Blue Zoo – Part 3: Animation and storytelling on a budget
Part three of our in-depth series on Blue Zoo focuses on animating for storytelling amidst the realities of production at an animation studio
This month, in part 3 of our series, we chat to two directors of children’s TV about the challenges that need to be overcome when telling engaging stories through animation
Animation is storytelling, from character rigging to a simple walk cycle and the most explosive of action, everything in animation helps to tell a story. Nowhere is this more true than at Blue Zoo. If you’ve been following 3D World’s in-depth series on the UK animation studio you’ll know that story is at the heart of everything they do. In this third instalment of our Blue Zoo series, we’ll be diving into the animation process, with a focus on the studio’s
long-form children’s series. We sat down with directors to find out how popular shows like Pip And Posy, The Adventures Of Paddington,
Go Jetters and Digby Dragon are animated, as well as how the team overcomes the numerous hurdles involved in production.
THE ANIMATION PROCESS
Matt Tea is the series director of
Pip And Posy, Blue Zoo’s animated series for three to five-year-olds based on the popular series of picture books by Axel Scheffler and Camilla Reid. Having joined
Blue Zoo as an animator in 2007 and worked on shows like
Digby Dragon and Go Jetters,
Tea is perfectly placed to discuss animation, storytelling and the various challenges they present. “My main role is a problem solver,” he explains to 3D World. “Everyone is so capable. They bring their skills and talents to every department they work in. My main job is to steer the show.”
Steering the show, of course, involves overseeing the animation process. “It all starts with an animatic,” says Tea. Whilst Blue Zoo’s 2D animation requires tighter storyboards with ironedout beats, 3D allows animators more room to iterate and put their own stamp on a project. “We want to make sure that it’s invoking the right emotions, it’s engaging, the timing, the pacing, everything we need needs to be there.” The
storyboard is handed over to the animators who begin plotting out the performances and polishing the animatic. “If you’ve got a really tight automatic, you’re only going to make it better,” adds Tea.
Blue Zoo use a visual storytelling pre-production tool called Panelforge to create their storyboards, a tool that Tea finds invaluable to the animation process. “It allows us to use 3D sets, we can draw as many as we’d like to do, kind of like 3D layouts with rough character models,” he adds. “We can move everything around as we go through and draw over it.” Despite Panelforge’s editing capabilities, the team will export the storyboard panels and give them to the editor who works in industry-standard video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro. “They also export out all the XML data from the edit and the Panelforge software,” says Tea, “and together that allows the layout artist basically to rebuild shots from Panelforge using the timing and editing from Premiere. They work together seamlessly so in Maya it brings in all the characters and environments and creates the right shots and durations. Then they polish it and work it up.”
“The animation process generally starts with briefing the animation director and animators who go through the animatic and break it down,” he continues, “typically we’ll have design locked down. But sometimes during the storyboarding process things will change and suddenly you have to think on your feet and change things around.” From here animation continues, with the animation director reviewing key poses to make sure that storytelling and performances are strong before the animators move onto a blocking stage where they add any extra information prior to another review. “The next stage is final animation,” Tea explains, “which is where I tend to step in and review it, just to make sure that everything we need is there. Most of the team do such solid work that my notes are more making sure the story beats have been executed really well. I don’t tend to find myself commenting on animation at all.”
With the director’s reviews complete, Blue Zoo shares the project with the broadcaster or client to get their thoughts and feedback. After implementing any changes the animation team will pass the project down the line to effects, if necessary, and then on to compositing.
ANIMATING WITH STYLE
Each animated show Blue Zoo produces has its own unique
“WE ALWAYS PUT CHARACTERS AND STORY AT THE FOREFRONT OF EVERYTHING WE DO” Matt Tea, series director, Blue Zoo
visual style that informs the story, the characters and the world they inhabit. These styles often stem from early conversations about the show and its design. “Pip And Posey and The Adventures
Of Paddington, they’re both very tactile worlds that we wanted to create. They’ve got a unique aesthetic where you feel like you can feel it and touch it.”
