Some Christmas Cheer

Before there was Creature Comforts...

When Nick Park and Peter Lord came to visit our office a couple months back, we asked them about the genesis of the idea for the original Creature Comforts short. Aardman was commissioned to make several short films using unscripted audio for a series called Lip Synch, and Nick Park's piece was the Creature Comforts short in 1989. Peter Lord mentioned that one of the first, if not THE first animated piece to use audio recorded from real people rather than actors was Moonbird (1959) which won an Oscar for best Animated Short. John and Faith Hubley had a unique collaboration and made over 20 independent, animated films together. You can learn more about them here.

Moonbird featured the voices of their children at play and the result is a beautiful short film which has been uploaded to YouTube for our viewing pleasure:

Like Wildfire

Unbeknownst to us Aardman folk in the U.S., more show clips have been released/found their way to the internet. SO, since the cat (or in this case, the penguin) is out of the bag already, why not take a gander at one of my favorite characters:



Oh, and for those who were wondering, the rope will not be seen when this clip airs on television.

Coast to Coast with Creature Comforts

I had quite the busy week this week. After the Thanksgiving holiday I went to New York City to shoot my first "Behind the Scenes" video for Creature Comforts. I really enjoy doing these sorts of pieces and if you have the time, you can check out a DVD extra that I did called "From Scout to Screen" for a film called "Little Manhattan".

Anyway, this shoot was with two of my favorite characters, the cockroaches. We tried calling them waterbugs for awhile, but lets face it, if they live in NYC, they're cockroaches. After listening to the wonderful voices of these two ladies for 6 months, it was so exciting to actually meet them. I got to the senior center early for the interview and was there when Natalie arrived. I knew it was her right away since she has a VERY distinctive voice. She was happy to meet me too and told her friend "Can you believe this guy came all the way from California just to have a date with me?". So I spoke with her for a little while outside the senior center where all of their interviews took place, near Washington Square park. It was a surreal experience meeting someone who I felt like I knew already. As a recent transplant from NYC to LA, I find it very comforting to listen to the voices of such New York characters. Both Natalie and Lilly were very sweet and it was a pleasure to finally meet them. I also invited Lilly to come by our office when she visits California in February, but I haven't told my boss yet. I'm hopeful that I got some good footage and that it will be a part of our promotional materials closer to the airdate of the show. Here's a snapshot of me with Natalie and Lilly that Hillary, their excellent interviewer, took:



Luckily, I was told not to reveal their animals to them yet and I'm happy not to be the one who tells them that they will be cockroaches on the show. Although, in the modelmakers' defense, I think they are just about as cute as cockroaches can be. And since their set really captures New York, I think they'll be happy about that at least. Take a look:


This image is a still from a holiday promo that may air during "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" on CBS, Friday December 8th.

Cafeteria Stats

I know what you've all been thinking: "Animation Shmanimation, how much coffee do these people drink?". Well wonder no more. The distinguished Brits pictured below in their enviable canteen have consumed the following over 25 weeks of production (forgive the metric figures):

1625 kilos of potatoes
375 kilos baked beans
6,000 pints milk
15, 000 pints coffee


Tea and cake figures were too astronomic to even guess at, clearly.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What better way to celebrate than with the first animated Creature Comforts clip?

For more on this duo, go to their myspace page! And eat lots of turkey (or tofurkey) tomorrow. :-)

Taking it to the Streets

Did I just get that song in your head? Oops. The reason I bring it up is because Eyeballs and Fishlips, everyone's favorite marginally secret unofficial blog about an animated television production imported from Bristol, England, is becoming less secret. That's right, with our first promos hitting your house turkey day, the powers that be have said that we can indeed take it to the streets. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. They said something more along the lines of "Who? What? Why? Okay, sure, whatever". Which was considerably less exciting and didn't involve any Michael McDonald songs. Sigh. Boring powers that be.

So if you're new around these parts, welcome! Take a look at the archives, especially here or here for some background info. And come back, because a few of the Bristol folks have come on board to write about the show from a more "British, working with the clay on a daily basis" type of perspective. Which should be great, as long as we're able to translate correctly. Here's lesson number one: "cheers!" means "bye!".

On that note...Cheers!

From Animatic to Build

Here are some of the animatic stills (which serve as blueprints for the characters and sets) along with pictures of the final models on their sets. I'm always amazed when we see the character builds after viewing the animatic sketches for such a long period of time. Sometimes the sets change a great deal from initial sketch to final build, and sometimes, they look like the sketch come to life. See for yourself:

POODLES



SALMON



FLIES



Okay, there's a glimpse at 3 of our characters, so 3 down 112 to go...

