New OpenFile story: Halifax animation sees a renaissance
The words ‘animation industry’ have been at the top of my ‘article ideas’ list for several years (possibly since my first year of J-School), and just recently, I finally got the opportunity to write about it. My article is a short history of the Halifax animation industry, through the thick and the thin, right up to the present.
Some things that didn’t make it into the article:
- Ron Doucet has a puppet that looks like him and it’s awesome. He designs the puppets on paper, then pays puppet-making people to make them in real-life puppet form. One of these puppet-making people worked on Sesame Street, so… you know, those are some legit puppets there.
- Weird Al, in an About.com interview, said about Copernicus: “If I was surprised at anything, it was at how good the actual animation is. We sent the animatic and the original cels to Copernicus Studios in Halifax, and they did the video in flash animation. I’m not a huge fan of flash animation in general, but this was by far the best flash that John or I had ever seen - they really blew us away.”
- I interviewed Faith Erin Hicks a couple of years ago, and she talked to me a bit about the slow demise of the animation industry in Halifax. She used to work at Collideascope and watched the contracts trickle away to nothing, and has since become a successful graphic novelist. I didn’t know anything about it at the time, so my article ideas file listed the animation idea as something like ‘the animation industry in Halifax and how great it’s doing.’ I’m glad the industry came back around so I could write that kind of story. Because the animation industry’s doing great again!