Chris Drew, director of The Adventures Of Paddington, recalls Blue Zoo’s initial pitch to work on the show, for which they made clear their desire to homage the past, particularly the 1976 series written by Michael Bond and directed and animated by Ivor Wood. “Adam Shaw, one of the founders of Blue Zoo, was very attached to Paddington. It was an important part of his younger life,” Drew explains, “that’s the
Paddington we grew up with outside of the books. So we definitely wanted to keep that in place.”
Despite their charming aesthetics these original animations were somewhat limited and were produced very quickly. “We wanted to get that illustrative look to the backgrounds but have tactile 3D characters. Shows we’d been
doing previously, Digby Dragon and Miffy, they were trying to get that stop-frame and tactile feel. So when Paddington came along, it was the perfect excuse to take everything we’d learnt,” adds Drew. All of Paddington’s sets are in fact 3D, with 2D shaders giving the illusion of illustration. This allows the team to move the camera freely, giving the show a dynamic, modern-day feel despite its traditional influences.
To replicate the look of traditional stop-motion animation in 3D requires Blue Zoo’s animators to work in what they call stepped animation. “Stepped can mean we will have more freedom. It’s still trying to keep that stopmotion aesthetic but not having the rule of it has to be on twos,” Tea explains. When it comes to Pip
And Posy, Tea and his team stick to animating on twos, meaning they animate every other frame, producing 12 frames per second instead of 24, perfectly replicating traditional stop-motion animation. Stepped animation, on the other hand, allows animators to replicate the stop-motion aesthetic whilst retaining the freedom to break down each shot and decide which frame rate works best.
Stepped animation may sound like a simple solution to the artistic and technical challenge of digitally homaging stop-motion, but it comes with its own set of hurdles for the Blue Zoo team to overcome. “It’s definitely very complex when it comes to interacting with props, you’ve got to make sure that it
doesn’t feel too clunky,” says Tea, “working in the stepped animation style can get a bit janky. Cheating things across motion helps us a lot because just seeing the physicality of contact is always a bit of a faff.”
The challenges don’t start and end there, however. Moving the camera around a scene involving stepped animation causes strobing, bright flashes of light that distort the picture, a result of the camera moving as the characters remain stationary for a frame. “You need to problem-solve around that,” adds Tea, “which sometimes means just animating the character on twos, but globally moving them on ones so they move seamlessly with the camera. Sometimes it’s just animating the whole character on singles because you can’t get around it.”
Things become especially challenging when effects are involved. “Effects do not like working with stepped animation styles,” Tea continues, “normally what an effects artist would do is spline the effects or do a simulation and convert it to be on twos as well. But for things like water, that doesn’t always work and can feel quite clunky. When it comes to effects we sometimes break the rules of staying in stepped animation, it means sometimes going on singles just to help the effects and animation work seamlessly together.”
ANIMATING ON A BUDGET
Even as one of the UK’S leading animation studios, Blue Zoo still needs to contend with the stark realities of production, including budget, deadlines and the marketplace. “I don’t think there’s any project ever that’s had money left over at the end,” Drew reflects, “it all gets spent somewhere. You want to make sure you use that resource as much as possible. When it comes to budget you just have to be aware, every step of the way, what you can achieve and how well you can achieve it.” He adds that the size of a budget is no barrier to making great art as long as you remember to keep that in mind. “Always reach for the stars, even if you only get to the moon, at least you’ve made it to the moon.”
“EVERY SINGLE FRAME SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING, BE WORTH SOMETHING… IT’S GOT TO HAVE A POINT” Chris Drew, series director, Blue Zoo
At the forefront of solutions to the issue of budget, and many other potential problems, is meticulous planning. “When we get that first script in we’re thinking about everything down the line,” explains Tea. “What could possibly go wrong? How’s this going to impact this department or that department? We involve all of our staff. For me it’s all about working collaboratively.” This forethought extends to the storyboarding process. “We always try and imagine how much work is involved,” says Drew, “how can we get this done well? I’d rather have a lovely headshot of Paddington than a rushed six shot of everybody. It’s about picking your battles.”
