International success stories: Toom Boom

Toon Boom
HSBC International Business of the Year,
Small and Medium Enterprise

In Steven Mussey’s field, people say funny things all the time. At least the curly-haired doctor with big glasses thinks so. That’s because Mussey, who has a Virginia-based internal medicine practice, thinks the U.S. health-care system can be laughable. After a long day’s work, he likes nothing more than to make animated videos illustrating his frustrations. His most recent pokes fun at the idea that being honest with your patients reduces malpractice lawsuits, and his video shows a doctor explaining to a worried woman that her grandfather’s heart operation was complicated by a Nerf gun fight between himself and the nurse. That one took him 2½ weeks and annoyed the physicians who saw it online.

Yet his animations will always keep some people smiling: the staff of Montreal-based software company Toon Boom. Since he started using the company’s product about eight years ago, Mussey’s become an ambassador of the brand—his work is used as a case study on its website, and his blog shows people how to use the software. “You can do stuff that looks good and people might say ‘Wow, that’s kind of like motion picture quality!’” he says. “They made software reachable for all of us part-time animators.”

Toon Boom has 12 software products, ranging from its most comprehensive called Toon Boom Harmony, which handles all the steps in producing a professional show, to FlipBoom Cartoon, a simple platform for kids and beginners. After originally starting out in 1994 to provide a way for large animation companies such as Disney to become more efficient, Toon Boom realized growth in the professional market was limited. So, two years later, the company focused on emerging markets and pioneered the animation business in India by setting up schools to train students to be employed by North American studios. The company has now exported its business model to every continent, and international business makes up 95% of its profits, 45% of which comes from Asia. In 2003, it made a big push to simplify its software, focusing on the online and educational market, which it predicts will grow from the current 45% to make up to 70% of its business in the next five years.

Toon Boom, which has 66 staff members, has a similar strategy to Apple of continuously rolling out new software to stay innovative. “You start with the Nano, then move to the iPod Touch and grow your user with the chain of products,” explains French-born Karina Bessoudo, VP of marketing and communications for Toon Boom. It worked for Mussey, who started with Toon Boom Studio which costs US$250, got hooked, and now uses Animate Pro, which costs US$2,000. The British-born and Carribean-raised company CEO, Joan Vogelesang, adds that growth comes from its new stuff, but Toon Boom’s reputation lies in its core line of professional products.

So why is a company that landed Disney as its first client, has a worldwide presence and has consistently grown over 20% each year so concerned with its reputation? “It’s the prestige of the company,” says Bessoudo. “Even for a kid buying Flipboom, knowing he’s using the technology Disney is using to create Marvel cartoons is an inspiration. It’s highly important to secure the niche and grow it as much as possible.”

Seventeen years ago Disney was looking for an alternative to its in-house software, and Toon Boom developed something to suit its needs. That has been the company’s strategy ever since: listen to what animators want, and adapt the software accordingly. Frank Falcone, president of Toronto-based animation studio Guru, says he remembers the company being very eager for feedback when it presented its software to his studio a few years ago. Though he declined to use it, mostly because Guru animators are accustomed to in-house software, he likes the product and says he is open to adopting it for other upcoming projects. “It’s incredibly robust,” says Falcone. “Probably one of best products out there. They have few competitors.”

Really, it has only one consequential competitor, Adobe Flash, which wasn’t widely used in the animation world until after the dot-com collapse in the late ’90s. Many computer engineers who were well-trained on Flash, a platform that specializes in creating interactive web content, were out of work, and brought their technical skills to studios. Though not designed specifically for animating, creative minds adapted Flash to suit their needs, resulting in a characteristic kind of animation that Falcone says “has a more grassroots feel.” For that reason, many animators prefer it. “Toon Boom software is made for creating character,” he says. “Many animators don’t like that. They want to work their own way.” Larry Gerbrandt, an L.A.-based media and entertainment consultant, says animators are always looking for a way to make their process more efficient and product diverse. But switching to new software is time-consuming and costly. “Part of what makes an animator efficient is really knowing the software they’re working with,” he says. “That’s the biggest obstacle. How easy is it to make the conversion from Flash, and what is the gain in efficiency?”

Toon Boom, which has won a handful of awards, including an Emmy for engineering in 2005, knows this. It gives away its technology for a period of time to studios that are considering switching, and holds free training sessions in Los Angeles to get animators acclimatized to the software. “There is such resistance to changing habits,” says Bessoudo, “though slowly but surely we’ll make them open their eyes and realize ‘why are we suffering?’” It should be said the Toon Boom gang don’t think Flash is a bad product. Bessoudo specifies it works well to create interactive features. It’s just not as good for animation as Toon Boom’s software. She says: “When it comes to animation, you think Toon Boom.” Product manager for Flash Professional at Adobe, Richard Galvan, wrote in an e-mail the software primarily targets interactive designers and the company doesn’t see Toon Boom as a direct competitor. According to Galvan: “In most cases, we see that the tools are used together.”

Atomic Cartoon, a large Vancouver studio, just converted their software in April, and it will become the second-largest Harmony Toon Boom user in Canada. The company’s goal is to convert between five and 10 North American Flash-based studios in the next few years. Toon Boom knows this starts with education. The more people trained on its software, the more valuable its product is. Currently, the software is in 3,000 schools worldwide, where it ranges from being used as a tool in kindergarten classrooms to the software in animation schools.

Toon Boom’s main advantage is evident in the non-professional market. Mussey couldn’t figure out Flash, and says learning just a small amount of Toon Boom’s software means you can “go to town.” The country artist Brad Paisley uses it to make animations that accompany his live shows, and Joey Travolta uses it in his studio that helps autistic children break into the film business. “If someone who has no training is able to understand the concept of animation and create something funny or interesting, for us, it’s a great accomplishment,” says Bessoudo. So if the Disneys of the world give Toon Boom an ego boost, the Musseys of the world feed the company’s soul.

While at a medical conference in Washington, D.C., a year and a half ago, Mussey skipped out to a nearby Toon Boom conference called Animate More for Less, where the company was showing off some of its new software. He characterizes 95% of the people there as hobbyists, who were swapping stories about how they used the software. Mussey has made service commercials about aggressive driving that aired for four years on Virginia cable stations and has taken a few freelance gigs. Most recently, a rap group in Miami came across his site, and asked him to animate their music video. He turned them down after hearing too many “four-letter words” on their MySpace page. After all, he didn’t get into animating to get rich, just to blow off some steam. “It’s just a break so I don’t go crazy,” he says on a lunch break. “It’s a ‘stop and smell the roses’ kind of thing, a fun thing, an outlet for frustration.”