Hate the troll...but love 'The Toll' 
Portsmouth computer animation studio hopes 'mockumentary' leads to feature film project

By Joel Brown - December 8, 2005

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. -The future of one local company is in the hands of an ugly, skinny blue dude with a potbelly, an enormous schnoz, ears he could use for sails, and a really bad attitude.

He's the Troll, and he's the star of ''The Toll," a computer-animated short film in production at Hatchling Studios in Market Square.

"A lot of times when you see characters like this -- well, he's gruff on the outside but he's got a heart of gold. He's a really nice guy deep down," said Zack Pike, director and co-writer of "The Toll."

But the Troll's not like that.

"He's greedy, he's selfish, he's self-absorbed," Pike said cheerfully. "He's a nasty little guy, and he's miserable because of it. But he wants to appear that he's nice, especially in front of the camera. He wants to put forth a really good image of himself, but he's evil."

Pike and several Hatchling co-workers are racing to finish by March 3 the six-minute animated mockumentary, in which the Troll is interviewed by a not-so-skillful film student. That's the entry deadline for next summer's SIGGRAPH computer graphics convention, which is to be held in Boston.

The convention is just the first step in Hatchling founder Marc Dole's plans, which involve taking ''The Toll" to major film festivals such as Sundance next year and using it as the springboard to a deal for an animated feature film.

There will be about 9,000 frames in the finished film; Pike and other animators working on ''The Toll" each average 200 frames a week. The slow rate has a lot to do with how detailed a character's movements are, from normal breathing to a raised eyebrow. A major-studio feature film animator might produce only 100 frames a week, Dole said, while the number for the average Saturday-morning TV show could be as high as 800.

Dole said Hatchling was ''totally self-funded" until July, when he raised $200,000 in venture capital to keep the Troll fed. He expects a total production cost of $500,000 -- and perhaps that much again to push the film at events around the country.

''We know the short film is one of the biggest calling cards because that's how all the other studios have done it," Dole said. ''It gets out there, and then we start heavily promoting it as the level of quality we can provide here."

The animation companies behind ''Toy Story," ''Ice Age," and ''The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius" each made its name with a short film first, he said.

While Dole's vision of Hatchling's future rests with the Troll, Hatchling is already a successful business, producing work in digital animation for commercials and other productions, as well as websites and CD-ROMs. Few of the company's clients are close by. Mostly ad agencies and corporations, they are in places such as Boston, Montreal, New York, New Jersey, and as far away as Seattle.

The work takes place in bare-bones offices above a Market Square storefront. Dole presides over the second floor from an open cubicle stuffed with computers, editing decks, a sound mixer, a laptop, assorted monitors and speakers, and a dock for his color personal digital assistant.

One flight up, the majority of Hatchling's staff works in a crumbling former ballroom, their computer workstations arrayed around the edge of the large open space. The casual clothes, the pizza boxes, the desk toys -- and the air of intense concentration -- all bring to mind the Internet startups of the 1990s.

That was when the roots of the firm were planted, in Dole's garage in Newmarket, where he grew up. A teenage computer buff during his years at Newmarket High School, he started working on TV shows as a grip while still in college. He later worked as a cameraman and editor, then started doing graphics for PBS, Discovery, and other outlets from his garage. He founded Hatchling in 1999 (although the name didn't come until 2004), and the company now has 15 full-time employees, plus part-timers, interns, and freelancers.

Working in Portsmouth would have been impossible before the era of computer animation and high-speed Internet connections. Now the location is a draw, said Dole, who lives in Nottingham. A single ad for an animator drew 300 responses.

''We got applicants with ties to 'Chicken Little,' one person who used to work at Pixar, people working on films right now who are looking for their next contract and, mainly, looking for a place they can raise the family," Dole said. ''A lot of these people grew up in New England, and they're looking for a way back so they can stay in the industry. . . . This time of year, we get really busy because everyone in L.A. is coming home for the holidays."

At Hatchling, though, they're focusing on bringing the Troll and his pet dragon, Willie, to life. The process takes many steps, starting with initial character sketches, many discarded. Once his look is settled, modeling creates the character as a visual computerized sculpture. Rigging gives him a skeletal structure and the controls by which the animators make him move. Texturing adds the blue skin tone. And then there is storyboarding, animation, rendering, and postproduction, not to mention the parallel process for sound. There's a lot yet to do.

At his desk overlooking construction in Market Square, Pike has a keyboard, a mouse, and two screens connected to his PC. On the right screen are a frame-by-frame script with every word of dialogue broken down phonetically and a diagram of the animation controls built into the Troll to govern his movements.

On the left screen is the Troll.

First, Pike clicks on a spot on the diagram to activate the control for the corner of the Troll's mouth. Then he switches to the left screen and drags the Troll's mouth out and up, forming a creepy smile.

Other animators work on the eye movements and making the character lip-synch to the dialogue. But contrary to what you would think, the facial expressions are actually an easy part of making the Troll come to life.

''Your hands have a lot of little complex motions over the course of three seconds," Pike said, ''even if you're just flipping it around and talking. Facial expressions last three to four seconds each, so if I have a 15-second shot, he's only got three or four facial expressions, unless he's being particularly schizophrenic.

''The whole body motion might take a week, and the face you kind of tack on the last two days. But it's interesting, because once you put the face in, you have to go back and modify the body movement a little bit once the two are meshing together. Before it looks like a puppet, and when the face is right, it looks like a troll."