Created in 2004, CarpeDiem is a media entertainment company which primarily focuses on the family market. The skills and depth of experience of its founders, Marie-Claude Beauchamp, Paul Risacher and Normand Thauvette, allows CarpeDiem to go from live action productions to 2D / 3D / stereoscopic animation to productions blending live action and CGI for all formats: feature films, television series, mobisodes or web games.

Each My Life Me 11-minute, two-act story focuses on a central issue relevant to teen life - stories from real life, pumped up for the genre. Whether testing the boundar-ies of friendship or finding balance between social and school life, the issues facing the My Life Me kids are real. The comedy comes from the complex, realistic charac-ters interacting in familiar adolescent situations. The Manga elements and shifting points of view blow the kids responses, and the comedy, out of proportion.

Pure Manga-driven fast-paced series, My Life Me is the first Canadian animated programming of its kind. Produced by CarpeDiem and ODMedia in Toon Boom Harmony, this 11-minute 52-episode series is hitting the mark with its audience of 8 to 12 year olds. Currently on air at Teletoon, France Television, Canal J, Disney Asia and KIKA (Germany), it was also sold to TV3 Cataluña, TV SDN Malaysia, Educational Broadcasting Korea, Norway Broadcasting Corporation, Canal+ Poland and Dreamia Portugal. International sales are handled by Classic Media. Considering the quality of this production, success is the name of the game for CarpeDiem.

CarpeDiem Goes Manga with Harmony

From left to right:Paul Risacher, Normand Thauvette and Marie-Claude Beauchamp

For this produc-tion, the team brought together

top-notch professionals in their respective fields: JC Little, Director-cocreator; Marie-Claude Beauchamp, Producer; Olivier Dumont, Producer (OD Media); Paul Risacher, Produc-er; Normand Thauvette, Producer; François Vachon, Studio Manager; Nicolas Blard, Co-Director; and Damien Tromel, Creative Producer (OD Media). Rising manga star Svet-lana Chmakova created all the characters, drawing

directly into Harmony using a Cintiq.

With production spanning over 18 months and following

a paperless workflow, My Life Me is a full

cut-out anima-tion produc-

tion which combines 3D backgrounds with 2D assets. All character design, prop design, backgrounds, effects and Manga visuals were designed at CarpeDiem. Backgrounds were created in Maya, then toonshaded, rendered and imported into Harmony, creating an impressive and unique look throughout the scenes. Manga visuals included sever-al types of lightening, tears, heart shapes, all with a specif-ic meaning. All assets were centralized within the Harmony library for storing and future reuse. “My Life Me brings the Manga printed style into animation so our goal was to be true to the genre and incorporate the same look and feel. We built an extensive selection of Manga visuals and transitions that were put to great use in each episode,” explains François Vachon.

All storyboards were done using Storyboard Pro. Therefore, the team was able to import the Storyboard Pro files into Harmony to recover the file structure, the camera move information and the timing as well as use the animat-ic as a reference to create the animation. The animation production was done 50% at Toutenkartoon in Montreal and 50% at Caribara in Angoulême. Due to the Manga style done using cut-out animation techniques, each scene included a large number of layers. “Harmony was totally suited to handle it. On average, there were 1, 2 or 3 char-acters per shot and one background. Each character could include up to 50 layers while background could include up to 10 layers. There were also several animated effects that

had up to 10 layers as well. For larger shots, for example when a scene combined two panels to facilitate the transi-tions, the number of layers could surpass 1000,” continues François Vachon.

All the compositing was done in Harmony as well. “We pushed the envelope to the fullest with Harmony,” states Marie-Claude Beauchamp. This step was quite demanding because the animation was built pose to pose, with many effects and moving panels. “There were a lot of transitions and manipulations to convey the Manga look and feel,” adds François Vachon.

The series is extremely well received by its targeted audience which testifies to My Life Me’s great quality in terms of content and visual representation.

Next was the animated preschool series, Silly Bitty Bunny, for which CarpeDiem storyboarded 63 out of the 78 episodes, using Storyboard Pro and Intuos tablets. “We had a team of six boarders working on this project, of which a few used the traditional paper-based methods to create the storyboards. They adapted very quickly to Storyboard Pro, making the learning curve a non-issue altogether. With Storyboard Pro, the turnaround was much faster and the reuse and sharing process was quite conve-nient,” explains François Vachon.

CarpeDiem is in active development on a number of animated projects including the book-based tween series The JJ’s. It is certain that the expe-rienced gained with My Life Me will be put to use in the future.

Look out for CarpeDiem, their dedicated and creative team deserves your atten-tion, they could be your future partner of choice on a co-production proj-ect. CarpeDiem, not just a great motto for your every-day life, a chance to seize your opportunity to create quality programming.•

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