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.

SunCola Fencing

SunCola "Fencing", 1998.

Every year throughout the nineties, a pair of SunTop/SunCola commercials were produced. And the SunCola ad always had the same concept:

Mr. SunCola competes in some kind of sport against his long-time foe Bob Bubble. On the face of it, the opponent is both bigger and stronger, and thus has all the advantages. But Mr. SunCola has his secret weapon: the non-carbonated SunCola drink, whereas Bob Bubble will have to content himself with an old-fashioned fizzy cola. Yuck!

On the other hand, Mr. Bubble has no respect for the rules of the game. So every film starts out with him playing some nasty trick on our hero, who therefore loses the first round. But as they both take a break for a drink, Mr. Suntop gets re-energized by his SunCola (while Bob Bubble is all gassy from his regular cola), and then, with a couple of elegant moves, Mr. Suntop  easily outmaneuvers his rival.

Here's the storyboard for the SunCola film of 1998.

SunCola "Fencing" storyboard by Dan Harder, 1998.

SunCola Skiing

SunCola "Skiing", 1997

Along with the SunTop "World Explorers" film, this 18 second TV ad constituted the annual SunTop/SunCola TV commercial pair of 1997. The two films were done in one stretch of eight weeks, six for the SunTop film and two for the SunCola.

That meant that I had to do 15 seconds of layout, animation, cleanup, inbetweening, coloring, camera etc. all by myself in two weeks. Quite a fun challenge!

The film was done for Co-Ro Food A/S, parent company of the brands SunTop, SunCola, Sunquick and Sun Lolly. I drew the storyboard based on a script worked out by the client in cooperation with a film production company called Planet Productions run by Lars Borch Nielsen.

SunCola "Skiing" storyboard by Dan Harder, 1997.

SunTop World Explorers

My journey with Mr. SunTop, the mascot of the softdrink brand of the same name, spans the full decade of the 1990s. During this time I worked on a whole string of TV commercials for the primary product, the orange drink, as well as its spin-off SunCola.

The films were made in pairs with one SunTop and one SunCola ad per year. Initially, my contribution was limited to storyboards, background layouts and animation. Other artists did the background painting, character cleanup and inbetweening. The coloring and camera work were done at Nielsen & Nielsen, the Borch Nielsen brothers' studio, on their expensive Silicon Graphics computer (coloring animated movies on a computer was kind of new back in the early nineties).

Mr. SunTop as Colombus in "World Explorers", 1997

But in 1997, having spent a few years working on various computer games, I realized that it was possible to make an entire film in my own little studio on nothing more than a regular Windows-based PC. I sold the deal to the client - sweetened by a very competitive price - and got to work.

The plan was to do the entire thing myself, so I had my work cut out for me: make a 30 second film in six weeks. That is, 5 seconds of rough animation, 5 seconds of  cleanup and inbetweening and 5 seconds of coloring every week, plus layouting, color styling, scene planning, camera work, color adjustment and the rest of it. It was a fun challenge which soon turned into a 24-7 gig.

Storyboard by Martin Madsen, 1997.

The film had already been storyboarded (by fellow animator Martin Madsen), so I could dive right into the next phases: layouting, animation, cleanup and inbetweeing. I bought a flatbed scanner to get the drawings into the computer and a CD-ROM burner (which was also kind of new technology back then) in order to deliver the colored single frames to a video editing facility where the images would be combined with the sound and transferred to Beta SP video, required by the broadcaster.

For the backgrounds I called on my favorite background painter Thomas Dreyer, whom I had first met when working on a Guldkorn commercial some years before. Here's some of Thomas' backgrounds based on my BG layouts.

3D Pepsi Bottle

As briefly mentioned earlier, I had a bit of a flirt with CGI animation back in the early nineties.

In the summer of 1990 I animated and directed a couple of hand-drawn commercials for the small Copenhagen studio Nielsen & Nielsen, which were colored and composited on the studio's newly acquired supercomputer, the "Personal Iris" from Silicon Graphics. Then, from December 1990, after finishing animation at A.Film on Don Bluth's A Troll in Central Park, I actually worked for a couple of months at Nielsen & Nielsen as a CGI modeler and animator.

