Characters come to life
Native of Sydney Forks wins animation contest
Ryan MacNeil has won a reality-style contest with a pair of unreal characters.
His short films on Pepper and Monterey, a cat and a ghost, may make them the next big animated stars in Canadian children’s programming, after MacNeil won this year’s Startoon Animated Character Competition.
The prize is $25,000 to put toward professional help from the U.K.-based Wildseed Studios, which helps children’s program creators pilot ideas and make a pitch to production companies.
“There’s still some hoops to jump through,” said MacNeil, who is originally from Sydney Forks but now lives in Vancouver. “Right now, I’m going to work with this company in England called Wildseed. They’re kind of a big part of the prize.
“They recently did a show called Counterfeit Cats. It’s about an alien that’s disguised as a cat living with another cat, and they try to pass it off as a cat, and it’s on Disney XD in the U.K., and it was animated in Vancouver at Atomic Cartoons.”
MacNeil said he hopes Pepper and Monterey will be the next big thing, but only time will tell.
“It’s not picked up as a show yet, but I’ve got a really nice leg up,” he said.
MacNeil is an animation supervisor at Titmouse, a production house in Vancouver.
In 2015, his work on a show about a snail called Turbo Fast was nominated for an Annie Award, the Hollywood animation equivalent of the Oscars.
MacNeil said he has always been interested in monsters and horror themes and when he heard about the Startoon contest this year he decided to bring a couple of spooky characters to life.
He worked evenings and weekends to develop Pepper and Monterey, and did most of the writing, animation and voice work. MacNeil also had help from his fiancée Anne-Marie Cyr as well as an old college roommate from Amherst named Lee Bird, a buddy in Vancouver who is also originally from Cape Breton, Mitch Kennedy, and a couple of other animators.
Pepper is described as a cute and cuddly-looking black cat who isn’t exactly the snuggling type. And his best friend Monterey is a ghost, but is said to be as frightening as a cinnamon bun.
The Startoon contest, in its second year, is backed in part by the Shaw Rocket Fund, which is supported by Shaw Communications.
Contestants started by entering an “audition” film of their character or characters, and a panel of four industry judges determined which ones would advance.
The field narrowed with three successive challenges, in which the creator had to put their characters into different situations and survive elimination.
Each challenge video was voted on by the judges and by online participants who clicked on a voting button to “clap” for the one they liked best. The online votes were essentially equivalent to one judge’s vote, but could act as a tie-breaker.
The process was not unlike some reality TV shows, said MacNeil, but it didn’t put his private life on display.
“It didn’t focus so much on me doing my thing here, but it absolutely was sort of set up that way as elimination rounds as we got closer and closer to the final winner, Survivor style,” he said. “The product is complete unreality, but it is a reality-style show.”
MacNeil said creators got to see the judges’ feedback on all the videos at every stage of the process, and they seemed to be impressed by all the final entries.
“There were other cartoons in there that the judges really liked, so it could have gone any way, really,” he said. “I just tried my best and they mostly seemed to like it. But the other final submissions were quite strong, as well.”