Company Profile
NoEvil Productions
Company Overview
NoEvil Productions, is a mom and pop, international micro-conglomerate headquartered in Hell?s Kitchen, New York City with operations in England, Sweden, Catalonia, Bosnia, Gujarat, Vancouver, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and New Brunswick. Building on a core competence in greeting card and e-card design, NoEvil has achieved enough viability in this area to allow it to expand development into animated shorts and other web content forms.
Mom is Kat Caverly whose background is in photography and greeting cards, and who has taken to computer technology and the Internet like an electron to copper. Pop is her husband, Thomas Reeve, a photographer and writer who, after years of crewing in the film industry, is now working for NoEvil full time, bringing his knowledge of motion picture storytelling to their ever more ambitious projects.
Kat is the key. Seeking to translate her years of experience in paper cards into the exciting new world of the Web, she learned her way around and began establishing contacts with talented people she found online. She built websites, studied the new tools, and studied the market. She began producing e-cards and hiring artists to work with her through the Internet.
One by one she assembled what she calls her ?Dreamteamsters?; graphic artists, illustrators, animators, musicians, actors, writers and programmers who are spread right around the globe into tomorrow. She holds it together across the time zones with virtual office space forums and conference rooms, I M, e-mail of course, and once in a while she uses a telephone. Oh yes, and at times odd hours are called for; it's true.
An idea that starts in Wisconsin might be scripted and recorded in New York, sent to England for musical scoring, to Stockholm for animation, and back to New York for Graphic design and editing. A sentiment from Dakota may be illustrated in India if that artist?s style best suits those words. It all goes through Kat?s computer in New York. Sometimes all at once.
With Kat as producer and technology director, and Thomas as writer and theatrical director, and now with a talented team assembled, they can create work of a far higher caliber than might be expected from a little "mom and pop" shop.
"I push pretty hard sometimes", says Kat, "but what can I say, I'm from the Southside of Chicago. Besides, I want everyone to do their best, and to keep getting better, because the goal is to move beyond shorts and make full movies. To do that the team needs to be at their best and to have the right tools".
Before finding Toon Boom, Kat and her head animator Sai Ming Yui had been using Maya, LightWave, Photoshop, AfterEffects, and Flash, but still they wanted a dedicated digital 2D animation tool.
Then she found Toon Boom, and Kat not only found the digital animation tools they needed (the camera alone sold her!), but a company totally dedicated to digital 2D animation production and the producer.
When Harmony arrived she immediately saw the production possibilities it provided and began setting up some of her artists with the program. But since the Dreamteam was a network of satellite artists, she also needed software that plugged them into the Harmony production pipeline and so that's where Solo came in. "Another dream come true," says Kat, who in fact can really get excited about these things. "The beauty of these powerful tools is that they can do the little projects that are feeding our studio, but then they can scale up to handle anything, and everything that comes along. When we are ready to do the big one we will already be experts." says Kat.
In building a far flung network where artists need to collaborate on scripts and visual concepts the usefulness of sketches and storyboarding is obvious, so when Kat heard that Toon Boom Storyboard was in pre-release to studios with Harmony she called for a copy immediately, and then turned around and bought two more. She finds it a perfect addition to the tool kit and currently has 5 storyboard licenses, one each for four animators, and one for Thomas, the director, to communicate when words don?t do it. Kat loves the way it all plugs together into the same Harmony pipeline, so she can really network her artist efficiently and keep things flowing. Her people can work together, side by side in real time, though they are separated by thousands of miles.
One little project that exemplifies the NoEvil team at work with their Toon Boom pipeline is Tic & Tac, a pair of characters who have debuted in e-cards, and making plans to move on to other venues.
Beginning as a simple character drawing in Spain, then bounced around in discussion, then written into scripts by Tom and with voice characterizations invented by actors in New York, Tic & Tac then bounced to England for sound editing and musical score, and then back to Spain for full animation, and back and forth a few more times for refinement.
The artists just loved these characters and were able to easily share their contributions using the Toon Boom tools. Whatever the fate of Tic & Tac and their soon to be introduced pet Toad, the Dreamteam has a way to really work as a team.
Perhaps their most ambitious single project to date it is called Subpoena Power is as much a political satire, and (gasp!) civics lesson as it is a fully realized action game. They hope that people find it thought provoking, but entertaining because ultimately NoEvil Productions is about good fun done well.
When Kat is changing the world one pixel at a time, she spends time with Tom and her cats, BB, Bill and Rosie in New York City.
When Kat isn't telling him what to do, Tom spends time pondering the Fibonacci sequence and claiming he is sleeping.
www.noevilproductions.com
Notable Clients
Recycled Paper Greetings, BirthdayAlarm