Creating an Animated Series

Directed all 15 episodes of this animated children’s series, which teaches everyday values through magic, comedy and music. 

My Role:

• Co-created & helped develop show.

• Recruited team.

• Directed every episode.

• Created the budgets and schedule.

• Edited the animatics, from VO recordings to final pass.

• Script notes.

• Final assembly of each episode.

I wasn’t involved with the show’s first incarnation, The Palace in Time. Here’s some art from that period. It was created by Chiang Pin-Hsuan.

Despite already having a theme song, some character animation tests and lots of art completed, the funder decided they didn’t want to back this because of its ‘Princess theme,’ so I was brought on to help reimagine what the show could be from the ground up.

My boss, Sarah Lefton, and I spent a while working on re-tooling the initial story idea and finding a writer.

Once we decided on the main characters and general look, I sent out tests to a variety of artists to land on a final style and decide who to ultimately hire. Below are a variety of those tests.

Meanwhile, I also needed to find my animation team. I had an active project that had 12 two minute pieces, and I decided to test animators by having a different one do each piece.

I had an open call asking animators to do a 5 second test, before going forward with who would animate the full two minutes videos.

This video shows some of those tests, from bad to good.

The best animation on that other series was done by Regh Animation, in India. I’d never set out to work out with a foreign animation team, but I can’t argue with the quality of their results. From the very beginning, what they pulled off was absolutely incredible.

Here are some of the clips from the series that came before Shaboom! which I used as a (obviously paid) second round of testing potential animators to work with on Shaboom!

Having picked out the creative team, I had Arash Rod make art for a pitch book to present to the funders.

We presented the package to them, along with a budget, schedule, and many documents talking about the educational objectives. They liked what they saw, and the show was green lit. We had funding!

This simplifies a much longer story, involving years of building a relationship with this person, but thankfully, that wasn’t my department.

Due to timing, Arash had to drop out, so I hired Steven Knudsen and he came up with this new set of characters.

On the pilot, we spent a long time developing the story reel. Robert Pincombe coming in as the writer was absolutely game changing to the project, transforming its quality level once again.

A short clip of the pilot’s evolution from me doing the voices to its final version. Steven Knudsen illustrated and I edited.

Auditioning actors was its own story, as was the writing process, educational evaluation side, and budgeting. But let’s skip all that.

Once we recorded the actors, I’d edit together a radio play version in Logic Pro.

And then I did a bunch of round tripping between Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, where I assembled the story reels, as well as the final animated scenes later in the process.

Here’s one of the completed story reels. I directed the actors, edited together their lines, and managed Steven Knudsen who illustrated the boards. Steven was absolutely incredible throughout. Then I edited together a final cut before sending it off to the animation team.

After I handed over the story reel and all of the assets (new backgrounds, props, and characters) to Regh Animation, they’d animate it in Toon Boom Harmony. There was always a few rounds of adjustments before getting to the finish.

A few times in every episode, I’d have to go into the Harmony files and adjust little moments here and there to make the timing of a joke land.

My full schedule, including a few other projects I was juggling, looked like this.

• Each row represents a video.

• Each color a different person or team

• Each column represents a week, meaning this is about a year

Here’s a zoom in from early in the process, as obviously that image above is impossible to make out. I did the tasks in yellow and oversaw the other tasks listed, hoping the people I’d hired would make their various deadlines.