Jun 18, 2018

Exclusive: How did Encyclopedia Pictura create the "DIY" mini-episode and provide it to Cartoon Network?

L.A.-based film and animation studio Encyclopedia Pictura is best known for its Bjork, Panda Bear, and Grizzly Bear music videos. One of their most recent projects, however, is DIY, an animated 3D television series for children that also includes an online community.

Cartoon Network has just begun airing Encyclopedia Pictura's short story "DIY": Cartoon Brew has an exclusive on the show, which dives into the mythical world of superheroes if you learn to do something yourself. Preview. [Encyclopedia Pictura directors Sean Helfricht and Isaiah Saxon explain how they came up with the idea for the series before the episodes aired, pitched it, produced it with less than 10 artists, and built a successful online community

He outlines the process of creating the series before the episodes aired.

Encyclopedia Pictura began in 2004 as the directorial duo of Helfritsch and Saxon and expanded to three directors in 2007 with the addition of Darren Rabinovitch. The studio works in several mediums and styles.

"Our general process and philosophy is to get crazy ideas that we really want to see. We firmly believe that in order to give the audience a sense of magic, we have to short-circuit their brains a bit. Magic comes from not understanding how something was done, so part of our approach to filmmaking is to seek to confuse the audience into a sense of wonder."

One of those crazy ideas turned out to be DIY, Helfritsch explains. "DIY" (do it yourself) in the title of this series is precisely what is at the heart of the idea for this project, which was born out of real life experience.

"We had a wild urge to move to the country and free ourselves from livestock. We built cabins, treehouses, hobbit houses, and learned to farm." We were excited by the feeling that we could learn anything on the Internet and then actually build it in the real world and change the environment. We started writing DIY as a way to encourage kids to engage with the world in this way.

Interestingly, as part of bringing the DIY concept to life, Encyclopedia Pictura, in collaboration with Zach Klein, co-founder of Vimeo, founded an online DIY community for kids called DIY.org. The community is available online and via an app and has over 1 million registered users. The community is essentially a learning environment exclusively for kids, where participants can post and watch DIY videos and earn "patches" related to the skills they have learned. For now, there is little interaction between the online community and the DIY series, but the series is designed as an extension of DIY.org.

"The original idea behind DIY.org was the realization that it would be a missed opportunity to successfully inspire kids but fail to give them the tools to actually do something," says Saxon. The fearless creative energy that kids have is so wonderful, but so many kids are missing out on it because it's not encouraged enough." So we set out to create a culture that celebrates that."

"DIY" began as an idea for a feature film that Encyclopedia Pictura imagined as a live-action version of children in a small Pennsylvania town. As ridiculous as it may sound, we worked on this version for several years with J.J. Abrams. Then Paramount shut it down. After that, we licked our wounds and began to think that Cartoon Network might be the only place we could find the odd tone we were looking for. "

The style of the show was thus reworked to fit the mood of an episodic animated comedy. An early sculpture made of clay by Saxon of the main character Eli and the main environment informed the directors of the medium of choice, which became computer graphics.

"Once Isaiah created that sculpted scene, we could point to it and say, 'We're going to make it look that way.'

The DIY characters were eventually sculpted in ZBrush and animated in Maya. Environments and effects were done in Cinema 4D, and everything was put together in May and rendered in V-Ray. The studio developed its own tools for facial animation to avoid the "plastic" feel of traditional CG rigs. We wanted the graphics to feel as lifelike as 2D or stop-motion, so we created custom ZBrush sculpts for each facial expression and mouth shape." "We had a huge grid of facial blendshapes and a slider tool so we could keyframe to blend between facial expressions.

The idea for a feature film led to many different projects, and "DIY" eventually came together as an animated series. The filmmakers had many story ideas and felt that a series would give them the freedom to create a deeper world. Cartoon Network was the place they sought.

"We approached Cartoon Network specifically because we liked what they were doing with Adventure Time and Clarence, and it seemed very creator-friendly," says Helfrichs. When we met, they already had a complete pitch bible, detailed concept art, tons of character designs, and a handful of story ideas." They were all very supportive and we got to work right away. We didn't sell the series anywhere."

Saxon and Helfrichs, of course, have prepared numerous pitches in the course of their animation work. For this film, DIY was something they had been thinking about for years, and both were well prepared and confident.

"We tend to over-prepare our pitches," says Saxon. 'We work on art for months and months, rehearsing scripts and speaking styles. Making a pitch is creating a show in my head. It's not a drag, but an opportunity to create the perfect blueprint for everything that comes later. It's about refining and revising the characters, worldview, tone, and themes until I feel I've boiled them down to their essence."

Encyclopedia Pictura is known for creating impressive work with a nimble team, and the same approach was taken for "DIY," which was created with a group of eight people. Says Saxon, "Keeping the team small and full of friends is the secret to us having a good time, and ultimately having a good time is the secret to pushing everyone's ambition level." 'Animation is very time consuming, so if you don't enjoy your time in the studio every day, then what's the point?'