I was hired by the book publisher Callaway & Kirk because they wanted to expand into animation.
Then I got fired by the book publisher Callaway & Kirk, who did not expand into animation.
In between those moments, I directed a 3D animated version of the children's classic by David Kirk, Miss Spider's Tea Party.
Originally I was brought on to create David's "Nova the Robot" books using Maya. Notice the use of ambient occlusion. Today it takes just a button to implement but back then we had to create a separate file to use the Mental Ray renderer. I comped the layers in Photoshop and used the Soft Light blend mode to combine them.
But then the storied children's book publishing house Scholastic teamed up with the venerable children's toy making company Fisher-Price to create the Read with Me DVD! It's an interactive learning system with games and an animated story with narration and read-along type.
Many classic children's books were used for content, such as The Little Engine That Could and Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs & Ham. Each animation was to be as close to the original design as possible and they wanted "Miss Spider's Tea Party".
Since David's original art work was done with oil paint, it would have been impossible to animate, except maybe as a crappy 2d version, so the publisher convinced them to have it remade using 3D computer animation.
from Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends by Nelvana
Luckily, Nelvana, an animation production studio in Canada, had already modeled, rigged and surfaced all the characters for the upcoming tv series, so the time it would have taken to complete those tasks wasn't an issue.
I bid the job and we got the contract.
As the director, my job was to juggle many hats, such as coordinate, deadlines and delivery with Scholastic, hire and oversee talent to create the assets, hundreds of them, for the interactive component and keep the artist and studio happy.
Some of those were easy. Others, not so much.
Handling the production was easy. I'm good, very good actually, at that. I set up the timeline and hired a team, from 2 to 6 people depending on the needs, and production began. A good artist is invaluable for any animation production and I was lucky enough that two of the hires, Keith and Eric, needed very little direction while producing a bulk of high quality shots. That left me with less headaches for administration duties and more time to do what I love the most, animate.
Technical Notes
Modeled in Maya. Rendered in Mental Ray.
Many of the background characters were sent to us from Nelvana in Canada, so I can't speak to that, but the main characters were modeled and rigged in our NYC studio. Nothing proprietary was needed as Maya's robust tool set had everything we needed.
All stills are from the dvd
Book to Animation Comparison
Because the animation was being done in 3D, I had some leeway while storyboarding. Using the book as a jumping off point, I added shots to make it more cinematic. Luckily when David designed the book, he had thought through everything so whenever I had a question, he had the answer. He was a real pleasure to work with.
At the beginning, the book and animation where very similar.
I wasn't sure how to frame this and David told me he imagined the beetles coming out of a hole in the baseboard. An animated camera was used to capture all the action.
Keith did amazing work on this shot.
This page was broken up into 4 shots.
Keith killing it again, this time with the translucent rubber shader and lighting.
Eric's animation made this shot so much better.
I couldn't figure out what the background was. David told me that it's framed from inside a dollhouse, see the first still, and the red color is actually a wall in the room.
Best looking shot in the animation.
A particle expert was brought in for the tears. His work was good but David hated it so I hand animated them.
Another page where multiple cameras were used.
I believe this illustration was used for the frontispiece but in the animation is was added towards the end, where it belongs chronologically.
The most time-consuming animation because of the number of characters. Eric, again, nailed it. I believe the worm is David's self-portrait.
The title page put in it's proper chronological spot. When I animated this scene, the pen just moved around. I came in the next day and Keith finessed the motion to match the words revealing. Amazing.
This one took a while.