BOY AND THE DINOSAUR

HOW STUDIO DISTRACT SUCCESSFULLY DEVELOPED AN ADORABLE KIDS’ TV SERIES FOR THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

The Origin

The Boy and the Dinosaur TV series began life as a short student film created by Jason Harding. Russell Dever from 1461 Productions saw the potential of the property and brought together a team of industry experts Writers, Concept Artists, Storyboard Artists, Producers, Directors and Sound Designers to transform the concept into something that would appeal to an international audience in a global market.

SD was asked to consult the 1461 team on production techniques to take the property forward. We took time to assess the project’s current state and proposed how our services could add value across the board. Our plan was to build additional material that could be used to sell the series to the top level of broadcasters.

We demonstrated our high level skillset covering the complete production process and focused a lot of attention on rigging. Rigging seems to be an area that often falls short and really limits the emotional and physical dexterity of any character. A bad rig is like having a puppet with only half of their strings.

Keep reading on to see the journey we took in developing something quite successful and reaching our goal of a fully realised and high quality property.

The Show

Boy and the Dinosaur™ is a preschool series about an ordinary Boy and his extraordinary friend, Dinosaur. It blends big, visual storytelling and broad, physical comedy with plenty of original music and a simple educational philosophy.

Boy is an ordinary, four year old boy. He loves climbing, exploring and playing – but, most of all, he loves dinosaurs! One night, Boy wished so hard on a shooting star that his wish came true… and Boy got Dinosaur!

Project Responsibilties

We picked up the project at the 3D modelling stage right through to rendering of animation and promotional stills.

Concept Artwork

Concept artwork is the foundation to great visuals as you travel further down the production pipeline. Bad concept art leads to bad or unoriginal 3D models. Great concept art really sets the standard high from the offset, passing the baton on to the modelers and riggers to create characters and assets with the life and charm of the original designs.

Boy Character Designs

We worked with the wonderful concept artwork featured here as a starting off point. ‘Boy’ went through many design iterations before the project was brought to our studio culminating in the images on the right.

Dinosaur Character Designs

The dinosaur character design was another wonderful piece of work that gave our studio a great foundation from which to bring the character to life. The exploration into the physical dexterity of the neck along with the colour and texture directions really gave us a lot to think about when taking the project forward.

Technical Solutions

We really pushed our team with this project, aiming for these rigs to be the best we had ever produced. The ‘Boy’ character was pretty straight forward, just lots of work. Whereas the Dinosaur character presented us with main unique challenges.

The ‘Boy’ Rig

In the creation of the ‘Boy’ rig over 70 separate blend shapes were created and linked to our proprietary rigging system. Each blendshape/morph target works together to enable our animators to pose ‘Boy’s’ face in almost any asymmetrical pose.

If you look closely you should be able to see each individual and unique modeling adjustment. This process is one of the most technical of our whole production pipeline.

This rig is tested thoroughly before sending to the animators and commonly sent back and forth for improvements and adjustments once the animation task is started.

A Rigged Scene

Here is a short sample of a shot for Boy and the Dinosaur. It shows the rig controls for each character including the face rigs for each. If you look closely you should be able to see how the movement of the face rig controls are moving at the same time as the 3D model.

Environment 3D Designs

Creating a plant rich environment is a massive task in any production. This was no exception and we had to be very careful how we managed the data within these scenes. It is very easy to build a very high polygon scene but to build one that is manageable within the viewport and renders without taking hours per frame, that is a complex task. We were happy with the results of our labours and ticked all the boxes for a manageable and render-friendly scene.

Property Branding

We created the Boy and the Dinosaur branding to tell a story in a simple and iconic way.

We wanted to have a big family presence in the logo. This is illustrated by the house shape, with the additional and subtle suggestion of the dinosaur disguised within the silhouettes of bushes around the house.

The logo works well in greyscale and at both large and small scale. It has been designed to be used across all forms of BatD’s brand communication.

Character Renders

The process of promoting and selling a property like ‘Boy and the Dinosaur’ isn’t always done through the use of animation. There are a range of materials that need to utilise still imagery to convey the style, quality and tone of the property.

The images to the right are a selection used in the promotional materials across web, print and DVD. They really show the fun that can be illustrated through the simple posing of the characters playing together and even the emotions they can convey on their own.

Boy And Dinosaur – Climb

Boy Yuck

Boy And Dinosaur – Sleep

Boy With Flower

Boy And Dinosaur – Nose Touch

Boy Laughing

Boy And Dinosaur – March

Garden Gnome

Boy Feels Sick

Boy And Dinosaur – Dangle

Boy Running

Boy Sleeping

Boy And Dinosaur – Slide

Boy Fall

Boy And Sandcastle

Boy And Ball

Boy On Swing

Boy Holding Box

Boy Tired

Boy Worried

Boy Angry

Boy On Chair

Animation Samples

While in the process of testing the character and assets rigs, we often create small, sample animations to demonstrate the versatility poses that can be created. Below are a few animations created for these purposes.

Character Turntables

We created animated turntables of both ‘Boy’ and the ‘Dinosaur’ to demonstrate the life that could be breathed into what are essentially rigged polygon models.

These turntables also gave us a chance to test out lighting and shaders when rendering the characters. We’re pretty proud of the results and once we originally saw them, we knew we were ready to move into full scene animation.

Fluid Simulation Test

Within the script for the first episode was the mention of a milk drinking action scene.

We knew that we needed to prepare for this and wanted to make sure that there were not any unforeseen technical issues ahead.

The test was a relative success and although not perfect was enough to know that we had the ability to simulate the milk for the scene to come.

Hero Tree Development

We treated the development of the hero tree (that was to span the garden areas of boy’s home) like it was as important as a character. Our Producer and Director were very keen on making sure that the tree was designed and developed with ‘story’ at it’s core.

The steps in creating the tree involved many ‘sign-off’ stages with many stakeholders in the property. Due to these stages, we initially blocked out the tree before adding detail in approved increments.

Once the scale and proportion of the tree and it’s branches had been approved we continued to add texture detail and the addition of a low-poly leaves solution.

Gnome Character

The Gnome character was to be a relatively inanimate gnome with the simple ability to smile and frown.

Stage one in it’s development was to define how realistic the gnome should be. After lots of reference imagery and some wonderful concept work, we nailed the design the Director wanted.

With the approved concept designs, we moved ahead with the modeling of the character. This was eventually approved before painting the textures using a 3D paint tool. The aim was to give the gnome a weather and pseudo realistic aesthetic.

Wilderness Garden

An area at the very end of Boy’s back garden exists and it is this, the wilderness garden

There was a request for this garden to have a psuedo realistic feel whilst still sitting well next to the designs and aesthetics of the characters.

One of the greatest challenges was managing the relatively high polygon count within the scene. We believe we successfully created a feeling of life within the garden with the centerpiece being the hero tree.

Production Stills

Here are a collection of ‘Production Stills’. This is the term used for images that give an accurate impression for the look, feel and quality of the proposed production.

It can be very tempting to touch up these images in Photoshop but this could mislead anyone viewing the images and somewhat over-promise what the production may look like.

These images are straight out of the render engine with 3 passes. Diffuse pass / Ambient Occlusion pass / Rim shader pass. No touch up work in sight!