SpeakeasyFX Creates Furry Digital Puppets

When the makers of Sesame Street were considering whether to make certain elements of the show digital, its main concern was to keeping the look and feel of the Sesame Street puppets in CG. For director Jan Carlee and the animation team at SpeakeasyFX, tasked with creating 13 nine-minute digital episodes along with footage for online games that will begin appearing within the Sesame Street show in November, this presented a number of challenges, not the least of which was creating hair and fur that moved dynamically on these characters.
The main challenge for the digital version was to maintain the integrity of the brand.

“It was important to have that puppet performance in there because you had to acknowledge a 39-year heritage of the Sesame Street franchise,” Carlee says. “For a show to be around 39 years is pretty impressive in the first place and we didn’t want to through the baby out with the bathwater in making the CG version.”

This all started with the test SpeakeasyFX created when bidding for the job.

“Scott Stewart [executive producer/executive director of SpeakeasyFX] and his team put together a beautiful test,” notes Carlee. “A big part of the test was getting the look of the puppets correct, making sure their hair wasn’t locked off, that there was follow-through with the hair, that the clothes would move to some degree. The test had a lot of personality and set up the modus operandi of what I was going to do with the show. Namely, balancing the percentage of puppet performance and CG character performance so that it feels like a puppet but by not being a physical puppet opened up a lot of possibilities character performance that weren’t normally possible.”

Carlee began watching hours and hours of Sesame Street and puppeteering to get a sense of how the characters moved and acted.

“The trick was to have the head drive the performance because with a puppet the hand is in the head and that really drives the entire performance,” explains Carlee. “. Once we started getting involved with the show the people at Sesame Street were very relieved that there would be something akin to what they’d been doing in the past but allowed them to move forward.”

The episodes star the existing Sesame Street character Abby Cadabby and introduce a host of new characters. The main new characters were designed by Peter de Seve, while David Michael Friend developed the secondary new characters in-house at Speakeasy FX.

“We worked with the performer of Abby Cadabby, Leslie Carrera-Rudolph. She does the voice and the puppeteering. She was gracious enough to give us a tutorial on how she approaches the character and certain mannerisms she puts into the character. That was really important for us to get inside the head of the character. Our version of Abby became a lot closer to the Sesame version of Abby right after that session. The challenge of creating new characters from scratch was completely different than trying to create Abby, getting in the puppeteers head and mimicking gestures and personality. For he new characters we had to formulate how the characters moved, their mannerisms, everything.”

Fur Simulation for Television

The one major technical hurdle of the digital puppets was to create the hair and fur that would move. While this has been done in feature films by giant animation houses like Pixar it has never been done on this level for a television show, with a television show’s time and budget constraints. For this they wrote a software plug-in for Softimage XSI.

“We worked on some software that would make the hair and clothe motion more streamlined so we did not have to do extensive hair and cloth simulation.” Carlee “That was a really important piece of the puzzle to make them feel like puppets. It basically gives the show a much richer look because there is motion to the hair and cloth. It’s not as robust as something like Pixar does but there aren’t any characters with moving hair and clothes on TV. Once we knew we could write the software to do this in an efficient manner it really put us in good shape and we knew it would come out really good that was like nothing else on television.

“There were certain parameters than allows us to direct the hair and cloth. When they are on a bicycle we can dial up the wind dynamic and make it blow and flutter in a certain direction. It moves dynamically with the movements of the characters. And then if something doesn’t go quite right we would go in and keyframe certain frames to make it look right. It is not a crazy simulation but it does elevate the quality of the TV show.”

Creating Digital Boundaries

Once the Sesame Street makers saw the tests they were excited about the limitless possibilities the digital world had to offer. But it was important for SpeakeasyFX to lay down some basic parameters they had to operate within to keep in line with the budget.

“One of the things we worked with the Sesame people is that most of the episodes would occur within the location of the school. While everyone was excited with the possibilities of the students going on field trips that needed to be limited to some degree. You couldn’t do the shown budget with all different locations. We also gave them some rules about things that were outside of the scope like fluid simulation and fire, and other things which to do well would be outside the parameters of the schedule and budget.
For each of the scripts we would go through and make sure that it could operate within the confines of the show, making sure the character counts were at a reasonable level, making sure the props were limited, stuff like that.”

Recording the Show

When it came to recording the voices for the animated characters, Carlee took an old-school approach to achieve the ensemble-cast feel that is so integral to the Sesame Street formula.

“Unlike a lot of animation where everyone records their voices separately, one of the things I wanted to maintain in the tradition of the show was to do the voices as an ensemble. The puppeteers are used to working together in the first place so we decided to do it that way and just put everyone in the booth,” explains Carlee. “Doing it that way I could really hear how the show was playing. I think that by allowing the ensemble version to happen allowed for a great energy level that the animators could take advantage of. I could also make sure gags were firing properly and be confident that everything working instead of finding out later when we were putting it all together that something didn’t work. So it was almost like the old Rockie and Bullwinkle show, which were recorded like radio shows. Before anyone animated they knew how the show played.

“I encouraged them to ad lib and overlap lines. I recorded several takes as an ensemble, encouraged them to step on each other’s lines and find the energy of the script. I would record one version clean just in case I did need a line broken out to give the animators the freedom to change things up little if we saw opportunities to add an element to the episode. I’d also encourage the actors to do a silly version, do ad-libs, sound effects, anything they could think of. So all of that gave me everything I needed to put the show together.”