Title : How JAM Media Is Refining A Mixed-Media World With "Becca’s Bunch" | Nickelodeon [Updated]
link : How JAM Media Is Refining A Mixed-Media World With "Becca’s Bunch" | Nickelodeon [Updated]
How JAM Media Is Refining A Mixed-Media World With "Becca’s Bunch" | Nickelodeon [Updated]
How JAM Media is producing one of its most complex hybrid projects in the upcoming preschool series, Becca's Bunch, which is set to debut on Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. channels globally in 2018.
Having produced a number of mixed-media series like Picme and Roy, JAM Media is always up for a challenge. But when the Dublin, Ireland-based company agreed to adapt an award-winning original short film—Fear of Flying by Irish filmmaker Conor Finnegan—it nearly met its match.
Finnegan’s nine-minute film tells the story of a little bird who overcomes his fear of flying and follows his feathered friends south. Funded under the Irish Film Board’s Frameworks scheme, the short features a unique blend of live-action puppetry with 2D/3D animation. Among its many awards, it garnered Best Animation at both Ireland’s Galway Film Fleadh and the LA Shorts Festival in 2012.
“We saw the short in Galway on its premiere, and were really taken by its visual appeal and tactile quality,” JAM CCO Alan Shannon tells Kidscreen. Coincidentally, JAM head of development Chris Dicker was already floating an idea for a series starring a very positive and adventurous female lead. With a golden opportunity in its grasp, JAM optioned the film and brought Finnegan in to help art direct and craft a long-form preschool series with Dicker. JAM’s Dublin studio, meanwhile, got to work on the show’s stories and characters, and Manchester-based prodco and stop-motion animation expert Factory (Clangers, Scream Street) was hired to produce the series’ live-action elements.
Using a mix of live-action, puppetry, 2D and 3D animation similar to the short, the full series was renamed Becca’s Bunch. It follows the titular bird character and her friends as they head out on adventures in Wagtail Woods. Nickelodeon Senior Vice President (SVP) of International Production and Development Nina Hahn says the project was introduced to her and Nick’s Vice President (VP) of Content Acquisitions, Layla Lewis, at a very early stage. And it was love at first sight.
“They showed us the short even before they did the formal pitch into our larger group, which allowed us to give them feedback from multiple different filters on what we wanted to see,” Hahn says. “The content itself had a lot of the DNA of Nickelodeon, from the visual quirkiness, to the way the characters were developed and its strong female lead at the center. It really tapped into the kind of broad, emotional and simple ideas that we like to work with.”
As a result, Nickelodeon secured exclusive broadcast rights to the 52 x 11-minute series in the US, as well as global pay-TV rights, in October 2016. The show is slated to debut in 2018, with a premiere date to be announced nearer the launch. Three months later, JAM brokered a deal with Australia’s ABC Kids, and CBC Kids snapped up the series for Canada in May. Most recently, French terrestrial France Télévisions has acquired the rights for the show.
Learning curve
According to the show’s executive producers Shannon and JAM CEO John Rice, the project has been both a delight and a major challenge. “We never make things easy on ourselves, and we hit the jackpot with this one because it combines so many different little processes, some that we weren’t very well versed in,” says Shannon.
The production process begins with shooting live-action footage of puppets on customized rods built by Factory that give the characters a unique gait. The puppets are shot against real backgrounds to preserve the IP's (intellectual property) textural look and feel. Then in post, the rods are digitally removed, and the characters’ limbs and facial expressions are added using CGI animation.
“There’s a massive learning curve in how to compose shots in such a way that there’s less impact down the line for the digital process,” says Shannon. “For instance, all of the puppetry is carried out in real time, which sounds like it should be quick, but it’s far from it. It saves a little time on the floor, but the addition of the CG elements with the digital elements takes a long time.”
Other challenges involved figuring out how to accommodate multiple puppeteers using the rod-powered puppets on a very small set, taking the rods out for de-rigging, and removing shadows cast from the rods onto the puppets. The biggest obstacle, however, was matching the live-action footage exactly with CG elements.
