The head of a man on the body of a dog paces in the background of a pure white landscape. The dog/man barks like mad, breathes heavily, momentarily walks on its hind legs, wags its tail, and hurriedly runs up to the camera’s face and screams "Try Fusion yet?" as its tongue falls out of its mouth. "Dogman" for Cadbury’s Fusion candy bar, out of Leo Burnett, Toronto, and directed by Peter Montgomery of Sparks, Toronto, is one example of the TOPIX/Mad Dog, Toronto, credo: "Never let reality get in the way of a good idea."
When the company first opened in ’87, it specialized in broadcast logos and show opens for corporate and broadcast clients. Two years later Chris Wallace, founder/president/executive producer of TOPIX/ Mad Dog, received his first offer for spot work—a McDonald’s job—but in the ensuing year, other ad assignments did not exactly come pouring in. When TOPIX finally did receive a call from DDB Chicago to work on a LifeSavers spot, "Good Times," directed by Harold Harris of TOPIX (he has since shifted to Nelvana, Toronto), the company did not disappoint, and hasn’t looked back since.
In the summer of ’95, TOPIX launched Mad Dog, a postproduction arm headed by partner/executive producer Sylvain Taillon. "We went full steam into post because SGI became the platform. Before that, it was all black boxes. We were more of a creative animation boutique," Wallace says. TOPIX/Mad Dog embraced the new post technology, becoming one of the first houses in Canada to acquire a Flint and a Flame. The company, which now boasts a staff of 35, has since added an HD Inferno suite. The animation arm works on an NT operating system with software such as Softimage, AfterEffects, PhotoShop, Illustrator and Painter. The two divisions’ recent credits include Crayola’s "Imagine That," via TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Toronto, with animation direction by Fay Grambart of TOPIX/Mad Dog and live-action direction by Larry August of Maxx Productions, Toronto; "Flying Ball" for Sears, with live action directed by Nigel Dick of A Band Apart Commercials, Los Angeles, and animation by Patrick Coffey of TOPIX/Mad Dog; and "Lucky You" and "Closet Space" for Eaton’s, both directed by Floria Sigismondi of The Partners’ Film Company, Toronto, out of Roche McCaulay & Partners, Toronto. (Sigismondi is repped stateside by bicoastal M-80.) TOPIX/ Mad Dog also just completed work on an international ad for Kellogg’s new Milk and Cereal Bars.
Dog’s Life
Prior to joining TOPIX/Mad Dog, Taillon lived in Montreal, working as an online editor and later as a post supervisor on TV shows. Taillon moved to Toronto for personal reasons; having heard of TOPIX, he dropped by in the summer of ’91. He and Wallace hit it off and Taillon came to TOPIX as an animation producer, a position he held from ’92 to ’94. "Chris and I started talking about what was in the cards for us," explains Taillon of Mad Dog’s origin. "I was really excited by the idea of doing postproduction using the computer as a main tool."
The first step towards post work came in December ’94, when TOPIX acquired a Flint system "[We acquired the Flint] under my recommendation for a project that was coming along. It was obvious to me early on that this was going to be the new way, and that it was so incredibly flexible and powerful compared to what we could do before," says Taillon.
The company established its post operation and won the 1998 Imagina Pixel Award for "Little Wonder," a David Bowie clip directed by Sigismondi. That video was followed by "Groove," a Canadian Coca-Cola spot, via MacLaren/ McCann, Toronto, and also helmed by Sigismondi. "TOPIX was fairly well known for animation, but that was sort of the big splash that made Mad Dog well known," Taillon says of "Groove" and "Little Wonder." "We got worldwide [attention after that], as far as people being interested in what we did. You need to become a bit of a commodity away from your own country to have people start paying real attention to you locally."
Mad Dog has also made forays into features. "We’ve always done a little bit of work—either feature film opens or an effects shot here and there—but most of the time it was always when the size of it was manageable, so that it could roll through the facility like a commercial would," says Taillon. "One of the big mistakes that I’ve seen in the past is [when post companies] turn eighty percent of their facility to a feature for six to eight months, and then expect their [commercial] clients to come back. That doesn’t work, and that’s why we’ve done it when it’s transparent to our commercial clients."
One of TOPIX/Mad Dog’s better known feature efforts was for the Oscar-nominated film The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, for which it created and "sank" a digital school bus. The company is currently working on a feature project, but is not at liberty to discuss the details. TOPIX/Mad Dog also launched a television production arm called Red Giant, which is currently working on Murphy The Rat, a show it hopes to sell at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) convention.
Over 60 percent of TOPIX’s commercial animation work comes from the U.S., Mexico, and more recently, out of Japan. Wallace believes "it’s the globalization and the Internet effect on the world: You create a Web site for the project, and everyone works around that. They can do that anywhere in the world any time of the day or night, and we get the comments back. Some people say it’s more efficient than meeting in person.
Meanwhile, observes Wallace, "post tends to be fairly local, because people sit in a session, so to travel to sit in a session is more effort and energy than to go down to your local postproduction place."
Taillon believes the reasons for increased work from the U.S. to Canadian companies is not purely a matter of less expensive prices. "You can be as cheap as you want, but if you can’t deliver the quality, you’re a bad deal," he says. "You can spend very little money on something terrible, but if you can’t use it, it’s a bad investment."
"No one ever travels to save money; they travel to get good work that saves money," Wallace concurs. "The exchange rate doesn’t do it for you alone. It has to be matched by very high quality and good service."
Wallace perceives that the work the company gets from the U.S. "tends to be a little more buttoned-down, a little bit more ‘We know what we want, this is what our client has approved.’" Although the U.S. work is more structured, Wallace believes "it’s very creative down in the states. I think people are willing to take more chances."
One recent animated spot is "The Face of Technology" for Comdisco, directed by Marc Cuttler of TOPIX/ Mad Dog via Saatchi & Saatchi Business Communications, Rochester, N.Y. "They were looking for us to create a character and animate him in a spot around a script they’d already written," explains Wallace. "[The spot] revolved around how big people select and choose and equip themselves with technology." The spot, which uses a 2-D background with a 3-D character, shows a head on a wheel that mows a lawn, bops down a few stairs and is chased by a cyber shark—all before helicopter blades pop out of its ears and it flies away.
No matter what agency the company is working with, TOPIX/Mad Dog believes collaboration is crucial to a spot’s success. "We think that you can do so much now with digital technologies [that] postproduction and animation can no longer be [considered] an afterthought," says Taillon. "It’s so intricately linked to the final images you’re going to create, that we welcome and encourage everybody to sit down with us and brainstorm, because often we come up with simpler, better ways of achieving things."V
