Last week's Spark Animation 2014 conference, film festival and job fair revealed two sides of Vancouver’s animation industry. On the one hand, Bardel Entertainment – a big company with 500 employees working in three studios – premiered its big-screen feature, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, at a sold-out Vancity Theatre.
Meanwhile, Animation Brewery Productions, a two-man business that adds employees when needed, wasn’t able to attend because it was busy working on projects for the mobile market, which is the company’s chief business.
Two solitudes? Not really. In fact, Bardel also diversifies into mobile entertainment, and has an interactive division, Kid Riot Digital Inc.
Though Bardel is not in charge of distribution of The Prophet, it is certainly aware of the growing mobile market.
“The plan is to go theatrical with the film,” said Chris Browne, studio computer graphics supervisor for Bardel. “But I’m sure after it would be available on any format. I can see it being released for mobile.”
Based on the book by Khalil Gibran, The Prophet features nine stories by different animators fused together by a larger story, which Bardel created. About 80 studio staff at Bardel worked intensively for six months on the film, which will be released theatrically next year.
In addition to the new feature, Bardel is doing five television shows with DreamWorks Studios, one with Disney, another with Cartoon Network and one with Teletoon. It also has done work for mobile apps and made an online series.
“I can definitely see the company doing work for mobile,” said Browne. “I’m always interested in emerging technologies.”
Animation Brewery, a small Vancouver business that has been around for a decade, abandoned the television market five years ago to concentrate on producing 2-D animation for the mobile market.
“Between 2008 and 2010, a lot of the television work dried up and a lot of 2-D work went overseas,” said Animation Brewery co-owner and head of creative development Glen Schachowskoj. “We changed to making interactive videos for the web, because we saw that this was the way the medium was going.”
Schachowskoj and co-owner Stu Wenschlag entered the online market making e-cards – short, humourous animations that people can send to one another at Christmas or on birthdays. “The e-cards kept us going,” said Schachowskoj.
The two-man operation, which expands to more than a dozen when busy, now concentrates on the education market, producing children’s learning games and informative, interactive works for teens and pre-teens. The company also has a mobile app coming out next February.
Schachowskoj feels that even movie and television productions now “have to have a tablet component and a mobile component. Broadcasters are looking for all those avenues of content and revenue.”
The biggest adjustment for Animation Brewery was philosophical.
“From our television days, we still thought about ‘audience.’ But they’re not audience any more, they’re ‘users,’” said Schachowskoj, adding that animators must consider the interactive platform because “it’s no longer a passive process sitting in a living room watching animation on TV.” •
