Early Christmas For Emmerdale With Airwick Idents

Animated and appealing characters with plenty of 'expressibility' are set to enliven TV soap Emmerdale's idents as Christmas approaches.
Four different idents were created in total, with the animated rabbits and set all developed in-house at Golden Square by Sean Elliot and Jasper Kidd, who heads up Golden Square�s character development department.
Golden Square designed all of the elements in the film and prepared shooting boards and fully timed animatics to ensure that as much of the work was approved in 2D as possible before beginning full 3D animation.
Sean Elliot said: "Designing animal characters is a lot of fun but it can be difficult, depending on what the animal is.
"Some animals just don't lend themselves to being bent and stretched into a human form. Luckily for us the rabbits were lovely animals to work with.
"These spots were great to work on because the characters have such an important role. They deliver the message: there are no other voices or narrators.
"With this in mind I decided we should really focus on the characters expressibility above everything else. Even though body language through clear and appealing poses goes a long way to sending the right 'message' we concentrated most of our efforts on the facial rig. We added more controls giving us more flexibility in their faces and combined these into groups of expressions or emotions to make the animation process more natural.
"We wanted to achieve an intimate and cosy feel as 3 out of the 4 idents take place at night. Warm interior lights contrasted with cool moonlight gave us a good base.
"Table lamps and the Christmas tree allowed us to craft the lighting shot by shot to fine tune the final composition," he said.
(DS)