TISDALE—The popular brainchild of a former Tisdale resident is making the leap from live-action to animation.
Brent Butt’s Corner Gas Animated will air on the evening of April 2 on the Comedy Network.
“It came about because when we did the movie, the response to the movie was far greater than anybody anticipated – and we actually had pretty high expectations of what the movie was going to do, but it far surpassed what we thought it was going to do,” said Butt in a phone interview with The Recorder.
That success made the network ask if Butt and his team would be interested in filming more episodes.
“We said, ‘ if we were going to do more episodes, how could we do it differently, bring something new to the table?’ and animation was a natural thing for all of us to think about, so we started kicking around that idea pretty early and it went from there,” Butt said.
One of the writers for Corner Gas, Norm Hiscock, had experience with animation because he had also wrote for King of the Hill.
“I was able to go to him and say, ‘how do you think this show would translate, what would we do differently if we were to animate this?’ and he said, ‘this is the perfect show to animate. This would work great.’ So that emboldened us and we began the discussion that way,” Butt said.
From there, a three minute demo was created. Butt said that looked good, so they were encouraged to move ahead.
“I wouldn’t have pursued this if it didn’t feel like something that was going to work,” he said. “We’re all really happy with how it came together.”
The new animated format allows the show to do new things it couldn’t do when it was live-action.
“The nice thing about this show, the reason it translates so well to animation is in the live-action version, we always had this built-in device where we could see what the characters were imagining,” Butt said. “It allowed us to pop out to pretty wild fantasy sequences that didn’t fracture our actual reality.”
However, the imagination sequences were limited to what could be done in the real world with a limited budget. With animation, many of these limits are removed. For example, in the first episode, which deals with a fuel shortage, Oscar Leroy imagines what Corner Gas would look like in a post-apocalyptic, fuel-starved setting.
“It would have been very difficult and expensive to try and make it look like Corner Gas was no longer in Dog River but it was in the middle of a desert and to have 30 war machines rolling over the horizon with a bunch of weirdly-clad warriors on top of it,” Butt said. “That’s just too big of a thing to do in the real world, but if we’re drawing it, we can do it.”
Before he became a comedian, Butt used to draw graphic novels and comics. He said having the ability to draw helps the show meet its tight deadlines. Normally, in animation, the animators put together an animatic – an animated storyboard. The producers look at that and ask for revision through notes. The back-and-forth continues until the producer is happy.
“We can bypass all of that because for the most part, I was able to do revision art. They would do the animatic, send it to us, the producers, and I would just make the changes that I wanted,” Butt said. “From there, it would go back to the animation team and they could start animating.”
Butt had he was happy with how the animated series came together and encourages people to check it out.
“I think if you’re a fan of the live-action show, you’re going to like the new animated version because in a lot of ways it’s more of the same, it just has a bit of a new flavour.”
