BBC / Little Howard: Animation & compositing

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Little Howard’s Big Question, a BBC Childrens TV show on BBC1 and CBBC brought comedy live act Big Howard and Little Howard to the small screen with a unique blend of animation and live action. The series won excellent audience ratings (a 23% share during 1 month) as well as praise from TV critics, “…Little Howard is worth the licence fee alone…” wrote Benedict Clancy in the Sunday Times.
Little Howard’s Big Question examined the questions that children most want answered, such as ‘could the dinosaurs ever return?’, ‘how will I know when I’ve fallen in love?’ and ‘can I believe my eyes?’. Big Howard, played by Howard Read was accompanied in the real world by his animated side kick, six-year old Little Howard. The production used Flash to animate Howard’s 2D characters which Loco then composited into the live action sequences filmed on location. The 13 x 28 minute programmes featured 20-25 minutes of animation in each episode as the cheeky 2D character of Little Howard interacted with people and places in his weekly quests.
Loco beat numerous other post production houses to the ambitious project and won on the strength of our team’s technical expertise, workflow and enthusiasm for the project. Working closely with comedian and animator Howard Read and the CBBC production team, Loco’s editors helped to craft the stories while our animators and compositors developed the 2D animations in Flash, After Effects, Shake and Boujou. Shot in DVCam, Loco ingested all footage using our 4Gb SAN network at broadcast resolution, enabling the compositors and editors to work in tandem at online quality throughout the project.
Peter Davies, Executive Producer at the CBBC praised the team, ‘Producing Little Howard for CBBC has meant breaking new ground from inception to delivery. We’ve had to write the manual from scratch for how to make a live action factual comedy featuring a six year old animated boy. We couldn’t have done this without a post production facility house with unique skills’.
- See more at: locomotion.co.uk/index.php/little-howards-big-question/#sthash.cGSdnDdM.dpuf
Credits:
Client: BBC
Product: Little Howard Series
Exec Prod: Peter Davies
Series Prod: Vanessa Frances
Director: Dermot Canterbury
Director: Bruce Webb