We first heard of the new CBBC Snow Spider TV show through the show’s composer, Cato Hoeben, who passed along our details to Jennifer Sheridan, the director. This was incredibly lovely in several different ways, but horrible for one key reason: we initially met Cato at a networking event, which proves that networking events are useful and we have to keep doing them.
We chatted on the phone to Jen and Lindsay, the show’s producer. They told us all about the show, and mentioned that they wanted two animations doing (one in episode 3 and one in episode 5) while the main characters narrated the story of Welsh legends. We immediately knew we‘d love to be involved. We put together some storyboards based off their ideas and arranged to meet with Jen, Lindsay, and also Jen’s dog Bowie. The meeting was great; not only did we discuss the project in more detail, but we got to stroke an adorable border terrier and drink mulled wine. Our creative director Jonny discovered that mulled wine gets him tipsy quicker than any other drink, and had try really hard to not let it show. We’re unsure how well he did, but he almost flung his iPad at Lindsay several times, so we’re not confident he pulled it off.
After the meeting, we put together some visual references of three different styles for the animations: a hand-painted style; a woven-looking tapestry style, and style made up of block colours and vectors. Jen settled on the hand-painted style to reflect the history of the legends in the show. This hand-painted style would take a still moment and give it depth, like the viewer was sinking into a painting.
Gwydion, legendary Welsh magician
Initially, we experimented with AI-generated hand-painted frames based off a 3D model of a character. We would create and pose the model, render out a camera movement and paint over a single frame in ProCreate. We would then use 2D motion capture software EbSynth to take that one painted frame and apply it to the rest of the model. After a few, er, wonky-looking trials, we decided that it would be preferable to use a traditional approach of texture-projecting onto 3D models, and using 2.5D layers to give the paintings depth.
This… did not work as well as we wanted it to
Once our rough storyboards were approved, we dived straight into making the animatics. These were really simple – characters sketched in black and white with a linear camera movement. These camera movements formed the basis for what would eventually be a more fluid 3D camera movement between each scene. The sketches were done in ProCreate for iPad Pro; the movements were added afterwards in Adobe After Effects.
Initial sketches for the animatic
Once the rough camera movements in the animatic were approved, we began to block out the scenes in Cinema4D. Once we had positioned all the elements, we took each section and decided which textures would be projected onto models, and which would work better as 3D cards added in After Effects. We figured the mix of the two would best give the effect of diving into a 2D painting.
We used the projected textures on things that would benefit from existing in a 3D space: Efnisien’s face, the landscape that the camera sweeps over and the church interior. For each of these, we took a shot from the animatic with the rough 3D model in place, brought it into ProCreate, did a rough paint-over of colours etc, then refined the paintwork and detail.
Development of Efnisien
After each larger element was painted, we took it and, along with the 3D camera movements and layers of other elements (grass, fire, extra paint strokes), imported it into After Effects. It was really important to us that everything worked together to create a unified painted world, so even our lens flares, light rays and air particles were hand-painted.
Development of wedding scene in episode 5
With the extra time we’d budgeted at the end of our process, we created some quick transitions from the live action performances into the painted world. In episode 3, we used the camera movement that exists at the beginning of the shot to animate a few paint strokes, so it appeared like each element was being painted over the top of the characters. For episode 5, we animated each layer to appear individually, recreating the way the shot would have been constructed if it were truly hand-painted.
Opening transition for the animations in episode 5
We were so pleased to have been involved in The Snow Spider. The entire team was wonderful to work with, and the final show is brilliant.
You can watch the trailer for the first series of The Snow Spider on BBC iPlayer.
