By Kayla Hounsell
It all started with four little girls in a magical place where anything is possible. It evolved into four constellations that live on Mount Evermyst, high in the night sky. Aurora, Celeste, Star, and Picey use their cloud powder kits to transform into human children. They play in the city below them while an astronomer, Dr. Logic, develops schemes to prove to the world that The Constellations exist.
This is the animated story that fills a lot of Chris Dainty’s time these days. It’s also the story that gave the 23-year-old animator the opportunity to pitch the project to 200 industry executives and potential buyers at the Ottawa Animation Festival in September.
“Holy crap,” Dainty recalls thinking when he found out his idea had been selected. “I gotta work overtime on this.”
He worked on the cartoon with his partner, Jessica Borutski. It was selected as one of two out of 50 proposals from all over the world for this year’s Pitch THIS! category, and though it wasn’t picked up at the festival, the duo received positive feedback from such cartoon giants as Nickelodeon.
But the story behind Dainty started long before The Constellations came to life.
Ever since he shadowed an animator for ‘Take your kids to work day’ in grade nine, Dainty knew what he wanted to do.
“I’d seen the stuff that they had done, and I was just like, ‘Wow, this is a lot of fun,’” he says.
In his final year of high school he left his family in Hawkesbury, and boarded with a family in Ottawa, to take the visual arts program at Canterbury High School.
From there he attended Algonquin College’s traditional animation program. He says a couple of bad jobs, some lucky breaks, and a whole lot of persistence eventually landed him his own business.
Dainty has worked for shows like Ren and Stimpy, and Carl Squared, and even went to the KidsScreen Summit, a major trade show in New York City, and pitched a show he’d started working on in college. Even though the show didn’t get picked up by any of the networks, Dainty did get singled out by Finn Arnesen of the Cartoon Network, with more than 1,000 people in the room.
Arnesen told the crowd Dainty had just pitched his show to him. “It was one of the bravest things I’ve seen for a long time. And I think that our industry’s going to be in good shape if we have people with passion and commitment like that,” Arnesen said in an audio clip that was sold at the event.
Steve Neilson, Dainty’s ex-supervisor on Carl Squared at Pip Animation has a similar opinion. He says Dainty’s persistence is what sets him apart and allows him to make contacts with the big shots. “He just seems to weasel his way in there,” he chuckles.
But, towards the end of the season of Carl Squared, Dainty seemed to be distracted, says Neilson. “He just had to create his own work.”
Since starting his own business, Dainty doesn’t have to go very far to get to work every morning – down the hall, down the stairs, hang a right, and enter a world of cartoons, a room in his Centretown apartment also known as Dainty Productions. There’s a stack of containers labeled with the names of the shows he’s working on, a laptop, and two work desks – one of which has a work-in-progress sketch of Dr. Logic, the villain astronomer, tacked to it. There’s a bright purple poster of The Constellations on one wall, and several movie posters along another. One is for The Aviator, a poster Dainty’s actually on. He’s played an extra in several movies, an experience he says has helped him learn how to make contacts in the animation industry.
Though he works 50 to 60 hours a week, Dainty says it’s been more rewarding to work on his own ideas. “It doesn’t seem like a long time because it’s working on stuff I really love,” he says.
Dainty wrote most of the story for The Constellations and Borutski did the drawing.
So how does a 23-year-old male know that Star loves to paint her nails and gawk at herself in the mirror in human form? He doesn’t. And he’s the first to admit that sometimes Borutski has to step in. “You can’t do a girl’s show without a girl’s perspective,” he laughs.
Borutski had the original idea of a show about four best friends living in a magical place. She says she went to Dainty to elaborate on the idea because she thinks he’s a really good storyteller.
Indeed, telling stories is why Dainty loves animation so much. He says he always enjoyed making films with his friends when he was a kid. Animated films and regular films, he says, are both about telling stories. “It’s just a different paint brush for doing the same thing.”
Animators have to become actors sometimes, Dainty says. “A lot of times at the animation studios, you’ll see people standing up or just doing random things because they’re trying to visualize in their heads, ‘How am I going to act to pick that up? Do I pick it up with the left hand or the right hand?’ ” he says.
Of all his works, Dainty says he’s most proud of his film Emma Graves because it was screened at the Ottawa Animation Festival this year. The story is about a girl who doesn’t fit in very well at school. At night she goes to her backyard to share her worries about the boy she likes at school with her grandfather’s tombstone, which takes on the personality of her grandfather. He, by the way, complains that the birds won’t stop “pooping” on his head. Grandpa Graves is voiced by Dainty’s real grandfather.
He developed the Emma Graves character while volunteering at an orphanage in Nepal in 2004. He was teaching the kids to draw, so he got them to try to copy some of his drawings. “They would draw weird proportions of stuff, and I’d be like, ‘Hmm that’s cool,’ and that’s kind of how the evolution of her look came about,” he says.
Although working with kids’ shows has been a great experience, Dainty says he won’t be doing children’s animation forever.
“I just want it to be really funny for everybody, kind of like Sponge Bob. I love Sponge Bob. I can’t get enough of it,” he says, and the Sponge Bob pencil holder sitting on his work desk proves it. “Whether I do a kid show or an adult show, as long as it’s funny, it doesn’t really matter to me too much.”
Dainty teamed up with a friend to produce a documentary. His friend, who’s in a wheelchair, and who journeyed across Canada, hopping on trains, “hobo style,” shot the footage with another of his friends, and Dainty added cartoon characters. It aired on the CBC in July. That’s when he knew he had made it in the animation industry, Dainty says. “Having my logo animated at the end, right before the CBC logo – as a production company, that was the moment where I was like, ‘Yeah, alright, this is for real.’”
Now, Dainty is working on another documentary pitch about teaching animation to the children in Nepal. But even though he’s working on a lot of different projects at once, Dainty says he’s concentrating on The Constellations. He and Borutski are reworking the show according to the feedback they got at the animation festival and they plan to resubmit it to the cartoon giants in the next month or two.
They’re also making toys and even T-shirts. Dainty says the main way to make money in cartoons is through merchandising.
He says remaining independent is his main goal.
He’d like to direct films one day, he says, but he’s going to keep working in animation until he sells a show, regardless of how long it takes. “As an artist I like my work I do, but if I think I’ve reached my pinnacle of style, I think that’d be the worst thing to ever happen,” he says. “Keep on refining, never be satisfied and you’ll hopefully get something really good that’ll hopefully make an imprint on the world.”