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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.6 - SEPTEMBER 2000
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The Power Behind Atomic Cartoons "I thought I could freelance and do boards and go back to Studio B. I don't know if I would've gotten a chance to direct. I like to think that I would have. I didn't know what to do at that point in my life.
"As luck would have it, I got a call from Jae Moh, the executive producer at Sunwoo. He called me at home -- he had gotten my name from a mutual friend, John Kafka -- and said, 'I need a studio in Canada to do 26 episodes of a show for us, Milo's Bug Quest. Could you recommend any studios?' "I said, 'Sure, I worked for Studio B for years. Why don't you guys try them?'
Choosing Another Route Davies teamed with his old friends Olaf Miller and Trevor Bentley, who were art directors at Studio B, specializing in background and set design. A fourth partner, Mauro Casalese, was an animator and character designer, whose credits include The Ren & Stimpy Show and Woody Woodpecker. Together they formed Atomic Cartoons in early 1999. "Everything fell into place, despite the awkward situation I was in," Davies says. "I think just the four of us alone when we started the Milo show were a strong team. Now we're surrounded by a lot of talent. At the present time I'd say we've got 25 other people working with us. So we surround ourselves with a lot of good, ambitious talent to support us. That's what our company is based on.
"Sunwoo was a very good company to work with. We helped each other in that situation. They helped our studio grow and we helped them get a show done," Davies says. Once Milo's Bug Quest was finished, Atomic pursued other projects. Phil Roman offered them pre-production work on a 44-minute Christmas special based on the song Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, produced by Fred Rappaport. They also rendered storyboards for Courage, the Cowardly Dog for Stretch Films and Molly O for Sunbow Productions. Atomic also worked with Danny Antonushi on a.k.a. CARTOON's Ed, Edd, n' Eddy. Film Roman provided Atomic the opportunity to do five months of production layout on The Oblongs. During that time, the studio expanded its staff and had to move to a larger space. In late 1999 the staff was joined by producer Samantha Daley, who had previously produced Ed, Edd n' Eddy. "We were able to get an experienced producer who's also a very good people person," Davies says. "The four partners can now concentrate on the creative side of things a little bit more, while she deals with clients and staff. It worked out really well for us." Welcome to Flash Says Davies, "We contacted Honkworm in Seattle and they came up here for a visit. They liked some of the ideas that we had. One idea was Dog in a Box with Two Wheels. It was just a sketch of the dog. They wrote a script around it. They came back to us and we're co-developing and co-producing the series.
"They contribute with the script and the final edit, and they also share in the directing of the show. We do everything from script to boarding and design, right to [almost] final edit. They do the final tweaks to it, and put the voice tracks and music to it. So it's a real 50-50 effort. "It's worked out really well," Davies says. "We've got a ten-show deal for the Internet. I believe we're the first studio in western Canada to get our own Internet series, so, that's pretty happy for us." On other Internet projects, Atomic has done animation for Sticky Flicks, The Romp, and Mondo Media. "Now that we've gotten into Flash," Davies says, "we can actually take a script and make a full cartoon for a client right from scratch. So Flash has allowed us to take our skills and push it one step further, where the cartoon isn't being sent overseas to be animated. We can actually keep some of the animation in North America. "That's another exciting thing about Flash: Everything doesn't get sent away. We've got a lot of animators that have come from Disney and DreamWorks and commercial backgrounds in our studio that are now getting the opportunity to animate again. A lot of stuff that we do in production and layout allows us to do key posing, [but] now we get to animate again," Davies says.
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