Format: TV Series – in development.
Family, adventure, animation
Primary target group: the 8-12 y.o.
In order to deal with a sometimes confusing reality the bird-girl JOON and her best friend Louie embarks on crazy adventures deep in her imagination. – A series about understanding the world from a child’s point of view, the power of play – and the power of confronting your inner demons.
The story:
The 10 year old bird-girl, JOON, is wild at heart and optimistic & adventurous by nature. She is living with her parents and thousands of other birds in a social bird-housing area in a small forest – close to the freeway. A life that isn’t always easy when you are 10 years old and trying to find your place in the world. She is blessed (or cursed) with an imagination that she can’t seem to control. An imagination that floods her reality when it gets triggered. Together with her best friend, the Hippopotamus LOUIE, she embarks on surreal adventures into the depths of her imagination to make sense of everyday life and confront her inner demons…
The technique:
Dealing with the low budgets and tight deadlines is part of the job when creating an animated tv-series in Scandinavia. Luckily the landscape of animation is rapidly changing. With the rise of technologies like real-time game engines, VR animation and motion capture, we are currently witnessing a revolution in how animated content is being produced. These technologies – that are allowing teams to work faster and more efficient and focus on the creativity that goes on screen – are the backbone of our production.
We are working on creating a pipeline uniting the style and flexibility from the VR animation program Quill with the real-time power of Unreal Engine.
The power of animating in Virtual Reality (in our case Quill) is that it is extremely intuitive and allows you to create complex scenarios very quickly. Unlike classic 3d, the universe is hand-drawn, not modeled, which lends the series its charming, dynamic and personal style. In terms of animation, Quill blends the workflow of 2D, stop Motion animation and puppetry, making it an highly efficient animation tool – especially for action driven or loop based animations. For scenes that need more dramatic finesse we are planning to combine this workflow with the 3D rigging & animation tools of Unreal Engine.
There are advantages in the VR workflow that would benefit almost every stage of an animation production – from layout to storyboarding to final animation – combining this workflow with the real-time capabilities, powerful animation, mocap and lighting tools of Unreal Engine will allow us to work faster and more efficiently with the material, while maintaining a high visual quality – and more importantly; tell better stories.
Creating a successful IP these days is not only about creating a good animated series, but also about creating a strong digital universe surrounding it – containing cross platform storytelling, games etc. Training our artists to work in Unreal Engine – and creating the series here – will help us tremendously in expanding the universe in a qualitative and cost-efficient way.
The Team:
JOON-BIRD & HIPPO is being developed as a collaboration between…
The director: Christen Bach (the director) is the head of the Berlin based animation unit “RocknRoll Animation” and has more than 20 years of experience in the animation and VFX industry both as director, craftsman and vfx-supervisor.
The co-creator: Kim Svarer is one of Denmark’s most productive illustrators and creative catalysts with more than 400 titles on his resume.
The production company: Made By Us is a Copenhagen based production company specialized in the kids/youth demographic with a strong focus on storytelling.
