MAIN TV SHOW INTRO

The most impressive sequence produced for The Fairies was the main introduction to the TV show, the result of many CG artists working around the clock as the deadline approached...

The fairies animations were used along with some extra animation to a flock of fairy-mail and the hero fairy-mail wipe logo reveal featured at the end.

THE FAIRIES: VFX CONTRACT WORK

A recent VFX contract job was at Adelaide studio Rocket Squad. This was an intense yet fun three weeks in Adelaide's production hub, Kent Town.

This job was for character rigging and animation on The Fairies, a popular TV show for children. Working with a small team of highly creative artists, the work was quite varied including CG stunt-doubles as well as the more cartoony style of characters like Clickety Clock and Fairy Mail.

CG environment creation, texture and matt painting and a truckload of effects and compositing followed the huge chunk of animation performed by several animators and 3D VFX artists.

The work was created in Softimage, Maya, Boujou, Shake, Final Cut HD, Illustrator and PhotoShop.

The Fairies is currently screening on ABC and Channel 7 in Sydney.

CLICKETY CLOCK

An original character design based on a child's toy alarm clock, Clickety Clock features regularly on the show telling the fairies the time.

The work on Clickety was mainly Maya character rigging and some modelling and texturing tasks e.g. UV mapping and texture painting in PhotoShop.

FAIRY RING / VXF SHOT

3D VFX shots were created for one of the episodes where the fairies fly over the garden to investigate a fairy ring.

Similar to the opening crane shot used in the intro, the background was filmed on a guided cherry picker, though without the need for camera tracking work [Boujou].

RIGGING THE FAIRIES

Polygon models were provided along with some photos of the actors which were prepared in PhotoShop and then used as projected textures in Maya. The rigging controls were mainly driven keys based on simple bone rotations. This was simple to rig yet very effective and fast to animate.

RIGGING CLICKETY CLOCK

Next was Clickety Clock. This rig was far more complex using a wide array of controls including driven keys, bones, blendshapes, constraints, deform lattices and non-linear deformers.