Doodle Dan short film wins Cbeebies’ Student Commission 2010 Competition
Students from Liverpool have beaten off the competition to win the Cbeebies’ Student Commission 2010 competition.
Doodle Dan, a short film about a spaceman and his friend Mit coming to life from a doodle and their adventure, was created by students from Liverpool John Moores University.
The short was created by students Nicolas Thomson, Stephen West, Jonathan Wharmby and Pei Sze Wong, and won the award for it’s originality, humour and imaginative animation techniques, blending 2D and 3D animation together with real life acting to create the short film for the Cbeebies website. The film features Chris Chittell, better known as Eric Pollard in Emmerdale.
The student’s ideas were brought to life by a small team of animators at Chapman Entertainment, providing the 2D characters as Adobe Flash animation and the 3D elements created in Autodesk’s Maya. Once the live action shots were edited into one sequence it was then passed on to the compositor where some of the shots where tracked so that the artwork could be placed into the live action footage. The whole thing was combined using Adobe’s After Effects, which allowed the compositor to add lighting, grading and effects to the finished piece.
Doodle Dan was produced an created in conjunction with Chapman Entertain, a London based production and licensing company. The film was animated at their studios near Manchester.
Senior producer at Chapman, Phil Chalk commented that “the Cbeebies Student Commission provides a great platform for recognising talent in the North West. We are very pleased to mentor such a talented bunch of students.” He added that the four students, Thomson, West, Wharmby and Wong, were exceptionally “motivated, creative, and embraced the whole experience.”
Speaking on behalf of Cbeebies, executive producer Sarah Colclough said that the competition gave “students from the north West a chance to experience the whole production process from beginning to end.” This included the pitch, scripting and storyboarding, right through to the final sign off.
She adds that “it was wonderful to be able to give this unique opportunity to young talented film makers, who in turn have created great content for the Cbeebies audience.”