TV Kids Summer Festival Explores Toon Innovation

Cyber Group Studios’ Raphaëlle Mathieu, Toon2Tango’s Ulli Stoef and Sinking Ship Entertainment’s Matt Bishop discussed the technologies and processes that are revolutionizing the animation landscape at the TV Kids Summer Festival.

TV Kids’ Kristin Brzoznowski moderated the panel discussion with Mathieu, COO of Cyber Group Studios; Bishop, producer and founding partner at Sinking Ship; and Stoef, CEO and producer at Toon2Tango. You can watch the session here.

“In our industry, we’re here to create, to innovate,” Mathieu said. “When new stories come up and you want to tell it the best way possible, you need to have the tools enabling you to do it.”

Pushing the boundaries of animation technology has always been part of the Cyber Group Studios DNA, Mathieu noted.

The rise of OTT platforms has contributed to gains in animation technology, Bishop noted. “Back in the day, we used to have feature animation and television animation and never the two shall meet. Right now, I think we’re kind of at the precipice; you’re starting to see things that look like feature animation, but it’s actually television. As things continue to advance, that gap is going to shorten and shorten, and the quality is going to increase. I like to view future technologies like newer paintbrushes, newer ways of painting, and every single time it just gets better and better. Now with the birth of real-time, I think it’s going to become a better eraser. It’s going to allow people to be more flexible and faster, but actually just give them more creative options.”

“We are all pushed to create more innovation by the market itself,” Stoef added. “Quite some money has been taken away from the market. So at the moment, budgets are a little bit tighter. We have to be really innovative and cost-effective in order to produce great shows with the utmost creativity. That almost cries for innovation.”

Sinking Ship is fairly new to animation, Bishop said, with the outfit having made a name for itself in kids’ and tween live-action shows that were heavy on special effects, all handled in-house. “We were able to take a fresh approach to animation for our most recent television series and also for our first feature that’s coming out this year. We looked at our VFX pipeline, which is a Maya Houdini-based setup, but we realized that as things were progressing, there was a massive move toward real-time. We decided to really double down with Epic and invested in building out an entire real-time pipeline for our first series, Builder Brothers Dream Factory. We still do our animation of Maya, but it was really important for us to come up with a way that we could actually adapt a lot of our live-action mentality into production. The nice thing with working in real-time is it’s very similar to how we do location scouts. It takes a lot of the preproduction that you would have in live action and moves it to the front, so the pipeline kind of flipped, which is exciting. We’ve also been making a massive move into universal scene description (USD). Our traditional pipeline couldn’t handle the feature side of things, so we had to double down on USD. Long term, USD is going to absolutely revolutionize both collaboration and also give a competitive advantage for the studios that are running it because it’s so much faster, it’s so much more efficient. We can move between software incredibly quickly. We can go with the benefits and speed of an Unreal pipeline for television, and then using USD for robust rendering and high-quality fidelity.”

Cyber Group has also been working with real-time animation, Mathieu said, calling it a “game-changer.” Its use, which began with Giganto Club, a digital companion to the Gigantosaurus series, is “complementary” to the company’s traditional animation pipeline. “It gives us more possibilities, more flexibility and more ability to speak in a language that is appropriate to the content or to the cost-effective need of creating content with budgets that are getting smaller. Or you need to create content that is digital-native. The financing for that type of content is not necessarily the same, and we have to be creative.”

Toon2Tango has been integrating AI into some of its development processes—a move Stoef hopes will help to bring development costs down in the future—and working with real-time animation. He added: “Unfortunately, innovation is still sometimes stopped by our partners more than by the producers and studios themselves.”

Continuing the conversation about using Unreal Engine, Bishop added that it not only saves time: “The environmental impact of moving away from render farms to high-end GPU rendering driven by a real-time engine is going to be massive.”

Brzoznowski asked the panelists for their thoughts on the lower-cost animation being made in the creator economy that fares well on YouTube and other AVOD services.

“We see many positive effects, which we can leverage into our productions,” Stoef said. “The best possible animated picture does not automatically have the biggest fan base. It’s a clear message that we have to create very deep stories that relate to the kids and not to us. You see so many shows out there in the market that look stunning, but they are so distant from our core demographic. That is frustrating to me personally, especially when you see those shows that are partially financed by government funding subsidies, tax credits, tax breaks—they fill the pipeline to the platforms or to the broadcasters or whatever with these shows that will never succeed because they simply don’t hit the heart of our core demographic.”

“It can be a bit frustrating from time to time to see a show that I would say visually is not so great having a great success,” Mathieu said. “But they got it right on so many other levels that maybe we can learn from it and we have to do better as well. I think we’re at a moment in our industry where there are really two different ways to work that will coexist. The first one is the traditional one that takes a lot of time, and we will be able to reduce it at some point, but if you want to do great quality visually at the service of amazing stories, appealing to the hearts and the emotion of kids and grown-ups, it will take time. On the other side, you have the digital space where you can experience another language, another type of storytelling, and they can complement each other. We’re newbies in the second area. It’s good to be challenged.”

Bishop said he’s excited that “broadcast is becoming democratized.” He continued: “It really boils down to story. If you’re telling a good quality story and you’re connecting with your audience, there’s so much to learn from that. You can look past bad quality if there’s a good story, but you can’t look past a bad story if the quality is good. It won’t connect with the audience. It’s exciting that these platforms exist because some of these shows would never see the light of day ten years ago because there would be no audience for it. And I think it’s only going to continue to grow. I think we’re going to see more and more of this content, and we’re going to see what connects and what doesn’t.”

“We’ve got to get better in every discipline,” said Stoef. “The so-called cheaper animations, which are having great success, should motivate us to find a formula that enables us to produce high quality, stunning pictures, fantastic stories. Story has to come first because we can we can never repair that part.”

Lower-cost animation can also be used to concept-test new IPs on digital platforms, Stoef added.