Director Dan Fitzgerald at Noad Animation in Kent, UK: “We recently made this ident for the 2022 British Animation Awards.

“Creatively the main challenge was balancing how different each object holding up the sheep could be – the story is more fun if they’re all sitting on a wide range of different objects, but if they were too different the zoetrope would strobe and distract from the leaping sheep.

“Plus, as always, limited time! Reducing the color palette really helped here, and I’m happy with the balance we ended up with.

“The biggest technical challenge was keeping a few sheep animatable while all 24 had to end up in their correct poses to make the zoetrope work – each of those poses being a frame from the leaping animation loop. It felt a bit like adding a fifth dimension!

“I’d already decided to use Houdini for this project as I was excited to try the Kinefx character animation toolset, and Houdini’s procedural tools helped get those two animation dimensions to meet, as well as some careful cheating like swapping sheep poses while they’re behind the carousel.”
 

 
Client: British Animation Awards

Production: Noad Animation
Director/animator: Dan Fitzgerald

Music/sound design: James Rogers, Simply Sonic Studios