Another solution is compromise. Despite its negative connotations, compromise can lead to moments of artistic inspiration. “There’s always compromise all the way along,” adds Drew, “it’s just knowing what you can or can’t achieve, where you can reuse props, where you can reuse character designs, where you if you can reuse animation. We have an episode coming out that requires Paddington to march in rhythm and there’s a lot of it. It’s not easy stuff to do. The good thing is we can reuse stuff. You cheat a cycle, you can dirty it up so it’s not exactly the same all the time, you can add a pause or a head turn, or move an arm, little tricks like that. All of a sudden you’ve got a lot of footage and a lot less work.”
Tea is equally enthusiastic about the benefits of creative compromise when it comes to navigating the realities of production. “We always have to find creative solutions to tackling problems. That’s what I think the teams at Blue Zoo are amazing at because everyone’s passionate
about the jobs they do. When we do that it’s about going back to the story. Do we need to show all these crazy waterfalls to tell the story? Do we need to have it in every shot or shall we just focus on one big effect shot? Is throwing all this stuff into the story making it better? And working with the teams, the broadcasters and the clients, making sure they’re happy. I find that most people are happy to problem solve and discover solutions together.”
Drew actually sees limitation, whether it be budget, deadline or something else altogether, as an important part of the creative process. “I like the fact we’ve been told no, you can’t do this and it’s like, well, actually we could,” he explains. “There’s an episode in season one of Paddington where he has to dig to Peru. In the script Paddington’s digging in a tunnel and there was no real way that we could do it. We went backwards and forwards, we re-boarded and then we had a lightbulb moment. We said, well, we can do it in 2D. We can cheat it but we’ll get the idea across.”
NEVERENDING STORY
Regardless of all the technical, artistic and production challenges involved, animation at Blue Zoo is ultimately guided by character and story. “Animators are basically shy actors,” says Tea, “I’m not the kind that could get on a stage and act but I think most animators in their heart are people that enjoy performance. We always put the characters and story at the forefront of everything we do. The animation needs to be a continuation of that.” As a director, Tea likes to ensure animators are thinking about character whenever they work on a shot, considering how each character would likely react and behave in any situation.
This character-focused approach to animation helps Blue Zoo to create more believable and powerful shows, thus forming a strong connection with their audience. “Our audiences are quite perceptive,” adds Tea, “they pick up on things. We’ve done things where something would be a little bit different and they’ll tell you that they didn’t understand that, ‘why did that character do this? They never do that!’ It’s quite impressive that a four or five-year-old has picked up on that. They invest very heavily in these characters and the worlds we build so you need to make sure you stick true to that.”
“It takes a lot of time, effort and money to get a single frame on the screen,” continues Drew, “so that framing should mean something, it should be worth something. If it’s just a headshot of someone turning and talking, it’s got to have a point. Although we have all our colours, our animation, everything else, at the end of the day, if you don’t understand why you’re having this shot, then it’s failed.”
With a character as limited in facial expression as Paddington, Drew and his team are adept at telling a story with every minute detail. “When we have our animation meetings we will ask, what’s he doing? Why is he doing it? It’s all very well for a character to turn around and pick up a pencil. But if a character turns,
picks up a pencil and just starts using it, why are they picking the pencil up?” he asks.
“I think one of the things that makes Paddington so successful is that we go for thought process. We always have him think before he does something. That’s where the storytelling comes from. Because you now know Paddington wants the pencil because he needs to write a letter really quickly.” The simple act of Paddington looking hurriedly for a pencil injects a small amount of story into the scene, reinforcing what happened previously and what comes after. “Every moment you’re in character,” adds Drew, “every single frame if possible. As much as we can within our budget, because by doing so, the better the show is overall.”
For more info on Blue Zoo visit www.blue-zoo.co.uk