Making the Cards

Each card takes on average 10 days to produce, the simpler ones take less time, the more complicated ones, a great deal more time.

The cards are set in West Wales mainly because I love the area and have had two wonderful holidays per year there for many years – one day I will live there!! Meg’s farm Pentre Afon is fictional, as is the village of Ffynnon but – the Preseli Hills are real.

Work on the cards started in earnest with discussions on the storyboards for the four cards. I developed some ideas which were discussed with the animators (Mocha) and then developed into drawn storyboards for final agreement.

While this work was developing, the Mocha crew filmed my dogs and my friends dog Ella so that they had exactly the right movement captured on film (thanks a lot Janet - MUCH appreciated !!!). This ensured that the animation of Meg and Jazz would give a level of realism that we hope we have achieved.

Janet and Ella

The next phase was for Mocha to produce “the look” of both the dogs.  The more detail in coat tone etc added to the overall file size which had implications for download times so a lot of discussion took place at this stage – particularly over the need to get the eyes right !!  We then had the Canine Card dogs – Meg and Jazz.

The film that had been taken of the dogs was edited into various movements and saved as separate files e.g. Ross jumping left to right, Kerrie walking right to left, Ella sendaway etc.  We ended up with hundreds of separate files!

David and the team then started the difficult and time consuming process of animating the dogs.  The film of a particular movement was run on one computer screen while the dogs were drawn frame by frame on another screen – their movement followed the film to make it as realistic as possible.  This process is very skilled and very time consuming, for example just one of the shots of Jazz jumping just one jump took 35 different drawings to produce the animation. 

We then ended up with a variety of shots of the dogs for each of the cards which then were edited together into a complete card “story”.  Discussions took place on the scenery/setting for each card – all of which were drawn by David and team - and on the addition of sound. The sound recordist spent a week recording and producing actual sounds for each card (it fact, at one point, he stood in a field by a lamb waiting for 45 minutes waiting for it to bleat !!).  Finally – the cards were released to Kate and the team at Brava for testing and ------ after some additional work to ensure that the cards worked perfectly ---- the first Canine Cards were finalised.