My Interview with Animation Magazine

As I mentioned here previously, I was interviewed for Animation Magazine's October 2007 issue, for an article on "Tak and the Power of Juju". It's hit the stands, and you can see it here.


Here's part of my interview, if it's hard to read the images:

Josh Book, Creative Director of Nick's CG department, was also involved with Tak from that early pilot stage. "We took the project as far as we could within the time frame," he says. "We saw the things that we wanted to tweak, so, when we had the time to take it further, we did our best to make it look spectacular."

According to Book, the CG team used the original premises and characters from Avalanche Software's Tak game as a springboard. "The characters' texture mapping is painted and very stylized," he notes. "The environments are also hand-painted, so that puts the burden on the texture artist."

A self-taught animator with a B.A. in Fine Arts from U.C. Santa Cruz, Book worked at Electronic Arts in the mid '90s, then gravitated toward commercials and game cinematics work and had his first CG series experience at Film Roman on Tripping the Rift. "We spend a lot of time on the performances and aimed for getting lots of subtleties out of them," he notes. "What makes the show stand apart from other TV shows is that you don't get quick and snappy movements. Typically, you get a lot of over-the-top animation in TV shows. What makes Tak stand out is the fact that it's more sophisticated."

Of course, the show's organic tribal setting and magical elements can sound like a CG animator's nightmare. "It's set in a jungle and you can ask anyone who worked on DreamWorks' Madagascar how CG-unfriendly that can be," admits Book. "Then there are all the magical effects and the huge cast of characters - we have 180 characters - lots of villagers, lots of magical beings. They are a lot of fun, but they each have their own complexities."

In addition to India's DQ Entertainment, Nick also gets service help from CGCG Inc. in Taiwan and Cinepix in Korea to produce the 26 half-hours required in the first season of the show. Regardless of the complexity of the animation or the numbers of studios involved, Book believes that after all is said and done, CG is simply another tool. "It's just like picking up a paintbrush or pencil, however, it's much more challenging to bring CG up to the quality level we all expect from professional projects these days. What you have to be conscious of is that CG isn't right for all kinds of projects. For example, I know SpongeBob wouldn't work the same way in CG. Complex doesn't always equal funny. When you want to sell a funny drawing, you can work for months and months to make it work in 3D."

*** One small note, on the part where I was talking about animation style, it said that on the show you "don't get quick and snappy movements". What I was actually saying was that it's not all quick and snappy, and that we have lots of subtlety and quiet moments. Considering I blabbed on for 20 minutes, I was suprised to see me quoted this well!