Animal TV
Animal TV was a 20 episode children’s program for the BBC CBeebies channel.
It was about a TV news network run by animals. The newsreaders were dogs, the fashion correspondent was a gerbil and the sports reporter was a tortoise.
The characters needed to be played by actors we could somehow transform into talking animals. We didn’t have the budget for complex VFX or CGI.
I created a system where we filmed the actors faces in front of a greenscreen, composited their heads on to the animal bodies and then used face tracking to add animal features to their faces. I created the Animal TV studio backgrounds in After Effects and I also used After Effects for all the keying and compositing.
The actors wore a furry bonnet to cover their hair and had face paint on their skin to help make the effect work.
The characters would introduce different parody segments such as Carp-pool Karaoke, Frisky Come Dancing, Game of Bones and Beastender’s. I had to found ways to make each idea work in a way that would suit the budget.
