"Scallywags" is a stop-motion animated, children's television pilot made as my senior thesis at College for Creative Studies. My first semester was spent creating the pitch for the show and tightening down the character designs and story, while my second semester was devoted to fabrication and animation.

CONCEPT

The concept was to create a television show for children that was a call back to Saturday morning cartoon adventures from the 80's. It was to be silly and lighthearted and to teach a lesson or good morals with a very soft approach. Only the main characters are revealed in this animation, but behind the scenes it is a fully fleshed out show.

PROCESS

The sets and puppets consisted of working with wire armatures, molding, casting, sculpture, sewing, woodworking, mosaic tile, painting, liquid latex, liquid rubber and airbrushing.

The characters were animated on a small green screen that I built.

The mouth shapes and eyes were made in Adobe Photoshop then imported into Adobe Character Animator where they were synced with the audio edited in Adobe Audition.

The animation was then edited in Adobe Premiere and sent to Adobe After Effects where the green screen was keyed out, visual effects were added, final film look was applied. The background sets I shot as individual planes so they could be turned into 3-D objects and digital camera moves could be achieved.

The heads movement was then tracked in Mocha AE and the tracking data was applied to the facial animation so that it synced with the head movement.

The project had some minor hurdles to get over during the process, but I feel like the combination of classic stop motion animation with digital elements makes for a fun and quirky look.