After our initial work on MTV, this crazy coloring style came into demand. We were asked to go further with it for other clients including HBO, USCI, VH-1, USA Network, more radio station spots for Dale Pon and the Teen Wolf opening and end titles for Buzz at Southern Star. For awhile there were lots of other studios using this technique. With the popularization of the Quantel Paintbox, the price of doing this directly to tape, without going through the film stage, made it seem totally pervasive. (Although I do prefer the hand drawn look with film images.) By 1987, we were much less interested in this particular style and were creating, A Warm Reception in L.A., our first independent short in which we used neon colors against a stark black background. This became the new "Buzzco look." Again, we've done scores of projects in this technique which has also been imitated by others. (Actually, in Audition I had an entire sequence with colored pencils on black construction paper, a precursor! But then that's another story....)

I still go to international animation festivals and love to see how themes and styles seem to cross-pollinate in this atmosphere. I was so taken by the graphic style of The Monk and the Fish by Michael Dudok de Wit in Ottawa `94 that I ached to use a big black paintbrush in our next film which ended up being The Ballad of Archie Foley. I'm not sure that the average viewer could actually tell that, but I sure noticed the proliferation of dots on the generation of films after His Wife the Hen by Igor Kovalyov.

Candy Kugel.

As for the state of the animation community in New York this last half of the `90s decade? There is no more dichotomy; no more intense rivalry between the independents and the union studios. Most independents do commercial work since grants have dried up considerably. There is no more union or union studios. In the mid-80s Local 841 got swallowed up by an indifferent Local 644, the camera union, which in turn, just last year, got swallowed up by the West Coast Local 600. Many studios and independents compete for the same work. In addition, many studios, even if they don't produce their own independent work, produce short pieces that compete in the international film scene. Here at Buzzco Associates, we try to produce enough income-generating work to allow us to keep making our own projects. Often, as in the case of the 30-minute direct to home video that we did for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Talking About Sex, we get to produce income-generating productions that we can treat as an independent project. The best of both worlds!

Candy Kugel is vice president and animation director at Buzzco Associates, Inc. in New York City.