“Even though we have tracking points on every puppet, using those as guides for where the limbs might go didn’t prove very successful at all, and at that point a large majority of the first 26 episodes were already shot,” says Shannon. “In the end, we had to reconstruct from scratch exact replicas of the characters in CG, even down to their indivdual hairs. Then we had to refine those rigs repeatedly until they matched exactly. It enabled us to copy the live-action motion so at least all of the eyes, beaks and limbs looked believable.”
Regarding the decision to use live action, Finnegan says shooting the puppets at 25 or 30 frames per second allows for more fluidity, since stop-motion is often filmed at a lower frame rate. “It has a much more analog feel, so when a character stops walking they will still bob around a little bit because the puppeteer may not have a completely solid hand. You can tell that there are a lot of people behind the craft of the puppets and the world,” says Finnegan.
For Rice, the production’s approach is paying off, now that the series is well into its second round of 26 episodes. At press time, 33 episodes and all 52 animatics had been shot, and three episodes were complete. “The learnings we’ve taken have also extended onto our other new shows like Jessy and Nessy,” says Rice. “And from a few of the Becca images we’ve posted, we’ve already had a number of rights holders and production companies looking to work with us to adapt the style on other properties.”
Going forward, Shannon says JAM will look to tie up presales in non-Nick territories, and begin discussions with a number of toy companies and licensees. “We already have two publishing deals secured, Egmont for the world and Candlewick for the US, and we expect to make some interesting announcements in the coming months,” he says.
Also, from BelfastTelegraph.co.uk:
How Belfast animators are pushing the boundaries of children's television shows
Animation studio Jam, which has studios in Belfast, is at the forefront of an industry making its mark globally, writes Fearghal O'Connor
John Rice, Jam Media chief executive, with Becca and some of their other characters
Becca and her two stuffed friends sit wide-eyed and happy on a couch on a shelf in an office on Kevin Street in Dublin. There's a parade coming up, but Becca and her friends have a big, big problem: their car, according to a plot outline scribbled on a whiteboard at one end of Jam Media's boardroom, is a banger.
But for rapidly growing children's TV maker Jam, Becca's Bunch, as the new Nick Jr series is to be called, looks set to be a flier.
Jam's chief executive and co-founder John Rice gently takes the very cute - and likely very lucrative - production prototype puppet off the shelf, placing her on the boardroom table like a dad showing off his newborn.
Jam had worked on a series based on the adventures of a courageous little bird, but it was going nowhere. Then they saw a short film by young animator Conor Finnegan at the Galway Film Festival.
Conor was brought on board and special rigs were built in the company's Belfast studio at Murray's Exchange on Linfield Road, where Becca is now in the middle of a complex production process to deliver a 520-minute first series for Nickelodeon. Negotiations are also under way with toy manufacturers. "If it ignites at all, and with subsequent seasons, something like this little guy could generate €15m over the course of its life on programme sales," says John. "Then with other stuff like toy deals or whatever... who knows?"
Jam's boardroom is a curious mix of business functionality and children's playroom.
Its colourful array of characters, usually aimed at younger children, adorn a room that otherwise could be the hub of a corporate solicitor's practice. John, too, dressed casual but smart, could just as easily be the creative head of an advertising firm. But his easy laugh betrays a predilection for fun.
If Becca's Bunch takes off, it will be just the latest hit for Jam, with shows like Picme and Roy playing to young audiences around the world.
And there's lots more to come. Rice points to a series of detailed timelines outlining production deadlines drawn neatly on one side of the big whiteboard: "This is Jessy & Nessy, which Amazon Prime has bought. This is a pilot for PBS in America. This is Tiara Jones, which is something we are doing with CBBC," he says.
With a growing number of series coming through production, turnover is expected to grow from €9m to €20m over the next three years.
"And then we have a couple of other options that have been taken out by a big US company, which I am not allowed talk to you about. I would love to ... ", he says with a big laugh, "next time".
"What I can say is that we are developing a series with a major US network. If it happens, it will be fantastic."
The idea for that yet-to-be-revealed show came from a six-minute student pitch at last year's Jam-backed Animation Dingle festival. The festival attracts key decision-makers from Amazon, BBC, Disney, RTE, Cartoon Network, Apple and Nickelodeon to the Kerry town. Little wonder that the 350 student tickets sold out overnight.
