Halifax's oft-overlooked animation industry has spent the last few years fighting for its life. With no contracts coming in, studios were forced to close and animators left the province. This is a story about two studios: Copernicus and Collideascope—one survived to flourish again today, and one didn't.
At its peak in the mid-00s, animation in Halifax was huge. It got referred to as the "hidden jewel of the film industry." Collideascope Digital Productions was the biggest, busiest animation company in the province with 150 employees and three studios at one time. Plus, there was plenty of work to go around to studios like Halifax Film, Wet Sand, Copernicus and Huminah Huminah. It was a golden age.
Michael-Andreas Kuttner, the cofounder of Collideascope, says, "The industry kind of grew from maybe one studio employing around 40 to 60 people back in the late '90s through to things really (getting into) a frenzy in around 2006."
Kuttner says Collideascope was one of the first animation studios in the world to realize the potential of a program called Flash, which was being used to add basic interactivity to websites. Kuttner and his business partner Steven Comeau realized it could be used to produce TV animation, and cheaply. It made animating in North America cheaper than outsourcing to Korea or China. Collideascope's flagship production was Olliver's Adventures, about an imaginative kid dreaming himself into epic adventures.
Kuttner estimates that at its peak, the animation industry in Nova Scotia was employing around 400 people. But "as the recession came on, things dropped off quite precipitously.
"We started to really see some of the writing on the wall as far back as mid- to late-2007," says Kuttner. Contracts stopped coming in, and no one was knocking. "When things slow down economically, the first thing that tends to be cut are company's ad budgets. You see that start to play out in the television industry where obviously ads are a large driving factor in revenues."
On October 1, 2008, after 13 years in business, Collidescope closed up shop.
Kuttner says they decided to "shut down the good way, rather than (have) everybody walk in one day and all the doors are locked and they're wondering where their last paycheque is going to be coming from."
Wet Sand Animation studio closed around the same time. But not the "good way."
David MacCulloch, now of Game Radiator Interactive Entertainment, says, "(Wet Sand) went bankrupt. I was with them right until the end and was owed wages to the tune of around $4,500… It set me back many years."
The entire animation industry hit a wall in 2008. There was an exodus of talented artists moving west. Ron Doucet, who worked at Collideascope until the end and now works at Copernicus, says many who elected to stay in Halifax had to change careers. He lists several of his Collideascope colleagues who went on to careers in medical equipment maintenance, welding and addictions counselling. Kuttner went on to do consulting and mentoring with entrepreneurs.
Juan Cruz Baldassarre, one of the co-founders of Copernicus, says, "The global financial crisis didn't help at all… Everybody was really cautious and essentially shows weren't being bought in Canada, or worldwide, for that matter."
To make things worse, in 2009, the Nova Scotia film tax credit was reinterpreted from a 50 per cent labour credit, to a credit that was based on whichever was less, either 50 per cent of the costs of labour or 25 per cent of total production costs.
Given that 90 per cent of an animated production is labour, Doucet says, "(To) what was already a dwindling industry in Nova Scotia, it was like the final nail in the coffin." The tax credit went from one of the highest in the country to falling off behind Ontario, B.C. and Quebec. "So there was absolutely no reason for any production… to come to us."
MacCulloch says, "(A lot of) guys moved right out to BC and a lot of the animators and animation work went out to between Ottawa, Quebec and BC… All the talented people migrated away and a lot of them haven't come back."
Survival
Copernicus Studio started up in 2004, and in the years that followed, they worked with such legendary figures as John K, of Ren and Stimpy fame, (adult content at the link) and made music videos for "Weird Al" Yankovic, Nelly Furtado and animated a TV show called Garth and Bev.
Still, Copernicus was a studio of about 10 or 12 people when Collideascope closed, and both Baldassarre and Kuttner agree that the small size had a lot to do with the studio's survival.
"Copernicus was a bit more nimble than we were able to be," says Kuttner.
Baldassarre says, "We're able to survive in a sort of guerilla mode." He says he and his three partners, Andrew Holland, Murray Bain and Paul Rigg, were able to "talk to the client and make the sale, which not every artist can do, I guess, but then make the actual drawings, clean up the drawings, animate them, put effects on it, render it in HD. Amongst us, we can do all that. And perhaps other companies, they need to hire more people to do that."
Copernicus got through the lean times with "just the partners capturing what little business there was and getting it done."
Other animation studios found themselves buoyed by video game development. Huminah Huminah Animation survived by diversifying and spinning off a new department, Huminah Huminah Interactive. Adam Mimnagh, executive producer at Huminah Huminah, says that with the video game work, they didn't even have to downsize.
Doucet says that when the reinterpreted tax credit came along, making all the animation studios in Nova Scotia "automatically more expensive than anybody else… it woke us all up (and) for the first time it got all the remaining studios in Nova Scotia to band together and we made a case with the Department of Finance… We had some charts and some graphs plotting out how this (was) going to absolutely kill the film and television industry as a whole eventually for Nova Scotia."
The tax credit was restored on December 1, 2010, and allowed Halifax animation studios to be competitive again.
Mimnagh says, "They readjusted the tax credit and almost immediately, things turned around."
Resurgence
Baldassarre says not to call it a comeback.
Since the tax credit was restored, Halifax's animation industry has been slowly and surely building itself back up. It's not at the level it once was, says Doucet, but it's getting there. Doucet joined Copernicus in May of 2010 as a director, and the studio is working on a Nicktoons series called Wild Grinders, and a few other projects, including some video game development.
Unlike their early days, however, most of their current projects are being outsourced to China after they do the design and storyboards. Murray Bain, one of the partners at Copernicus, says, "When we started using digital tools, the whole thing was that it was cheaper and faster than shipping it overseas to be done by hand. And now that's still not good enough in this economy so we have to use the digital tools and ship it overseas."
But Copernicus is looking forward to future projects that will allow them to do the full production in house. And the local animation industry is doing better every day. Doucet says, "We've been having productions knocking on our doors to do commercials and music videos, just very recently… This time a year ago, there was no one knocking at the door, really. No one coming in and asking even what our prices are."
Baldassarre attributes the resurgence to a general bouncing back of the economy. "I think TV in general is back up, and that industry, like any industry does go in cycles, so we're just in a cycle up," he says. "We're possibly busier than ever before, which is, of course, fantastic."
Further viewing
Copernicus's video for The Jimmy Swift Band's "Turnaround"
Collideascope's Johnny Test:
