The Mill's Tom Bussell and Rob Petrie.

ReBoot Rebooted
The folks at Rainmaker are working to have the first CG television series, ReBoot, come home to a loyal and new audience. Director William Lau spoke about how the TV show, which ran from 1994 to 1998, was attempting to "do the kind of stuff that Hollywood does." Lau said, "We developed time-saving techniques. We phased out hand-drawn storyboards… what we did was eventually called previs or digital layout. We had a proprietary lip synch and facial animation program called GRIN. We were fast but we were creative."

ReBoot is currently being revitalized through a project conceived with Vancouver's Zeros 2 Heroes online social network. The site ran a competition that encouraged fans to "pitch" their own vision of ReBoot. The winning story has been published as a comic book and can be viewed online. "The hard-core fans want us to pick up where the last episode left off, but in 2008 we have to engage a bigger fan base," said Rainmaker EVP Paul Gertz. The company is planning new ReBoot films, which will not be the same storyline as the comic book. "We're in early stages of visual development and the middle stages of story," Gertz said. And while ReBoot has a reputable past, its newest incarnation will have to reflect all the new bells and whistles that CG animation has to offer. Assets from the old show will not be repurposed. "Don't let what happened before drive what goes forward," Gertz added.

Rainmaker's Paul Gertz and ReBoot director William Lau.

He later told VFXWorld, "There's no way we can make a $150 million film, so how can we be clever and do what nobody has ever done? Zeros 2 Heroes helped reintroduce and reinvigorate ReBoot with Web 2.0 techniques and social networking constructs to reach out to the fans and help us bring this property back."

Rainmaker now has a framework from which to build a trilogy of movies (which may be for DVD/Blu-ray with limited theatrical distribution). "Not only does Zeros 2 Heroes design the campaign and have brought in artists from all over the world," Gertz said, "but they're also a research company and have compiled all of the comments that we get into a white paper that we can look at and make sense out of analytically in terms of trends and what people are responding to. The other fascinating thing that we learned was that the fans came to our defense for us to try something new through social networking. That has also been very helpful in moving forward."

Massive Education
Jason Manley, president of Massive Black Inc., shared insights into color theory by using examples from great masters of art during his presentation at ADAPT. Along with artist Andrew Jones, Manley believes that the expensive art education he received should be affordable and shared with others. "There's a whole core of people who are not being educated until later in life," Manley said. "I firmly believe in the traditional language of art," Manley added. Through their school and through the conceptart.org website, Manley and Jones are trying to bring art instruction to those who seek it -- as all of the instructors strive to do at ADAPT.

Janet Hetherington is a freelance writer and cartoonist who shares as studio in Ottawa, Canada, with artist Ronn Sutton and a ginger cat, Heidi.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.