Yes Virginia - first boardomatic ( excerpt )

One of the things that i felt was really beautiful was the original work on the first boardomatic illustrated by Marcus Reed. The amount of detail he drew in each frame was phenomenal. We sat outside in the fading British summer and talked through the film several times, postulating and acting out each role to establish the frames required in this short frame boardomatic. This is really early on in script development when the opening shot pulled up on Virginia in a classroom instead of her house. Virginia's dad was modeled after Morrissey, and he had wooden body parts on the kitchen table, and the bully Charlotte was a boy named Charlie. And finally that is Mr Church leaving the library as Virginia arrives. In the original script Mr Church secretly pines for the librarian's favour.

early mood film and crowd tests

Early on back in December 08 when Yes Virginia was perhaps going to be much smaller i set to work on the film by myself. One thing that i knew would be problematic would be to get the city streets to have the right density of extras for a busy city. So i made a quick hack-job of a crowd generator in my 3d software that actually became quite powerful. It meant i could have several character variations. Also all the crowd 'clones' of those variations would use the one 32 frame walk cycle but each use of that walk cycle would be randomly offset to give the impression that each clone was unique. The opening shot on this mood film has over 150 clones walking down the left hand side of the street. I dont have collision detection or anything like that but felt it did the job for wide shots. Music here is Wilco.

RBC - Shiny Happy Relay - pitch clips.

Here are the clips I furnished to the agency with the original pitch, the first one shows how I wanted the runners to group together and the second was an example of how I saw the rotational sets would work to transition through the diverse regions of Canada.

RBC - shiny happy relay - style frames.

This was a little beauty of a script and against stiff competition we were flattered to have won it. With a cast of hundreds, and a Christmas period deadline that was abjectly terrifying, the result was an achievement on many levels. We had to execute two 60's, one in English and one in French, and two bilingual 30's. The idea was to mirror in animation an actual torch bearing relay race across the width of the grand nation of Canada . 

The set design I am especially found of - here are the style frames I made for each scene.

you can see the final clip here http://www.bitstate.com/tv_film/29QT.htm