Cuppa Coffee Ramps Up Flash Capabilities

TORONTO: Cuppa Coffee Studios, best known for its stop-motion output, has expanded its department devoted to Flash productions and is currently at work on the Comedy Central series Ugly Americans.

The Flash production division features more than 50 Mac-based stations equipped with 21-inch Cintiqs and an HD suite. It recently began production on Ugly Americans, a Flash-animated series for Comedy Central created by David M. Stern and Devin Clark and directed by Aaron Augenblick with Lucy Snyder and Lou Solis directing layouts and animation at Cuppa Coffee. The series is due out early 2010.

“We’re known predominantly for our stop-motion shows and for the techniques we’ve pioneered over years of perfecting the production process,” said Adam Shaheen, Cuppa Coffee’s president and executive producer. “Now we’re applying those principles to a different medium and building upon our previous successes. We’ve developed a process that allows us to not only be competitive, but to deliver a higher level of service than clients are used to.”

Shaheen continued: “We have 65,000 feet of production space devoted to over 45 stop-motion studios, whereas our Flash department takes up about a tenth of that space, with the same amount of animation being produced.”

Shaheen stresses that Cuppa Coffee will continue to work on stop-motion titles. “They said the computer would be the death of stop motion, but this year we’ll have produced more hours of stop-motion animation than any other in company history. We’re not shifting our focus, we’re simply adding to our arsenal.”