Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1100392
www.postmagazine.com 30 POST MAR/APR 2019 SESAME STREET CG AND ANIMATION Many of the animated or CGI sequences on Sesame Street, including the popular "Elmo The Musical" segments, which feature fantasy worlds from Elmo's imagination, "Smart Cookies" and "Crumby Pictures" shorts, or certain elements in the spe- cials such as Once Upon a Pickle or hot air bal- loons in The Magical Wand Chase, are completed by Nashville-based Magnetic Dreams Animation Studio, who has been working on the show for about 15 years. "We have a fairly broad spectrum of work we do here," says Mike Halsey, president & found- er, Magnetic Dreams. "We complete 3D and 2D animation, motion graphics, special effects and we apply all those things to Sesame Street. A lot of times we build sets. They shoot the Muppets on blue or green screen and we build the world around them." Exactly what they did for the "Super Grover 2.0" sequences — the first major work the team at Magnetic Dreams completed for the series. "For the show proper, we tend to do special effects," continues Halsey. "So, if they write a script where some of the characters turn into robots or if there's just set extensions or different visual effects, or every once in a while a CGI character, when it was something that would just be too difficult to puppet, we'll complete that for the show. For, The Magical Wand Chase, a few seasons ago, we had a CGI bird in there. It was built to look as much like a puppet as we could get it in CGI, but it was just because of the different actions, it was more cost effective to do a CGI bird than it would have been to do the scenes with a puppet." The team primarily relies on a blend of tools that includes Maya for most of the 3D, occasionally some Houdini for bigger effects or simulation and Redshift for rendering (a GPU renderer) which, explains Rickey Boyd, creative director, "we dearly love because of its speed. It's really sped things up for us. Things that were taking 20 to 30 minutes a frame is kicking off in six or eight minutes a frame. We use After Effects for most of the composit- ing because it's such a nice Swiss Army Knife of a program and we do so many different things for the show, it's been handy to be able to do compositing work or green screen or motion graphics in the same software. Those have been our primary tools." With the live action, CGI and animation footage combined, there's a large amount of assets to store. "We use LTO tape arching and AWS archiving for storage, so we always triple and double our content," explains James. "We have a lot of Google charts and trackers for important things like Abby's wand — we need to have that handy — things we use every season, we have to know where to find them. The Sesame font or num- bering for the show, we have local. We also have a shared-storage system called EVO NAS [from Studio Network], where we have things like re- peatable segments. It's very quick for our team to pull that asset." For instance, the popular "Letter of the Day" song which, James points out, will be getting an update. "The first few lyrics are 'Jump up, get down!' Whenever my three-year-old daughter hears it, she's on her feet. For Season 50, we are revamping the song. I have a feeling it will be a big hit. Look out for it." According to James, who says he's had the "privilege of working at Sesame Street for 19 years," he can't really "compare it to other productions. The feedback I've received from editors and post professionals that come to work at Sesame from other productions is that while Sesame does have a unique way of operating, it is a well-managed organization that has a highly efficient post process." Salazar agrees, "It's a great show. It's been a great privilege to be a part of this. There are not a lot of things in our culture we can be proud of these days. So, it's really nice to be part of an organization that's trying to help the world and do things for kids and make it a better place." Post's Linda Romanello poses with Abby. On-set at Kaufman Astoria Studios. Sony 4K cameras are used for shoots. The show is edited in Premiere.