Shaun the Sheep

Like all of Aardman's work, the TV series "Shaun the Sheep" is super charming and a delight to watch. So when a chance to work on the show presented itself, I naturally jumped at it!

Bitzer, the sheepdog, is relaxing with the paper and a cup of tea in "Bitzer's Basic Training,"
season 2, episode 24 (2009).

Back in the spring of 2009, it came to my attention that some of my friends in the Israeli animation business were working on the storyboards for the second season of the beloved British claymation series. I realized that this was a unique opportunity and decided to try to get a piece of the action. I contacted the local storyboard director to offer my services, but when I couldn't really get a clear answer from him, I made the bold decision to jump on the first plane from Copenhagen and simply show up at the studio in Tel Aviv, ready for work. Thankfully, my chutzpa paid off.

I was given an episode called "Bitzer's Basic Training," in which Bitzer, the sheepdog, fears that the Farmer is planning to replace him with a more efficient and obedient dog. So Shaun, the unofficial leader of the sheep flock, offers to help whipping Bitzer into shape in order to save his job. The mission succeeds beyond expectation, of course, when Bitzer ends up taking his new role a bit too seriously, requiring Shaun to step in and solve the problem.

The script was changed several times during the storyboard phase requiring me to redo a number of sections again and again, with the outtakes amounting to almost as many storyboard panels as those that made up the final animatic. In the end, some of the shots that were previously cut out eventually found their way back into the movie. The whole process took about two months, far more than justified by the modest remuneration offered. But that didn't matter. Half of my pay went to travel expenses anyway. The main objective was to be part of the Shaun the Sheep story. And so it was, and for that I am grateful.

The episode "Bitzer's Basic Training" originally aired on 20th May 2010.

Here's a video of the final animatic, synced up to the sound from the actual color movie.

And here is a "dual video" of part of the animatic (the "training sequence") juxtaposed with the final movie for easy comparison.

A "dual video" of the entire episode can be seen on YouTube here (only available outside Europe).

You can see some storyboard snippets from other Shaun the Sheep episodes made by my good friend and long time colleague Doron Meir here at the Living Lines Library.

More Hugo Boards

Inspirational sketch / location design by Uwe Saegner, 2006.

Here are two more sequences that I boarded for the feature "Jungledyret Hugo 3 - Fræk, flabet og fri" (see the two previous sequences here).

Hugo has left his best friend Rita the fox on Meatball Charlie's island in order to go hunting for winter apples on the mainland. In the inspirational sketch above, drawn by German illustrator and background designer Uwe Saegner, Hugo discovers an apple tree in the distance. Hugo's apple hunt soon turns out to be a  foolhardy enterprise, as he gets caught in a snowstorm and is almost run over by a car.

Later, Rita goes looking for Hugo, and finally finds him frozen half to death. Hugo, of course, downplays the seriousness of the situation and tries to charm his way out of it.

Jungledyret Hugo Storyboards

There's no denying it. I definitely have a soft spot for Hugo and his friend Rita the fox. These two wonderful characters have been with me since I animated the first sequences for the first Jungledyret Hugo feature back in the summer of 1991. As I did about six minutes of footage before the other animators joined the production, I also had a hand in refining and adapting the character designs to suit the classical style of animation. Especially Rita I have really come to consider my own little baby.

Inspirational sketch by Uwe Saegner, 2006

Luckily I have had the good fortune to work some more with Hugo and Rita over the years. In 1995 I produced and directed a PC game based on the first feature, for which I also did most of the animation. I have drawn modelsheets and developed walks and run cycles for the Hugo TV series, and illustrated two books about Hugo's further adventures. In 2003 I made character designs for the third feature, back when it was supposed to be done in 2D - that is, as hand-drawn animation. And three years later, when "Jungledyret Hugo 3 - Fræk, flabet og fri" (aka. "Amazon Jack" or "Jungo Goes Bananas") had finally been financed - and changed into a CGI project - I ended up storyboarding half of the movie.

