In toon with the kids

Throwing around ideas about gunge-spewing monsters and the mechanics of how sperm move might not sound like your average day job, but for the boys at Mukpuddy Animation it's just another day at the office.

Alex Leighton, Ryan Cooper, Tim Evans and Jeremy Dillon's collective portfolio of work includes illustration of three children's books, music videos for New Zealand artists King Kapisi and Pluto, and an animation clip for a sex-education documentary. And they've just hit the big-time with a series of 10 three-minute cartoon shorts that screened on Sunday morning kids' programme What Now.

What Now Sparkle Friends featured hosts Jason Gunn and Janine Morrell as main characters, along with a Pokemon-style creature that could change objects into anything he liked by spewing green slime over them.

"We knew he'd be popular," says Ryan. "The show needed some kind of gimmick and looking at What Now over the years, gunge has been the big thing that the kids love.

"It also allowed us to do anything on the show - he could just have a good spew on something and change it into whatever we wanted."

Each episode took the Mukpuddy crew a week of fulltime work to complete. They'd brainstorm on Monday morning, begin storyboarding on Tuesday, and send a rough cut down to What Now in Christchurch on Wednesday so that Jason and Janine could voice their toon selves. The rest of the week would be spent transforming the storyboard stills into moving pictures using advanced Flash Macromedia software.

The boys still refer to their work as frame-by-frame animation, but whereas they would once have had to re-sketch a scene multiple times to show movement, Flash allows them to control their hand-drawn characters "puppeteer-style", with the click of a mouse.

The process is completed in-house at Mukpuddy's new Freemans Bay studio. It's a big step up from Tim's parents' basement, where the original crew of three - Alex, Ryan and Tim - worked for four years after "clicking" at animation school and deciding to start a company together.

"When we finished we didn't want to work for anyone else, we just wanted to make our own cartoons and get our ideas out there," says Alex.

Last year they were joined by Jeremy, a self-described "ideas man" with experience writing, directing and presenting kids' television. The former host of The Machine and Wired recognised Mukpuddy's potential, offered to help out with cartoon storylines and became the boys' much-needed point of entry into the television industry.

Their next big project is storyboarding for a feature film based on the Warner Bros cartoon Mucha Lucha, a gig they say was offered to them as a result of Sparkle Friends' success.

"We've got our own ideas but the best way to get our name out there is to animate other people's ideas for a while," says Jeremy. "Next it will be our own."

They aren't afraid to expand the team as they take on larger projects and say they look forward to being able to provide jobs for the animation graduates who struggle to find work in New Zealand.

"There's not much being made here," says Ryan. "We've got hundreds of animators who love this work the same way we do, but not everyone can start up a new company because there's just not room at the moment.

"We'd love to slowly merge with more and more of these people. We don't want it to be the four of us forever because we'd never be able to make more than a three-minute short."

They dream of creating their own television show or feature film but say they'll never compromise the most basic elements of animation. They believe having a sense of humour is crucial in this business, and that story and character are the keys to tooning success.

"There are a lot of people there who have lost touch with that sort of thing and don't know what kids really want anymore," says Alex. "People have their statistics and numbers and what they think kids are into. But then we throw in a character who spews on everything and it wins."