Blue's Clues
At Nickelodeon's digital studio in New York, animators on Blue's Clues are using Macintosh computers running Photoshop and Adobe After Effects software to combine animated sets and characters with a live-action host. Even storyboards are created in Quark, so that they can be revised after various stages of the show's extensive kid-testing process.
While live-action is being shot on video (against a green-screen, color-key background), artists create props and characters out of clay and simple materials, then photograph them with a digital camera. The images are then cleaned-up and dressed-up, a process series co-creator and designer Traci Paige-Johnson calls making the images "yummy," then imported to After Effects where they are animated and composited with the live-action footage.
Series co-creator and executive producer Todd Kessler said that when the show was being developed, the technology decisions came out of the needs of the content. "The whole idea behind going `low-tech' and animating on desktop computers was to spend as little as possible on equipment, so that we could spend the largest portion of our budget on creative talent."
Both Blue's Clues and South Park creators use the computer as a very sophisticated camera which enables the production process to be broken down into stages that can be handled by different teams of people: storyboards, design and layout, lip-sync, and animation. Both shows use relatively small production teams--ranging from 15 to 30 people per episode, compared to the huge staffs, both in-house and overseas, needed to produce a typical 2D or cel-animated series. We can expect to see more of this kind of computer use in animation, blurring the line between CGI and traditional animation, and breaking through once-prohibitive cost and time barriers.