In 2007, I got a call from the traintastic world of Chuggington, and agreed to be parachuted in on a troubleshooting mission. The director was concerned that the human characters in the show were proving tricky to animate. I wasn’t surprised. Correctly-proportioned, naturalistic humans are always a nightmare. Realistic actions look slow and stiff while cartoony ones look plain wrong. This being telly, the animators had no time develop ideas by shooting their own live-action reference, as they would on a feature.
I saw no other option: I had to shoot all the reference myself – alone, with my tiny digital camera, in the back room of my house. I’m no actor but I know about expressing character through body movement. To look both realistic and animated, I had to make natural human movements with cartoon-level energy. And keep it up for 52 episodes.
Was it worth it? I made an almighty fool of myself and got a hernia (no joke)! Did it work? I have my doubts. Maybe the mission was an impossible one. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.
