Monster Court
Monster Court was a 15 part children’s program for the BBC CBeebies channel, produced by DLT Entertainment.
The show is about a Monster, Judge Smudge, who dishes out justice for families with light hearted problems, such as embarrassing parents and bossy teachers.
We made the program at the height of the Covid lockdown. Everyone worked remotely, even the puppeteer who played Judge Smudge. He had to operate all the lights and camera equipment on his own and act as the main character.
The Judge spoke to all the guests on his laptop using Zoom.
The editor had a huge challenge to cut between the main camera shot and multiple different zoom calls. I created various different wipes, transitions and backgrounds that he could re-use whenever he needed to.
I delivered a number of different Zoom screen layouts with alpha channel holes for the footage to fit into. The editor could mix and match the layouts whenever he needed.
The writers added lots of visual jokes to go between the Zoom calls. Since the puppeteer was on his own, most of the jokes had to be things that we could add later using graphics and animation.
He couldn’t set up extra props on top of all the work he was already doing.
I took whatever the joke was and make it work in animation. I used After Effects for everything that we needed.We had shadows of other characters looming in, ghosts that were filmed on green screen floating around, slime flooding the room and various funny certificates and books.
We needed to have a lot of text on screen for things like name straps, titles and the main logo text. We didn’t want to use a standard font, since the show needed to look really fun and unique.
We also wanted to have some texture to the text since everything else on screen had texture and we weren’t using flat colours for anything else.
I created a custom Font that had a furry texture, we chose fur so it would match Judge Smudge’s fur.
I chose a big chunky font to start with and used Turbulence Displace to distort each letter into an interesting wonky shape. Then I drew a bunch of single hair shapes. I added Trapcode Particular to each letter and used the letter shape as a Layer Emitter, I made the single hair shapes the Particles and increased the number of Particles until the hairs filled up the letter shape. I used the Fontself plug-in to save each letter as a .otf file.
