A part cel, part digital Free for All: this animated Showtime series is a hybrid of 2D and 3D and claims bragging rights as TV's first animated half-hour mastered in HDCAM - Graphics & Animation

Post, June, 2003 by Ken McGorry

NORTH HOLLYWOOD--Here's a changeling story for you--take your artwork from pen-and-paper drawings to the world's first high def, computer-aided cartoon TV series in one giant step. Sound feasible?

Brett Merhar, the creator of the cult-favorite Free for All" cartoon strip, found himself with that proposition at the end of last year. Producer Richard Hull had negotiated an enviable deal with Showtime for seven initial episodes in which Merhar's quirkily realistic characters would come to life on the screen. Showtime's original production guidelines call for high definition, however so a team had to be put together that could shepherd the episodes through television's most demanding format.

Hull is a feature film producer with titles like She's All That to his credit, but he's found many similarities to live action production in the animated world of Free for All. He helped put together a team of top animation pros to gridge the gap. "Ninety percent of the issues are the same across the board." he says of his new job as co-executive producer "but we've brought in some great animation people that absolutely know what they're doing." Two such specialists are former Sponge Bob head writer Merriwether Williams, now Free for All head writer/executive producer, and digital guru Mmdi Lipschultz, the series' line producer:

THE TEAM

This Free for All gang of four signed on with venerable animation studio Film Roman, (www.filmroman.com); initiated relationships with Korean animation companies Digital Magic and Yea Rim for digital paint and tweens; Glendale's Savage Frog Studios for 3D modeling; and Burbank post house MatchFrame to finally put it all together online in an Avid/DS HD. Also, Film Roman's in-house 3D lab, Forum Visual Effects, has now stepped in to help with the 3D work. Film Roman also provides the standard def offline Avid cut of each episode.

But wait a minute. 3D? A meant-for grownups cartoon strip morphs into a high def animated series with 3D elements? Grown up cartoons tend to be character-driven affairs relying more on wry dialogue than effects. However the makers of Free for All are also pragmatists and Lipschultz, who was responsible for designing the show's production pipeline, says the 3D elements are more for ease-of-use than wow factor: Free for All, set to debut in July, uses LightWave-conjured street vehicles as well as a 3D model of the main character's (Clay) Denver penthouse.

Along with that penthouse (Clay had won a lawsuit against a fast food chain) came a Ferrari. Also, there are some bad boys who don't mind challenging Clay's sports car with their souped-up pickup truck. The vehicles run much more efficiently in 3D space, especially in the series' drag race sequences, as 3D models painted to look like 2D cel animation. And Clay's penthouse, also modeled in LightWave 3D, now offers many varying backgrounds for each episode's action, allowing the virtual camera to swing around.

But since the work is shipped out to two Korean companies (one for animating and one for painting), the added pan-oceanic intricacies of integrating 3D elements became too much to consider exploiting 3D further:

But the series will stick with the 3D penthouse and cars. "A lot of the story takes place in Clay's car and penthouse," says Lipschultz, which Savage Frog originally created. "We would shoot back-plates of the penthouse from different positions and the 2D animators would draw upon the CG background." With the cars, she adds, "it's a little more complicated." The Free for All team goes the extra step of rendering the cars and printing the scene frame by frame; the animators draw where the characters go, animate and paint them, then give them back to the 3D people and have them place the characters into the 3D cars "so they can drive around in 3D space."

THE GEAR

As for painting the 2D animation, Korea's Digital Magic uses Toon Boom's USAnimation system which also comes in handy for HD mastering due to its resolution independence. Back at Film Roman, the team composites an episode's scenes, which may number over 475, with the unusual combination of After Effects (for scenes integrating 3D elements) and Film Roman's own US Animation system (for purely 2D scenes).

Free for All's HD production, which is actually "thousands and thousands of Targa files," as Lipschultz puts it, is mastered at MatchFrame in 1080p/1920 at 24fps in 16x9. "That way we'll be able to do any dubs for any kind of foreign format" and also make their HDCAM master for Showtime as well as NTSCdubs for standard broadcast.

Merhar created each character's design sheets, draws certain key frames, created the characters' library of mouth movements and is also the voice for Clay

Head writer Williams describes herself as the show-runner." With my staff of two writers we wrote every script. I direct the voice recordings and hand out the scripts to the storyboard artists." She also critiques both the completed storyboards and animatics. Williams liaisons with the network on all creative matters, and also supervises music and sound effects. Some of the audio is done at Jim Gomez Sound Design.