here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\u201cIn our industry, we\u2019re here to create, to innovate,\u201d Mathieu said. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pushing the boundaries of animation technology has always been part of the Cyber Group Studios DNA, Mathieu noted.<\/p>\n
The rise of OTT platforms has contributed to gains in animation technology, Bishop noted. \u201cBack in the day, we used to have feature animation and television animation and never the two shall meet. Right now, I think we\u2019re kind of at the precipice; you\u2019re starting to see things that look like feature animation, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s going to become a better eraser. It\u2019s going to allow people to be more flexible and faster, but actually just give them more creative options.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are all pushed to create more innovation by the market itself,\u201d Stoef added. \u201cQuite 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sinking Ship is fairly new to animation, Bishop said, with the outfit having made a name for itself in kids\u2019 and tween live-action shows that were heavy on special effects, all handled in-house. \u201cWe were able to take a fresh approach to animation for our most recent television series and also for our first feature that\u2019s 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<\/em>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve also been making a massive move into universal scene description (USD). Our traditional pipeline couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s so much faster, it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\nCyber Group has also been working with real-time animation, Mathieu said, calling it a \u201cgame-changer.\u201d Its use, which began with Giganto Club<\/em>, a digital companion to the Gigantosaurus<\/em> series, is \u201ccomplementary\u201d to the company\u2019s traditional animation pipeline. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\nToon2Tango has been integrating AI into some of its development processes\u2014a move Stoef hopes will help to bring development costs down in the future\u2014and working with real-time animation. He added: \u201cUnfortunately, innovation is still sometimes stopped by our partners more than by the producers and studios themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Continuing the conversation about using Unreal Engine, Bishop added that it not only saves time: \u201cThe environmental impact of moving away from render farms to high-end GPU rendering driven by a real-time engine is going to be massive.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see many positive effects, which we can leverage into our productions,\u201d Stoef said. \u201cThe best possible animated picture does not automatically have the biggest fan base. It\u2019s 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\u2014they fill the pipeline to the platforms or to the broadcasters or whatever with these shows that will never succeed because they simply don\u2019t hit the heart of our core demographic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d Mathieu said. \u201cBut 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\u2019re 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\u2019re newbies in the second area. It\u2019s good to be challenged.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bishop said he\u2019s excited that \u201cbroadcast is becoming democratized.\u201d He continued: \u201cIt really boils down to story. If you\u2019re telling a good quality story and you\u2019re connecting with your audience, there\u2019s so much to learn from that. You can look past bad quality if there\u2019s a good story, but you can\u2019t look past a bad story if the quality is good. It won\u2019t connect with the audience. It\u2019s 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\u2019s only going to continue to grow. I think we\u2019re going to see more and more of this content, and we\u2019re going to see what connects and what doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to get better in every discipline,\u201d said Stoef. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lower-cost animation can also be used to concept-test new IPs on digital platforms, Stoef added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cyber Group Studios\u2019 Rapha\u00eblle Mathieu, Toon2Tango\u2019s Ulli Stoef and Sinking Ship Entertainment\u2019s Matt Bishop discussed the technologies and processes that are revolutionizing the animation landscape at the TV Kids Summer Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":25263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[145,7746,1710,423,4843,4244],"class_list":["post-25262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-top-stories","tag-cyber-group-studios","tag-matt-bishop","tag-raphaelle-mathieu","tag-sinking-ship-entertainment","tag-toon2tango","tag-ulli-stoef","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\n
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