Well, animation is probably stretching it a bit, since I didn't really animate anything living, it was more like building and rotating various solid objects which were rendered with nice glossy surfaces using 3D software from Thomson Digital Image (TDI). In the end I decided against pursuing a career as an operator of this new technological wonder, fascinating as it was. But I still stayed in touch with the studio and animated some 2D commercials for them, and also served as an animation supervisor for my replacement at the computer.

One such project was this TV commercial for the then brandnew 1.5 liter softdrink bottles (we had never had bottles larger than 1 liter before in Denmark). The Pepsi bottle jumps into the picture and calls on all its new bigger friends: Pepsi Light, 7-UP, 7-UP Light and the Danish energy drink Faxe Kondi.

In this case I did a full hand-drawn animation reference for the action. The new tech guy, Michael Holm (with whom I later worked on a number of exciting and somewhat crazy projects - see future posts) then built the 3D bottles and matched them to the 2D ref. It's pretty simple, and the result isn't perfect, but it was probably the first CGI "character animation" made on Danish soil, so it does have some historical significance :)

The flic above is grabbed from an old VHS tape. Below is the original storyboard from the advertising agency. (As you can see it's a fax - oh, what wonderful eighties' technology!)

Gevinst-Giro Piggy Bank

Among the VHS tapes in the old boxes in my attic I came across these two TV commercials for a special savings scheme with the chance of winning a grand price of millions of Danish kroner. The ads were done way back in 1990 for "Postgiro", a branch of the Danish postal service which has long ago been gobbled up by one of the big Danish banks (which was in turn swallowed by an even bigger one).

The two films were produced by Nielsen & Nielsen, a small company in Copenhagen which had just purchased a very expensive high-end computer system (from Silicon Graphics), and so they were among the very first in Danish animation to be colored on a computer.

I did the animation, and in order to utilize the new exciting tool, I grabbed the chance to do something which was normally way too expensive for our small budgets: colorseps. That is, a border between two colors without the black line.

In the old days of hand-painted cels the colorseps would also have to be inked by hand, which was extremely time-consuming. In this case I simply had the cleanup artists draw the separation line between the two orange colors on a separate level, and then we colored it in the paintbox so it would be invisible. The same goes for the red triangles. It's a simple effect, but it does look nice. And with this new computer technology, it was done at almost no extra cost.

As a curiosity for the Danes among the blog readers, the speak for the ads was done by none other than the late actor Axel Strøbye, whom we all love for his roles in Olsen-Banden and Matador (the latter is the best TV series ever done in the whole world - you should check it out!).

Along with the video tapes I also found the original storyboards from the advertising agency. This is the board for film #1.

Here's the board for film #2, and below is the final film.

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!

Choco Bolo

I went through some old boxes in the attic and found a bunch of VHS video tapes with various animation stuff dating back to the late 1980's. Amazingly, most of the tapes were still more or less watchable, and with a cheap video grabbing device and some patience I managed to clean some of them up to an acceptable quality.

One of the films was a TV commercial for some chocolate crackers called Choco Bolo, which I animated back in 1991 for A. Film and the Danish Disney animator Jørgen Klubien, who was apparently taking a break from Disney at the time. In this case I also found the original animation roughs as well as a copy of Jørgen's storyboard for the film:

Choco Bolo storyboard by Jørgen Klubien 1991.

The film consists of one single shot lasting 15 seconds (plus some live-action). It may be slightly insane of me to share with you the entire 118 rough animation drawings - but what the heck, here we go:

BR Toys Christmas Ad

In the spring of 2000 I was asked by the advertizing agency of Scandinavia's largest toy retailer, BR Legetøj (BR Toys), to produce the company's Christmas TV ad for that year. Thus, I spent most of the hot summer drawing Santa Claus and his reindeer flying through the snow-covered landscape.

In the previous years BR Toys had released a new Christmas ad every year, so I was hoping to become their regular supplier of these films. But apparently they were so happy with this particular commercial that they have run it on Danish TV every Christmas since then. That would be 15 years now, and counting...

Let me share with you some of the artwork that lay behind the final film. This is the final storyboard that I did, based on a pretty good draft supplied by the advertizing agency, Nørgård Mikkelsen.

Storyboard, BR Toys Christmas TV Ad, 2000

The "cel" painting and camera work on this film was done on a computer. However, the backgrounds were painted in the old fashioned way. I was always especially pleased with these backgrounds, which were done by Thomas Dreyer, who supplied backgrounds for most of the commercials I produced in the 90's. Here's a selection of layouts and color BGs.