Here's a couple of sequences from the animatic for that film. It's a temporary edit of the raw boards. It has been shortened somewhat in the final film. The dialogue is in Danish.

In the beginning of the movie Hugo is spending the winter with Rita in Denmark. He dreams about the jungle where he belongs, but Rita introduces him to the fun of ice skating on the frozen lake. Meanwhile, a mouse is struggling to get hold of the only apple on the island. Alas, to no avail.

A bit later, Rita enjoys the romantic snow setting, while Hugo is bored and wants to go hunting for more apples across the lake. The mouse seeks revenge for the loss of the first apple, but again fails miserably.

The storyboard panels below are from the second sequence.

Disco Worms - Animation

Let's wrap up this small Disco Worms potpourri with some animation.

I'm not really a CGI animator, even though I did have some encounters with the technology back when it was quite new in the early nineties. In 1990-91 I did some simple modeling and animation on a Silicon Graphics "Personal Iris" computer with software from Thomson Digital Image (TDI). And as Autodesk's 3D Studio became available for DOS-based PC systems a couple of years later, I also played around with that for a while, doing the mandatory jumping architect lamp test. In the end, not much ever came of my 3D animation career.

A decade and a half later, however, having been deeply involved in the designs and facial setups of the Disco Worms characters, I couldn't resist the opportunity to brush up on my 3D animation skills. So I selected a sequence of my own storyboards, which I was particularly fond of, and set out to animate it using Autodesk's Maya software.

Disco Worms - Storyboards II

Forgive me for sidetracking a bit, but it was while storyboarding on "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" that I was first exposed to the wonders of the Wacom Cintiq.

To the few of you who may not know, it is a drawing tablet built into a computer monitor. I had earlier tried my luck with a regular tablet sitting on the desk beside the computer keyboard, but the necessary hand-eye coordination proved too complicated for me. I reckoned it would take me a month of very poor drawing ability too get to an acceptable level, and I simply didn't have the patience for that.

But with the Cintiq it's completely different. No learning curve, you just jump right in and draw with the electromagnetic pen directly on the screen. Fellow storyboarder Kim Hagen and I considered it for about five minutes, then ordered two Cintiq screens for ourselves, and we never looked back!

Gone were the days of re-tracing the storyboard's backgrounds to the next panel, or alternatively scanning and assembling the boards in the computer (in the old days it would be a lot of xeroxing, scalpel edge-cutting and magic tape). Characters and backgrounds could now be rotated or resized in Photoshop according to your exact desire, providing more accurate layouts for the background artists or CGI previz/blocking. As for the look of the drawings, I quickly acquired the now legendary Martin Madsen Photoshop brush, which is essentially a scan of a real pencil. Most people can't even tell the difference. A piece of truly useful technology.

Turning back to the art of (Cintiq) storyboarding, this sequence features the first rehearsal of Barry's newly formed disco worm band, taking the challenge of limb-less acting to a new level. How do you play the Stratocaster without any arms? Or the drums?

Well, when the disco music plays, nobody worries about such particularities.

Disco Worms - Storyboards

My original task on "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" was doing storyboards together with my old friend and colleague (and former roommate) Kim Hagen. In this case we boarded the entire film together, with Kim doing almost two thirds of the footage. (As it happened, in 2007 Kim and I seemed to be the only ones left of the "old guard" of Danish animation who were still actually drawing for a living.)

Kim had been part of the initial development of the movie, and was working on his second sequence when I arrived. His first sequence, where Barry finds his dad's old disco record (Disco Inferno by the Trammps), was already in animation, so for the rest of the production we were pretty much playing a game of catch-up with the animators. What's more, since I soon started squandering all my regular working hours engulfed in the character design process together with the 3D modelers, I had to spend every evening, weekend and holiday at the drawing desk, trying to complete my boards.

Figuring out how these spine- and arm-less creatures got about their daily tasks was an interesting challenge. And where there's a will there's a way - apparently you can't keep a good worm down!