Welcome to America!

Our newest coworker Dan Sinclair, an interviewer from the British series, arrives in the U.S. only to immediately learn the perils of audio recording in Los Angeles.

It's a good thing we said yes to that renter's insurance...

The Golden Ticket (Part I)

Our office trip to Aardman's studio in September was truly a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment for me. I couldn't believe that we got to see the models up close and got a chance to see the animators at work. It is a process like no other art and the work they do is so seamless that you forget that these characters are created with one tiny movement every 24th of a second. So, straight from the stages where Wallace and Gromit battled with the Were-Rabbit, here's a little video glimpse at our painting gorilla character from "Creature Comforts"

More Fun with Extra Footage

The Toucan and Gecko Laugh Hour are awaiting your friendship at myspace.

previous fun

Calling Characters

As promised earlier, here's thrilling video of a call to a character. But instead of Abe calling the Bees, it's one of the story editors, Casey, calling our Rhode Island penguin, with guest appearances by Megan, Lauren, and Abe's voice. Enjoy!

The Voices Behind the Creatures

As we head towards the show airing, our publicist wants contact info for the people who were interviewed and animated. It is my very lucky job to call these people and make sure that's all right. Now don't get me wrong...normally a phone project sucks, but these are people I have grown to love over the last months. I know way more about them than I should, and I have seen them as clay animals. In some cases, the people don't know they're going to be on the show, and so my call is a bright spot in their day. In all cases, they don't know what creature they've been animated as, so I get to hear them guess, or talk about what they absolutely don't want to be. It's like being reunited with a long-lost friend. A long-lost friend who doesn't know a thing about you and about whom you know many secrets. Yeah.

Because I couldn't stop gushing about what a blast this has been, some other people have volunteered to call a few of their favorite characters. Stay tuned for video of some calls (like perhaps Abe calling our New York bees?).

The Battle of Chaka Khan

One of the issues we face in putting together episodes of the show is similar to the issues faced by traditional documentaries and that is rights clearance. Unlike a scripted show that knows ahead of time what each character is going to say, there are unpredictable moments that we want to include in the show but cannot always do if they violate copyright. One of these moments that we're dealing with now involves one of our characters quoting a sample from the Chaka Khan song "I Feel For You". It's a classic 80's jam and you should check it out if you haven't heard it. At first, the show's lawyers said we could not include it since the song was written by Prince and he is notorious for never giving permission to others to reference his songs, not even Weird Al! Luckily for us, the sample in which the DJ says "Chaka Khan" was NOT written by Prince and was in fact referenced in an episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer installs a turntable rig in his car. In honor of YouTube's flagrant copyright violations, I have uploaded the clip so you can check it out:

Happy Halloween from Creature Comforts!

Here's Abe's dog, Julius, dressed as a fire hydrant.

He gets a little excited when he's in the office so he ended up wagging his shiny silver hat off. But Julius don't need no shiny hats to be adorable.

Check out more dogs in costume here.

My Interviews

Even though there are Creature Comforts interviewers throughout the country who are doing a great job and are constantly sending us minidiscs, I have gone out and done a few on my own. Even though it's generally more productive to interview people that you don't know, I have interviewed a friend of the family and my young cousin. I also did an interview at the San Diego Zoo a few months ago where I approached people at random and asked if they would be willing to be interviewed for an animated TV series. One woman who I met was a supervisor in the sanitation department and had a lot of great zoo stories to share. You can look for her as a meerkat in our "Zoo" episode. Since my first zoo trip was productive, I decided to take my cousin Maya to the LA Zoo a couple weeks ago which was lots of fun. She's a real animal lover so she had a lot of opinions on all of the animals there. My first attempt wasn't very successful:

But after that, I found a more responsive subject:

The interview process for the show is really challenging since the material that we're looking for is very specific. But it's very exciting to see something start out as an audio snippet from a documentary interview and make it all the way to the stage of being animated. I haven't done nearly as many interviews as our story editors have and I think you definitely get better with practice. But as in all documentaries, ultimately, the final piece is only as good as your characters.

Fun with Extra Footage

Because we have a bazillion hours of interview material, we've decided to play around with some of our favorite moments that aren't likely to be aired. For example, here's a little myspace page for two of our characters, the very musical Horse and Mule. Click on the link and be their friend!

Our First Episode

Yesterday we all gathered around to watch an assembly of an entire episode for the first time. It was exhilarating and enjoyable (we're two-thirds animated, I'd estimate!), but it also raised some questions.

