DARTMOUTH: Inside Huminah Huminah Animation, animators are hard at work on creating the next episodes in the recently-launched Chomp Squad series.
Located in Dartmouth Adam Mimnagh has his 50-plus or so animators diligently working on the Hasbro-contracted series, which launched on Jan. 6 on You Tube.
“We’re a longstanding, well-known studio, and they (Hasbro) wanted to launch a new brand around a themed dinosaur series,” said Mimnagh in a Jan. 8 interview. “They asked us to produce everything from after scripts to the final delivered production.”
Hasbro wrote the scripts and had the final say when it was to be launched, and they did that on the Jan. 6 weekend. The plan is to have one episode air every Friday on Hasbro’s YouTube channel.
He said it was about a years worth of work to get the series from start to being launched for the world to see.
“They created the idea, but asked us to design everything on the show, in partnership with Hasbro,” he said.
It’s a pretty big accomplishment for a Nova Scotia animation studio to garner the attention of a giant like Hasbro yet again for a project of this nature.
“It’s fabulous for a little company like ours to bring International work in,” said Mimnagh, who said they also do work for Disney and Nickelodeon to name a few. “Over the years we’ve certainly worked for some big companies and Hasbro is one of the bigger ones.”
Mimnagh said people can watch the episodes on the Hasbro You Tube channel.
“Where they take it from there, it’s up to them,” he said.
He spoke about the design of Chomp Squad characters, and how the animators went about their work.
“Hasbro gave us the names of the characters, the general design of the toys and then we would create animatable designs based off the toys,” said Mimnagh. “We went back and forth with them. We sent them what they should look like.”
One of the characters, Sparks, is a women firefighter in the series. Mimnagh thought that was pretty cool.
“It’s definitely really cool that they picked Sparks to be a female firefighter,” he said. “She does take charge too.”
Mimnagh said the project is a lot of fun and his studio is continuing to work on it so more shows can be released. As of Jan. 8, the first episode “Fired Up” has 2,625 views, while episode 2 “Sticky situation” is at 1.5 k views.
“We hope that Nova Scotians and Canadians tune in to watch the shows,” he said.
He added a bonus from the show was the employment of the animators who worked on Chomp Squad. Ninety-nine per cent of everyone who worked on it is under the age of 25, Mimnagh said he enjoys being able to employ youth in a sustainable and growing tech sector industry.
“We also like to thank the province’s animated film tax credit which assisted in making it possible for us to bring productions like this here and help keep people employed full-time,” said Mimnagh.