January in Review

From Red Bull to Reel One Entertainment

It may not look like much, but what you’re looking at is a vital part to the animation process for integrating animation into live action footage. This seamless integration is something we’ve been working on for a while now, and being able to do it with Red Bull for their Doodle Art competition has been a dream come true for so many of our team members.

January has been the month of Red Bull as many of us are calling it here at Heehaw. Doodle Art has been all encompassing for both our production and post-production departments. There were a lot of late nights, a lot of animators shaking while so addled on caffeine and, well, Red Bull, that when we handed it over and it passed the quality checks our entire team sighed in relief.

And while Red Bull projects have been nothing but a blast for us, stress aside, it wasn’t the only big project our team’s been cooking up in their proverbial kitchen. Our continued collaboration with Reel One Entertainment will see us kick off production on our second feature film next month.

Not a bad way to shake off the holiday rust and get into the new year right away. So let’s dive in and take a bit of a closer look at what we’ve been up to in January.

Red Bull Doodle Art

Syncing up live action to animation is a time consuming process. It involves proper camera work, framing, and an illustrator/animator combination skilled enough to keep the momentum going. For something simple, like lifting a can of Red Bull to drink, the process is much easier. But when we get to things like a skier flipping midair and our animation overlaying on top of it… getting it to match up perfectly can take some time. The end result is always worth the effort.

But, to backtrack a bit, let’s get into what we were even doing here in the first place.

Red Bull approached us with an offer to make some stellar adverts for their Doodle Art competition, a competition where university students all compete to doodle as best they can. As a company filled to the brim with avid doodlers, this was a dream come true, though admittedly slightly too late for our team to enter. The next best option was, of course, to use our doodling skills to create functioning and eye catching animations for our partners at Red Bull. We were given a shipment of Red Bull cans (filled with liquid gold, of course) to use as props and refreshment on set and, with our retinue of actors ready to rumble, got down to business.

Everything had to be centre frame the entire time to make the animation easier, but also to ensure that the adverts worked for TikTok and Instagram, our primary markets. With everything captured, and copious amounts of Red Bull consumed on the day, our producers brought the footage and approximately 274 cans of Red Bull back to our Edinburgh office for everyone. The footage went straight to our editors and animators upstairs and, as for the Red Bull, well, that went straight to our stomachs. To say we were shaking from excitement when working with Red Bull is only part of the truth. The other half was totally not at all just the sheer volume of the stuff we were drinking on a daily basis.

In the end, our animation department worked in some playful, doodle inspired illustrations into the short advert while seamlessly blending every aspect with the initial live action footage. The work itself was, by all accounts, incredibly fun to do if a little bit stressful, though we’re told that the quantity of Red Bull our team drank helped massively.

Who knew caffeine was so vital to the creative process?

Pre-Production, Round Two

Pre-production in a nutshell can be summed up in a few words: locations, crew, actors, and catering. These four ideas are central to our cadre of veteran feature film producers and were some of the sticking points to our last foray into the wondrous world of feature film making. Armed with the knowledge of what went wrong last time and how to mitigate (and hopefully eliminate) these problems, our team divided the work so everyone, and we mean everyone, was involved. Locations needed finding, crew members needed hiring, cast needed sourcing, and, obviously the most important, food needed to be planned, prepped, and purchased.

January saw a lot of our producers calling castles, sourcing fake snow, checking to see how long they could put down the fake snow, checking to see if castles would even let us use the fake snow… you name it and our production team probably did it.

While castles are, unsurprisingly, in abundance here in balmy Scotland, castles within a close enough proximity to Edinburgh that met everything our team wanted and downright needed to make this film work were… less so. But, never to be discouraged, the team set out to fulfil the jobs they were assigned, getting everything in place well before filming and starting both the year and the next feature film off on the right foot.

Now all that was left to do was hope we didn’t get actual snow before we needed it.

Looking for more? Stay tuned as we’re coming out with some great content this year.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a film agency to fulfil any of your Strategy, Animation, Motion Design, or film needs, get in touch with us below!