Chris Hutsul's latest project sees the design savvy Soft Citizen director re-skin the Saatchi.ca website with a heart-warming animated tale of finding your own story. Shots.net caught up with the multi-skilled Hutsul from his Toronto studio to rummage through his sketchbooks and find out how he gave Saatchis a new purpose.

Last fall I was in the Toronto Saatchi office pitching on a commercial for Buckley's. Helen Pak took me aside to tell me about the Purpose project and to ask if I'd be interested in working on the art. She and Brett Channer had seen my Nike Air Force One piece and really liked it. I didn't hear anything else about the project until a few weeks after the Buckley's job. I think we bonded over that shoot so we all felt like we could connect creatively to make Purpose come to life.

The planning process was refreshingly intimate. The first time we met to formally discuss the project was at my art studio in Kensington, which is basically an derelict hovel above a ratty old coffee shop. I liked the idea of taking the brainstorming session out of a boardroom at Bay and Yonge Sts. and into the room where all the hours of drawing would happen.

After getting a sense of what Helen and Brett were looking for, I began designing the characters and developing boards. Once I began putting images to the words, new ideas and solutions began to emerge. For example, the little blue Love Marks character wasn't in the original text. He emerged as a device to connect the beginning and ending.

We wanted to build the site as an extension of the animation. Once we had a visual language in place it was fairly simple to translate that into a website. It was just a matter of creating a village that had an interesting entry point to each link. For example, we needed a entry point for clients to log in. That became a client log cabin. In terms of technical process, I merely handed at multi-layered PSD over to Saatchi's web team and hoped for the best. I think they did a nice job decoding it.

One of the project's mandates was that it was supposed to feel like a children's storybook. It just felt right to render the images on paper with watercolour rather simply keying in hard colours digitally, as I'd done in my Nike animation. Of course, that was a much more time consuming process, but worth the extra effort ultimately. In terms of bringing it to life, Bob at Alchemy provided me with very specific instructions as to which elements he'd need to piece it together in Final Cut Pro. We went over the boards, and figured out how to break down the layers that would allow Bob to create parallax and depth of field, etc. I'm sure the watercolour approach complicated matters for Bob, but he put a lot of heart into it and enriched the project.

The decision to render the project in watercolour was back-breaking at times. Painting by hand requires incredible focus and attention to detail. Unlike a commercial shoot, where revisions are a matter of noodling in the edit suite, revisions for this project required me to bust out the pens and paper. On a January shoot in New York I spent most nights in my hotel room painting backgrounds in a makeshift studio.

Creatively, the biggest challenge was just getting rolling. There's that vacuum between when the job awards and the work gets started that can really torment you. Unlike a film shoot where the director does a lot of delegating, you know that the road ahead will be a fairly solitary endeavour resolved only by man-hours.

I've drawn pretty much every day since I was a kid, but I only recently started working in animation. Having gone down this road a couple times now with different animators has opened my eyes to what can be accomplished and what the technical processes are available in bringing drawings to life. I hope Purpose and Nike Air Force One lead to more projects.