with the right visuals. As every character and prop had to be rigged, they were deal-ing with a mind boggling number of parts. For example, Jor-dan, one of the main characters, has 1128 individual pieces and this number continued to grow as the team completed the last episodes of the series. “We had to be disciplined in

Break Down

Scene Prep / Layout

Animation

Compositing(After Effects)

HD Rendering

File Conversion(QuickTime Pro)

Rigging

Background Creation(3D Studio Max)

Character Creation(Photoshop)

Audio/VideoRecording

(Digital Betacam)

DigiBeta(EN)

DigiBeta(INT’L)

DigiBeta(FR)

Down Conversion to480i/59.94/16:9

anamorphic

Editing(Final Cut Pro)

Project Archiving

Sound Editing, Mix Down

5.1 & Stereo

Storyboarding(Toon Boom

Storyboard Pro)

Animatic(Toon Boom

Storyboard Pro)

Voice Recording Shooting ScriptStart

Script Writing

“ReTake”

Sound Conception

Firewire 800

Toon Boom Harmony

Production Workflow for the Punch! Project

our fi le-naming structure to be able to easily navigate and fi nd what the team was looking for in the Library. Each axis, character type, character number, element number are coded following a set pattern for more effi ciency. Some backgrounds were created in a 3D ap-plication (3DMax) and then cut into pieces as well. As we are working in high resolution, we had to keep a consistent aspect ratio and reso-lution for each character. With continuous ele-ment-swapping in each episode, we could not derogate from this rule. On average, a char-acter image is 1500 x 1000 pixels ; main char-acters are 2500 x 4500 pixels while celebrities are 2500 x 3000 pixels. We sometimes had to perform a 1000% zoom or camera moves, so the resolution was critical!” explained Jean-Martin Casséus.

Once the design was completed, the next team could start rigging all the elements, building the scenes, and animating all the characters and mouths in sync with the sound. At this lev-el too, Harmony’s cut-out capabilities were ful-ly put to use. As the animators recovered the fi le structure and timing from Storyboard Pro, it saved them a lot of time, allowing them to start animating sooner and faster. The scenes were then rendered, and brought into the ed-iting room. Some scenes were sweetened or dressed up in compositing/FX software (AFX) before proceeding to the fi nal editing. “It was very useful to have the animat-ic exported from Storyboard Pro in AAF format as it provided me with the durations and cuts that highly fa-cilitated my editing work,” commented Emilie Gervais.

Kiwi Animation has now wrapped up the pro-duction of Punch! and Yves is already develop-ing new animated projects that certainly put a sparkle in his eyes. Social issues offer a wealth of great ideas to Yves and his team who will be sure to add their satirical twist, all for a good laugh!

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