After 25 years of animation, the UK's own House of Mouse is combining traditional animation with CG to re-invent itself and its star characters... BY GARRICK WEBSTER

The old Dangermouse is far from being dead. Nor forgotten. In fact, he still regularly appears in his classic 2D form on satellite and cable programmes. And he's always mentioned when those conversations about childhood TV favourites break out among twenty-somethings in the pub. So why is Cosgrove Hall Films hoping to give one of its favourite sons a third dimension he's never needed before?

The answer's simple; after 25 years creating animation for television, the company is as hungry as ever in its pursuit of excellence and success. Having established a new division in 2000 – Cosgrove Hall Digital (CHD) – it now has the facilities, talent and technology to rework its old characters. While that twenty-something audience may still appreciate classic Dangermouse, 3D offers Cosgrove Hall the opportunity to bring the diminutive hero to a new and younger audience. Ben Turner, now Creative Director at Cosgrove Hall, first began working for the company on episodes of the original Dangermouse in 1979, and is part of the team hoping to relaunch the character in 3D. "It just seems the natural thing to do, to update the characters and stories – make them three-dimensional – but still maintain the cartoon quality," he explains.

CHD has been working on budgets and schedules, and negotiating with Fremantle Media, the owner of the Dangermouse character. If all goes to plan, Dangermouse will be returning as a 3D character, starring in a feature film, and appearing in a computer game. "There's still quite a few people from the original team that we can call upon, from the animators, the art teams, myself as a designer and art director, right the way through to, hopefully, David Jason," continues Ben. "We can't get Terry Scott because, sadly, he died a few years back, but we'll get somebody to try and fill his shoes on the Penfold character. "it will be authentic," emphasises the Creative Director. "It's the original team, but updating that character and stories into a 21st century version of Dangermouse, for a whole new generation. We've got various European options on funding for a feature, too."

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO!
Dangermouse isn't the only British institution that CHD hopes to revitalise for a new generation. Only recently, the team was called upon to recreate a CG Captain Scarlet for Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson, who is hoping to revive the good Captain in a totally new CG project. CHD helped create a trailer which will help Anderson tout for backing.

The CG Captain Scarlet was created at Cosgrove Hall using a SensAble Technology sculpting arm. CHD has worked closely with SensAble to make the device more useable in the CG studio. "in the past, when people made anything on a sculpting arm, the information that came from it was so complex you couldn't use it," says Jon Rashid, CG Manager at CHD. "But we've worked with them now, and I can take a mesh from a sculpting arm and animate with it straightaway."

Jon continues: "We use McKinnon and Saunders, who are world-renowned sculptors – they worked on Mars Attacks! and other similar projects. We had their best sculptor come into the department and play with the sculpting arm for a couple of hours, and then he modelled Captain Scarlet's head which the motion picture company used for the CGI Captain Scarlet trailer."

The work with SensAble's 3D sculpting device is just one demonstration of CHD's in-house innovation. In building the CG department, Jon Rashid has chosen to work with 3ds max and combustion, but for the applications to fit into Cosgrove Hall's creative environment, the company has had to write its own add-ons. One such innovation is digital storyboarding. According to Rashid, a traditional, drawn storyboard can cost up to £2,000 per show, and is used just once. However, using the new system, the animators can turn each storyboard into a living representation of the production throughout the process. When animations are done, they replace scenes in the storyboard, and the directors can see what stage things are at simply by clicking on an item.

Another important area for Rashid is camera matching. CHD has developed its own software to work with its 3D and compositing tools. As Cosgrove Hall does a great deal of stop-motion animation using miniature sets, its camera-matching plug-ins have to be that much more sensitive. "It's a weird one, because on the camera-match software we have to be far more accurate than other producers because of the scale of our sets. If a camera moves a quarter of a millimetre, it tends to be a few feet on screen," he says.

TRADITIONAL STRENGTHS
Despite the impressive technical innovation on show, Cosgrove Hall intends to stay rigorously faithful to its traditional animation roots. When Jon Rashid joined from the games industry to help establish CHD, his strategy was not to fill the new division with technicians, but rather to retrain existing animators and give them new digital tools.

"That was one of the main reasons we opted to go over to 3ds max," he says. "It's one of the easiest packages for the inexperienced CG animator to pick up. We generally find that it takes about two weeks before we can take a puppet animator and have them up and running on a computer. All our animators have a traditional background, so they might only have two or three years' experience on the computer, but invariably they've got ten or twelve years' animation experience. On the animators' side, they're almost all traditional animators."

This approach is carried through to many of the productions CHD works on, which often combine traditional stop-motion or hand-drawn work with CG elements. In fact, nearly every traditional production Cosgrove Hall works on has digital elements added to it. In its new series Engie Benjy, which goes out on ITV this year, stop-motion action is interspersed with CGI. When characters take a journey between sets, for instance, CGI is used to create the countrysides and backgrounds. Often, flying elements are taken completely into CGI to avoid the hassle of using strings and so on.

For another series, the 26-episocle Albie, the main character is drawn, but all the animals are CG. "The reason for it was because the animals are drawn with cross-hatching," explains Jon Rashid. 'There's no economical way for it to be drawn by a traditional artist because the cross-hatching has to be consistent – it's that busy. We can put it on as a texture on a 3D animal and the hatching stays static no matter what the animal does. They came to us with that one first and it was so successful that the animals have now become quite a large part of the show."

MIX AND MATCH
It's this mixture of real, physically created characters and props with virtual settings that Ben Turner seems to relish. Typically, his team will work from drawings, paintings and other real-world elements from the start. This must be carried through to the finished animation so that the CG and real-world elements look as one, in an organic, believable environment. "We're trying to approach it sideways-on, so that we retain forms, colours, textures and methods of movement that are derived from the real world rather than the purely virtual world," he says. "I know it sounds odd, but I think that's the way to do it. The art direction, the visualising that you begin with, if you can give a clear direction on that then it leads the CGI experts towards specific techniques. They know exactly what they're aiming for."

And because the company is so busy – it can have as many as 11 projects on the go at any one time – Turner has the opportunity to keep creative teams fresh. When a big project is complete, artists can find themselves doing a TV commercial, just for a change of pace. But CHD's plans stretch well beyond advertising, too. In addition to the possibility of the CG Dangermouse movie, the company hopes to venture into Web animation, viral marketing, game art animation, music video production and a whole range of related fields. It seems it's not just Dangermouse who's being digitally re-invented with the founding of CHD – it's the whole Cosgrove Hall empire. It's no wonder the company looks upon CHD as central to its strategy for the next 25 years. _________________________________________________________________________

N.B. Contrary to what was said in this article, the studio now claims that although Dangermouse *will* return, it *won't* be in 3D. Sighs of relief all round, I think...

• Cosgrove Hall Digital online: www.chd.uk.com
• 3D World Magazine online: www.3Dworldmag.com
• Dangermouse at Cosgrove Hall Ate My Brain