NYC-BASED CURIOUS PICTURES PUSHES THE LIMITS OF ANIMATION, APPLYING FRESH PERSPECTIVES AND INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES TO FILM, COMMERCIALS, VIDEO GAMES AND BEYOND.

In the collaborative world of production, creating buzz-worthy, indispensable content that sells- and sells well enough to turn a profit- can seem darned near impossible, especially when you’ve got a business to run. Unless, of course, you work in animation. With the rapid advances in technology, animation has arguably more growth potential than any other area of film and television production. Here, the only limitations are the creative imaginations of your team and the gadgets they’re allowed to play with. The creative opportunities are endless.

It’s a good time to be Curious.

Curious Pictures, a 12-year-old animation studio in Manhattan’s NoHo district, is out to prove it can be everything to everybody. "What Curious likes to pride itself on is that we don’t have a house style," says Susan Holden, founding partner and executive producer. Every project that comes through its facility, whether a commercial, feature film, or multimedia production such as Moby’s Hayden Planetarium sound-and-light show, is treated from a fresh perspective. Curious Pictures’ headquarters houses 120 workstations, eight dedicated edit suites, one in-house advertising agency, 35 terabytes of storage, two sound stages, endless AC ductwork (13 tons of it), and one guy who still draws with a pencil.

"We’re an animation studio that uses pretty much every animation technique in the book," says Lewis Kofsky, producer and director of CG/VFX, who’s in charge of all digital production at Curious. "Our reputation is that we are able to work in a variety of media and combine that media to its best effect- stop-motion, live action, pencils, computers- whatever it takes."

“We do everything from origami paper-mation, to full 3D CG, to mixed media, to cell, to flash,” adds Holden. Motion capture, or mocap, is also critical to the studio’s full CG work and was used to excellent effect in Rock Band, the role-playing, multi-user heir apparent to the Guitar Hero video game throne.

Kofsky’s team auditioned musicians from all over the world, who strutted their rock star selves across a mocap stage with dozens of optical markers positioned to record every gesture.

The Rock Band playlist includes a variety of classic rock songs, such as “Tom Sawyer” by Rush, and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Kofsky’s animation team keeps a stash of broken guitars as proof of the cinà©ma-và©rità© aspect of the production process.

According to Kofsky, “Games are still in the silent film era, but they’re about to enter into their golden age.” Because of this, many creative types who once shunned working on video games because of their lack of sophistication are now flocking to them. With Rock Band and devices like Wii Fit, Kofsky believes that “gaming is moving out of simply banging on a console.”

But mocap isn’t all fun and games. Curious also used the technique on Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, a feature-length documentary about the 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Yes, an animated documentary. Curious developed a hybrid of motion capture and animation to produce almost half the scenes in the film. Chicago 10 kicked off the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won the top award for Outstanding Achievement in Graphics and Animation at the Cinema Eye Awards.

Animated documentaries, actually, are something of a specialty for the studio. Curious also did the animation for Morgan Spurlock’s recent documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, which featured an animated Spurlock battling an equally animated, but decidedly more evil, Bin Laden. Spurlock donned the spandex body suit and optical markers himself; one would assume that they used a stand-in for Bin Laden. The animation is a visual homage to that mid-nineties video game sensation Mortal Kombat.

And while Curious will continue to provide effects and animation packages for films, as it did recently on The Love Guru, the team’s next big thing is to produce its own feature film. “Without question,” says Holden, “the next evolution for Curious is to have a fully animated feature in production in the next 6-12 months.”

Curious is teaming up with Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dan Clowes, who wrote Ghost World, to produce an animated feature based on the drawings of Gondry’s son, Paul, who at 16, has already animated a music video and published a comic book. Gondry said of the project on slashfilm.com that the story is “about a dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is the source of energy.” If only.

Another film project, Beer Belly and Fat Boy, about a slacker who is actually a corporate assassin, is written by James Patterson. Current plans are for both projects to go into production; it’s just a matter of which gets there first.

Curious is aligning itself with top talent on all fronts. Recently, the studio shot the Wyclef Jean music video “Fast Car” (“Wyclef’s the man,” say’s Kofsky), using an animation technique called Machinima, in which a video game is used as a filmmaking tool. The big idea behind this video, according to Kofsky, was “to create a chase sequence to top The Bourne Ultimatum, one that would be impossible to do in real life.” The team accomplished this feat by putting four stunt drivers and two cameramen into the network console of a video game and filming for ten days. The results are like, well, being in a video game. A really cool, fast video game.

It might be surprising to note that none of the aforementioned projects have been geared to children, long considered animation’s primary audience. Curious Pictures is still in the business of producing content for kids, but that market represents only a piece, albeit a big, important piece of the studio’s output. Recent contributions include the Emmy-nominated television series Little Einsteins for Plahouse Disney/Disney Channel, and The Cartoon Network’s Codename: Kids Next Door and Sheep in the Big City.

For Holden, creating product isn’t the challenge, owning it is. "For the past twelve years, we’ve been trying to develop a portfolio of intellectual property," she says, "which is very, very, difficult. It’s the holy grail." Almost everything that Curious produces is on a work-for-hire basis; it becomes sole property of the company that commissions it. For short-form content like commercials and videos, this isn’t a problem for Hoffman; it’s the long-form arena where she’d like to get in on the action.

"Many of our competitors have either given up, or they’ve gone completely from (producing) commercials to being bought by studios and now only do feature films," says Holden. She is quick, however, to point out that she is grateful for the work-for-hire projects that Curious produces, and can rattle off the names of executives at Disney, Nickelodeon and The Cartoon Network who supply her with them. Still, it would be nice to own a piece of the pie, or to torture a metaphor, at least one sleeve of that suit.

Holden’s latest attempt at leaping the intellectual property hurdle is "Little Spirit," a Christmas special airing on NBC this December. It’s one of Curious Pictures’ first attempts at branded entertainment. Simply put, if you can find a way to sneak your sponsor into the fabric of show, the sponsor will pick up the tab for production costs.

Reality shows have led the charge in this area: The Biggest Loser tells contestants what kind of gum to chew; Top Chef makes participants use specific sandwich bags. So, when the lead character in “Little Spirit,” a little boy named Leo, searches for his lost dog in NYC at Christmas time, what could be a more iconic (and lucrative) background than Macy’s?

But branded entertainment is still in its infancy and Curious is experiencing some growing pains on the way up. "I’m still looking for my Steve Jobs," says Holden, referring to the man (and the money) behind Pixar’s success. "Because I would love to have the financial wherewithal to work on an [Intellectual Property] project until it looks great. And I think that Pixar’s success story is because they had the time. They took the time to make it great and they didn’t release anything unless they thought it was great. And the reality of working on a budget and a schedule is, you’ve got to finish. You could always improve it, but you’ve got to do the best you can with the money and the resources you have. And that’s a restriction."

With a grin (and a sigh) Holden adds, "To be able to do the type of work that we can own and that we are capable of, that would be great. If I could have my dream, that would be it."

Michael Koegel writes the monthly “Hot House” for this magazine. He has also written and produced TV programs for Nickelodeon and FX and was the story editor for Real Simple on PBS.