For those who know the British series via BBC America, you might not have realized that it was originally aired as 8 minute segments. As such, the issue of packaging the show as a standard 22 minute American sitcom is a new challenge. There are no act breaks in Creature Comforts. No "gasp! They put a pacemaker in Sawyer that's going to make his heart explode!" moments that make you want to rush back to the TV after the commercials. Also, with each theme segment running around 8-10 minutes, we have shorter bits to round out the show. So the question is...how do you structure the darned thing? Theme 1, Themelet, Theme 2? Theme 1, Theme 2, Themelet? How do we let you know we're going to commercial? How do we let you know we're back?

Being something entirely different than anything in the primetime landscape is a tremendous advantage, in a way. But it also means putting a square peg in a round hole. In the end, the concept has to stand on its own. Regardless, you want to make everything as polished as possible. As we're nearing the end of production, this is probably the biggest (and neatest) obstacle we're presented with.

Flushed Away...to Hollywood

As Megan just mentioned, Nick Park and Peter Lord visited our office yesterday (which was amazing) and lucky for me they had two extra tickets to the crew screening of "Flushed Away" at Grauman's Chinese Theater. Even though I've been living in Hollywood for a year now I haven't been to that landmark yet and it lived up to expectations. I had mixed feelings about the movie going in because of the fact that it is the first major production from Aardman done with CGI. One of the things I've always loved about Aardman productions is the handmade feel of their visuals. After seeing the "Creature Comforts" animators at work on real sets in Bristol I was even more impressed with the love and care that goes into each frame of animation that they create. So even though I'm a bit biased against the sterile nature of computer animation, I still enjoyed "Flushed Away". The visuals of the sewers beneath London are really impressive and detailed. I also got to go to the party afterwards which was really nice and included a lovely toilet setup for pictures like this one of yours truly:

An OMG Moment For the Nerds

...myself included.

Nick Park and Peter Lord. In our offices. Moments ago. Very cool.

Wallace, unfortunately, could not make it. Prior engagement or something.

Mouthing Off

One of my many unique duties on "Creature Comforts" involves drawing mouths onto animatic stills. Each character on the show has an accompanying drawing (created by one of the character designers) that will stand in for the visual of their shot until the animated shot is completed. While I consider myself to be a creative person, visual arts have never been my strongsuit (as my elementary school art teacher would eagerly tell you). So initially I was wary of altering the character designers' drawings in any way, but for our first animatic deliveries to CBS mouths had to be added so that the viewer could tell which character was speaking. This only applied to cases where there was more than one character who appeared in the shot, for instance the three alligators. In addition to making an open mouth for one character, I had to close the open mouth in the original drawing. Hooray for Photoshop!

How We Do

Hello all, I'm Megan. I'm the assistant to the executive producer and line producer of our fine show. Mainly, that means answering phones and ducking hot cups of coffee being hurled in my direction (hence the defensive under-desk stance seen below).

Ha! That's just a stereotype. It's not really like that at all(call the police), honestly (help me!). My main responsibility here has been recruiting, corresponding with and paying our team of 40 or so field interviewers. For those not familiar with the show, the best way I can explain it is as an animated docu-comedy. We take audio recordings of real people from all across America, assign them adorable clay animal alteregos, and finally put the clips into a logical and humorous order, based on topic. To gather all the audio necessary (and then some) we hired freelance interviewers from 26 states. Each interviewer selected 5 subjects (either an individual, a pair, or even trio in some cases) for a 30-minute "tryout" session. From those original tryouts, we selected a smaller number of people for them to go back to for 2 hour interviews. This is how, as Abe told you, we ended up with over 500 hours of audio from the American public. Listen below for an example:

Sample Audio from an Interview

Hopefully, as this blog develops, we can introduce you to some more of our interviewers' work, for us and in their regular lives. For now, just for kicks, any thoughts on what animal this fellow should be?

All About Me

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Abe Forman-Greenwald and I am the assistant editor on Creature Comforts. This has been my favorite job ever because the material we work with here is so much fun. I am responsible for digitizing audio from our field interviewers, making audio selects with the story editors and many other odds and ends that come up throughout each day. Most of the audio that we receive is on MiniDisc, not videotape, so we almost never get to see what the interviewees actually look like. I have been working in the documentary field for the last 6 years and in each project I work on I feel like I get to know and love the characters. Creature Comforts is a special case because the audio is all from documentary interviews with people all over the country but the visuals are animated animals. So that special combination of documentary audio and claymation animals is hard to beat and makes me love the characters even more. I've been a fan of Aardman Animations since I first saw Wallace & Gromit in high school. To work on an Aardman project has been a dream come true and I can't wait for the rest of America to see the show.