Jam's expansion has happened alongside growth across the entire sector in Ireland. Animation now employs more than 2,000 people here, generating hundreds of millions from exports.
In recent times, Irish animation studios have bagged Baftas, Emmys and Academy Awards.
"It's fantastic," said John. "There was a time you would almost feel guilty if you were in production, because so many weren't. Now there are a lot of great studios here. Ireland," he says, "is as synonymous with animation as the Nordics are with gritty crime dramas. We have a real brand as a country internationally. We have overtaken long-established countries like Canada, which for a long time was seen as a hotbed for animation companies. I think we are slowly eclipsing them."
John grew up in Abbeydorney, Co Kerry and was more interested in drawing on his schoolwork than in the schoolwork itself.
"Art was always my thing. I was always doodling and drawing and daydreaming. When I was growing up there wasn't too much to do in terms of creativity. It was kind of like 'Animation? What the hell is that? A Mickey Mouse job'."
That has all changed now, and he is a strong believer that young people should be encouraged to get into creative industries like animation, where there is a growing skills shortage.
"It has totally changed. Back then there was only one college in the whole of Ireland that you could go to if you were interested in animation - Ballyfermot College of Further Education, where I went in 1991. Now there are 23 colleges with courses."
The animation course in Ballyfermot in those days fed Sullivan Bluth, the studio established in Dublin in the mid-1980s by former Disney animator Don Bluth. But halfway through Rice's course, Sullivan Bluth closed down.
"There was nowhere to go for animators in Ireland. They were dishing out Morrison visas and if you got one you were pretty much guaranteed a job in America.
"Out of our class of 25 in Ballyfermot about 15 went to the States and the rest, I would imagine, did not keep it up."
An Oscar winner came out of the class - Richie Baneham for Avatar. There were also Emmy winners and the ones in the class who stayed with it have since gone on to achieve success, including the founders of other Irish animation companies like Brown Bag and Kavaleer.
"I don't know what made that class so successful, but it felt exciting. We were doing something new. It felt vibrant and ... shiny. I think people do their best work when they are happy."
But, after graduating from a course that suddenly did not have any obvious outlet for employment in Ireland, John headed off, along with 250 relocated Sullivan Bluth staff, to take a job at the 20th Century Fox studio in Arizona, which Bluth himself was now heading up.
There he worked on a number of animated films, including Anastasia, for three-and-a-half years.
"I learned my craft there, but I also could see the world changing around me. I was still using pencil and paper and animating by flipping sheets."
After a stint in New York doing character designs for MTV, Rice returned to Dublin to do a Masters in Multimedia in Trinity College in 1998 to open up the world of digital.
He began using Adobe Flash as his animation tool and suddenly found himself with the ability to deliver broadcast quality content over the web.
He had first met his two business partners, Mark Cumberton and Alan Shannon, in Ballyfermot. And now, with opportunities and possibilities opening up, the three decided to collaborate and set up Jam Media.
The original plan was to animate short adult-oriented jokes for the web: "We thought we would make loads of money from that. I have a cheque somewhere for $2.99 from six months of that business model."
The company's first big success came with the development of the children's programme Picme, an innovative kids' show that made the viewers the stars. Jam had developed a software that allowed the superimposition of kids' faces on animated characters.
"It was like the launch of our first album. It was very innovative at the time and sold in 130 countries and is still available as an app. We are always looking to push out the boundaries of children's television. You can really push the boundaries with a younger audience, more so than you can with an older one."
Currently, the company has about seven shows in development. Much of that initial work is done by the company's 30 staff at its headquarters in Dublin.
In Belfast, the company has a studio with 75 people where, says John, "the heavy lifting is done" for the production of a series. The 30 staff in the Dublin head office are mainly focused on development.
"We have grown very organically over the years. We didn't take on any investment, apart from friends and family at the beginning. It has been nice, steady growth.
"Two years ago, typically we would have been doing one series at any one time, but now we have the facilities to do three, maybe four, and we will continue to do that."
--Ends--
More Nick: Charlotte, NC Voiceover Artist Lisa Biggs Lends Voice To New Preschool Series "Becca's Bunch"!
Originally published: Tuesday, September 26, 2017.
Additional sources: Licensing Corner, TelevisionPost.com.
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