Critters TV Series 1
PROJECT TYPE
Service
CLIENT
Turnip and Duck
BROADCASTER/BROADCAST DATES
RTEjr, launched October 2019
SOFTWARE USED
Adobe Animate, Photoshop
Series Brief
Critters TV is an entertaining, nature documentary TV series aimed at children and families. Each 11 minute episode is a mixture of Live Action nature footage and Animated Characters. Think Gogglebox, if the audience were Irish animated wildlife characters.
The series was designed to be like a classic sketch show featuring 6 animal ‘families’ – Foxes, Badgers, Squirrels, Ticks, Hedgehogs and Owls. Their individual “sets” are their unique living rooms. And each day, as they tune into their favourite live action TV series (critters tv) we get to watch them in their natural habitats…. Watching other animals in their natural habitats and we get to learn both real life facts about animals in our world, and learn more about our fictitious adorable critters families.
The key to this series is to balance education, comedy, entertainment that spans from young to old, so the whole family can join in. It is made in Ireland, with Irish talent, featuring Irish animals, so we have embraced every day Irish culture in the voice cast, the dialogue and the relatability to modern life in Ireland.
“The service gig gave us an opportunity to provide a First Director credit to our Animation Director, Nicola Skuse. As champions and advocates for achieving 50/50 by 2025 its important to keep promoting women into key creative lead positions, especially director positions which are still predominantly male. ”
Production Services
Being experts in animated TV productions, a large part of our contribution for the series was structuring the production schedule and the pipeline. Setting out expectations, identifying the quality and standard needed and capable within the budget and deadline dates. Locking down the pipeline process and ensuring that all partners and crew members were clear on each section of the production, and on how the responsibility and workload would be shared throughout.
Design
We provided all design services for the series – including key designs, character, background, layout, rigging and scene prep. All backgrounds were built in Photoshop and all characters were built and rigging in Adobe Animate.
Animation files were compiled through a process called ‘scene prep’ before being passed to the animation crew.
Animation
We provided all animation services for Critters TV, mostly rigged animation, but for some of the more complicated scenes we provided hand drawn animation. This ultimately helped to raise the quality of the animation work, and to fully work out the larger poses and limitations of the rigs.
As our commissioning broadcaster is RTÉjr, all animation was created at 25fps and HD.
Once completed, we rendered all the animated files to provide them back to Turnip and Duck for compositing and post production stages.