Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
•••ADVERTORIAL••• Transition through Tablets Big Bad Boo Studios takes its production pipeline fully digital with Wacom Cintiq interactive pen displays and Intuos tablets. “We have a fun and funky studio,” says Aly Jetha of Big Bad Boo Studios, an animation production studio he founded in Vancouver, B.C., with Shabnam Rezaei. “We enjoy creating great animation with purpose.” Begun in 2006, Big Bad Boo Studios is an award-winning production and distribution com- pany with a noble mission: to teach children culture through entertainment. Today, Big Bad Boo boasts two offi ces—in Vancouver and New York—a staff of 70, 75 Apple workstations, and numerous, notable achievements, such as award nominations and airtime on PBS, Disney, and international children’s networks. The company and its products have grown considerably over the past fi ve years; yet, at fi rst, production was a manual and painstaking process. While the founders and the artists possessed heart, energy, and skill, they lacked the adequate tools to bring their unique, global vision to life. “In the beginning, because we were fi rst-time producers, we hired traditional artists or ‘paper people,’” Rezaei describes. “The designers loved to draw on paper; the storyboard artists drew every single panel on traditional storyboard paper. One episode was as thick as a phone book, and each department and each location needed a copy. One or two people would scan it in over a few days, and then we would edit it, scan it, re-edit it, and rescan it. All the revisions had to be incorporated in the whole paper workfl ow, then we had to make an animatic out of the scans and label each panel. Nothing was automated.” Big Bad Boo soon shunned the ineffi cient, manual process in favor of a digital pipeline, with Wacom pressure-sensitive tablets and pen displays employed from start to fi nish. “We use Wacom professional products in almost every department now,” admits Rezaei. The storyboard, design, background, and layout departments use Wacom Cintiq interactive pen displays to draw directly on screen, whereas modelers and animators use Wacom Intuos tablets to streamline their work. 48 July 2010 Wacom Cintiq interactive pen displays and Intuos professional tablets take center stage in Big Bad Boo Studio’s digital production pipeline.