Making Moves

0
Making Moves
Plucky: Partners Matt Senreich

The Burbank animation house behind Cartoon Network’s zany stop-motion animation hit “Robot Chicken” is drawing a new line of business in the feature film world. It’s also trying to break the stop-motion mold by producing more projects in other mediums.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, owned and run by actor Seth Green and three of his friends, announced this summer that it would be developing its first major studio feature film, “Superbago,” for Sony Pictures Animation.

The movie, about a couple of friends who want to be superheroes, will be made with stop-motion animation, a process Stoopid Buddy specializes in that involves the painstaking photographing of figurines in dioramas and then compiling the frames to bring the scenes to life.

Getting the go-ahead from Sony is an indication not only that Stoopid Buddy’s offbeat brand of humor, full of pop-culture references, has been catching on, but that its stylized form of animation could still find an audience on the silver screen. Stop-motion traces its roots back to the earliest days of cinema, animating the films of Georges Melies more than a century ago as well as contemporary features by Tim Burton and Wes Anderson. “Superbago” will also have live-action shots.

With the film in the works and new commercial and TV work coming in, the company is looking to add to its 30,000 square feet of production space and offices.

“We’re looking to grow,” said co-founder John Harvatine IV in an interview that also included co-founders Eric Towner and Matt Senreich. “It’s about bringing in more projects.”

In addition, the company has been ramping up work for other clients. For example, it produces a Web series for World Wrestling Entertainment and stop-motion commercials for Denny’s restaurants.

Demand is high, and the company has been profitable since launch, executives said. The studio keeps a full-time staff of about 30 people and hires as many as 90 additional workers for projects.

Expanded offerings

Stop-motion animation is just a small niche within the animation world, and Stoopid Buddy is hoping to expand its base by producing content with 2-D and computer animation as well as live-action content.

But the strategy is not without risks, especially as the company takes on new costs to expand its space. Producing a couple of minutes of stop-motion footage just to pitch a feature film to a studio can cost as much as $150,000.

However, stop-motion generally is competitive on price. Stoopid Buddy typically charges between $50,000 and $250,000 to produce a 30-second ad spot depending on complexity of the shoot. But industry sources say that a computer-animated spot often costs $600,000 to $1 million or more. A standard 2-D-animated 30-second spot is often in the $350,000-$500,000 range, although it can be done for quite a bit less if the animation is basic. A live-action spot can be between $250,000 and $6 million.

Tom Dunlap, chief production officer at Playa Vista ad agency 72andSunny, said a big component of the decision is not so much price but whether stop-motion will achieve the desired look and feel for an ad.

“It’s a style decision,” he said. “The thing I like about stop-motion is that it brings inanimate objects to life and that’s interesting and fun to look at.”

The company can thank “Robot Chicken,” which recently aired its seventh season, for getting it started. The sketch show uses toy dolls and action figures to spoof pop culture, featuring Smurfs or “Star Wars” characters, for example, in ridiculous situations.

The show was created by Green and Senreich, first appearing on a little-trafficked Sony website in 2001. The show was later picked up by Time Warner Inc.’s Cartoon Network to help fill out the channel’s “Adult Swim” late-night comedy block in 2005.

Harvartine and Towner worked as animators on the show in its early years before launching their own animation company, Buddy System Studios, which merged with Green and Senreich’s Stoopid Monkey in late 2011 to create what is now Stoopid Buddy. The four partners each own a quarter of the company.

Style revival

Their timing was good, as stop-motion animation has enjoyed a revival in recent years as an alternative aesthetic to the modern, sleekly animated contours of computer animation seen in Pixar movies, said Tom Sito, a veteran animator who teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

“Stop-motion has had a resurgence,” he said. “There’s this funky, visceral feeling of working with these characters.”

Stop-motion animated the original “King Kong” in 1933 and the characters in “Gumby” in the late 1950s. The technique was also used to create effects in early “Star Wars” movies, but has largely been replaced in the effects world by computer animation.

Still, the stop-motion industry remains a small one, with just a handful of companies specializing in the technique, including Screen Novelties of Los Angeles and Laika of Hillsboro, Ore.

Inside Stoopid Buddy’s production facility, stop-motion artists can be seen assembling items such as a toy pancake with human features to be used in a Denny’s spot. There are also vast reserves of old props from “Robot Chicken,” meticulously labeled so they can be found for future use.

“Our house style is a sensibility or a sense of humor,” Senreich said. “We want everything to have a different look to cater to what the subject matter is.”

No posts to display