Welcome back to the Unknown…Cartoon Network’s folkloric miniseries Over the Garden Wall is ten years old this year. To celebrate the milestone, Aardman Animations was commissioned to craft a stop motion short that will be of serious delight to fans as well as newcomers to this tale of two brothers, Wirt and Greg, who navigate the mysterious and dreamlike world of the Unknown.

We caught up with Director of Photography, Toby Howell, about the making of the Over the Garden Wall 10th Anniversary Short and he gave us the scoop, down and detailed.

“I’d worked with Mikey (Please) and Dan (Ojari) before, having shot commercials for them in London and I knew they had a great eye. I am also a fan of OTGW, having watched it all 10 years ago with my son, so it was super exciting when they asked me to shoot it for them.” Having trained at Aardman Animation in the 90’s, Howell refers to it affectionately as his “old Alma Mater,” telling us, “I was a runner and camera assistant before moving into lighting series work for them like Shaun the Sheep and Creature Comforts US, as well as lots of commercials, so it was lovely to come back to their studio in Bristol.”

He went on to explain: “Aardman had effectively taken this project on knowing it had a low budget, and as such are really well placed to solve it as their studio is so fantastically well set up, and we could add a lot of value. All the equipment is in great condition and they have a highly skilled in-house Post pipeline. A lot of the set’s trees were recycled from previous Aardman projects, and if you have been involved with set building at all, you know custom-made trees are time consuming and expensive. Another advantage was that the incredibly gifted Flynn brothers (Sculpt Double) were already fans of the series, so they went above and beyond creating the incredible ‘wooden’ puppets.”

The team captured the project on Canon 1DX bodies with selection of Zeiss ZF2 and Nikon Primes. “Dragonframe was integrated throughout the process,” Howell said, “as every shot needed technical plates capturing as well as the animation of the puppets themselves. For example we used 3D camera plates underneath the bodies on any shot that required ‘atmospheric’ effects (haze or mist) to be put in in Post.

“So when the camera tracks into Greg and Wirt when we first see them in the forest, each frame has a corresponding Left and Right ‘eye’ capture so that Post can determine the 3D space in the set in order to apply haze effectively. We are also tracking in on a slider and pulling focus using motion control. This was all programmed by Adam Cook, who was my 1st AC and is an Aardman’s in-house Moco expert!”

“This shot,” he went on, “like a few others, had foreground foliage shot as a separate plate so that the Animator could get to the puppets without fighting off a load of trees and leaves. It also means that we can set these elements quickly, shoot them, then take them away without having to rig them carefully to survive a couple of days animation. As with all the plates, we would use Dragonframe to control different light states as well as control Moco—so usually we would shoot a beauty still, the same frame with a green screen, and a silhouette still with the beauty light turned off. You get incredibly good mattes from a sequence of stills this way.

“James Owen, my Gaffer, was using Dragonframe to set lighting color balances that we were carrying over from set to set. One temptation with stop frame sets is to over light, you have time , and access to a lot of lights!  When we entered into the montage sequence I tried very hard to be true to whatever environmental logic a set presented.

“So this campfire set is lit wholly with a single broad moonlight from behind, and the flickering camp fire in the middle (Post painted dancing fire over the bare bulbs I had in the fireplace) . I made a little diffusion cap that sat over these fireplace bulbs and used black tape to retain or open up the firelight across the clearing. James programmed a Fire flicker effect into the multiple bulbs with Dragonframe.”

“In this set I used a small moonlight bounce, and a single practical bulb inside the Woodsman’s lamp to light up the dark forest—a challenge for the animator, as they are effectively now lighting the shot. We worked closely to make sure they could hit certain positions with the animation- and shot various exposures to be able to ‘rescue’ elements of the short in Post if needed.”

“For the Steam Boat shot, Adam Cook set up two cameras for me shooting at two corresponding sets in the same unit-  and we controlled and solved both setups through the same DF computer. This was because the shot had two different scaled elements, the foreground and the background, with corresponding tracking moves- so it made sense to see them together on the same screen in the unit. A head twister for Adam for sure!

“Like all the skies, I pushed colored light onto a grey paper CYC to create a base sky that we added clouds on top of in post. This meant that the orange /blue sunset we created on set reflected into the animated water surface correctly.”

“All the shots were timed out and Directed by Mikey and Dan, who acted out Lavs for every single action—these videos were on set as great references for the animators who then added their own life to the puppets.”

For more on the production, see the behind-the-scenes video below:

CREDITS:
Series Creator – Patrick McHale
Stop Motion Animation – Aardman Animations
Directors – Mikey Please and Dan Ojari
Writers – Patrick McHale, Dan Ojari, and Mikey Please
Producer – Alan Thorpe
Executive Producer – Helen Argo, Sarah Cox, Patrick McHale
Wirt – Elijah Wood
Beatrice – Melanie Lynskey
Greg – Collin Dean
Narrator/Toymaker – Frank Fairfield
Casting Director – Karie Gima Pham
Voice Director – Patrick McHale
Editor – Dan Williamson
Colour Script Artist – José Prats
Storyboard Artists – Mikey Please and Dan Ojari
Production Coordinator – Chelsea Galloway
Puppet Makers – Joshua Flynn, Nathan Flynn, Rachel Brown, Laura Tofarides
Supervising Set Dresser – Emma-Rose Dade
Senior Set Dressers – Luke George, Manon Wright
Set Dressers – Maria Collado Bonú, Bronny Salter
Junior Set Dresser – Phoebe Gibson
Animators – Lee Wilton, Marie Lechevallier, Suzy Parr
Rigger – Luke George
Director of Photography – Toby Howell
Camera Assistant and Motion Control Operator – Adam Cook
Electrician – James Owens
Visual Effects Supervisor – Bram Ttwheam, Fernando Lechuga
CG Supervisor – Ben Toogood
Senior Compositor – Spencer Cross
CG Character Supervisor – Nathan Guttridge
CG Artist – Trine Sørensen
CG Animation Supervisor – Mathew Rees
Senior CG Animator – Inez Woldman
Trainee Junior VFX Artist – Ethan Mainwaring-Taylor
Music – The Blasting Company
Sound Mixer – Will Davies
Colourist – Bram Ttwheam
Social Media and Publicity Manager – Elizabeth Quigley
Head of Business Affairs – Layla Stapenhurst