Annibendod
This year, Cloth Cat has been working with Siwan Jobbins and Twt Productions to bring Bochau the hamster to life in the new series Annibendod.
The slapstick comedy series centred on a mischievous, fun-loving, slightly anarchic and messy girl, her friends and her animated hamster. It is produced by Twt Productions and Boom Cymru for S4C’s Cyw service and targets two-to-five-year-olds who are fluent Welsh speakers and Key Stage 1 and 2 children who are learning the language.
Cloth Cat Managing Director and Lead Tech Artist Josh Doyle supervised the live action shoot at three locations around Cardiff: a school in Cardiff Bay, the family house in Caerphilly, and then two different farms in the surrounding area. We were not only taking camera references and placing a size reference in shot, we were also working with Siwan to make sure we can achieve the scripts in the animation time available.
Back in the Cloth Cat Studio, Senior 3D Artist Kim McCarthy sculpted Bochau in ZBrush and then Blender, while Josh put his rigging hat on and created a specialised rig that allowed for biped and quadruped movement. Building our previous Blender work, we upgraded to v4.2 and used a full fur and GPU global illumination system for lighting and rendering. Josh then moved on to layout and lip-sync.
Kim and Josh worked together to make all the additional CG props and also the interior of Bochau’s hamster pad, which serves as the location for all the music videos that end each episode. Tom Lucas supplied 2D illustrations for the videos, as well as the original design for Bochau. CG Animator Sehyun Cho completed all the animation for the series and Jon Rennie did the compositing in After Effects with a full linear colour pipeline.
We really enjoyed working on this series and it brought back all the memories of Grandpa In My Pocket and Ha Ha Hairies from the early days of Cloth Cat!
