Grant Orchard Creator of "Hey Duggee" Visits Escape

Grant Orchard creator of "Hey Duggee"

On Wednesday night Grant Orchard, the Oscar-nominated creator of "Hey Duggee" was our guest at Escape Studios to talk about his work and career in animation. 

Grant showed us some of his early work, his 2011 Oscar-nominated short film A Morning Stroll, and the early pitches for the TV series that became Hey Duggee.  

The evening was a great opportunity for our students to meet one of Britain's leading animators.

Animator, Designer, Writer

Grant Orchard and Dr Ian Palmer

Grant Orchard explained that he is an animator, a designer and a writer - "mostly in that order". 

Grant Orchard started his arts career doing a foundation course, and then studied animation at Farnham College of Art and Design. 

Pizazz Pictures

Pizazz Pictures later became Studio AKA

Grant started his animation career at Pizazz Pictures in the late 1980s, which later became Studio AKA. 

Animator Eric Goldberg was one of the founders of Pizazz Pictures, but in 1990 he left the company to animate the Genie on Aladdin at the Disney Studio in Los Angeles.  Grant started out as a runner at Pizazz; as a runner you are literally running around (or - more accurately - as Grant put it - "sauntering").  But being a runner was (and still is) a great way to get your foot in the door in the industry.  Grant got to meet everyone at the company, and learn how it worked.

Commercials in Soho 

Grant started working at Studio AKA on commercials, animating rice crispies, doing 2D animated commercial jobs, often for toys and cereal products.  Later Ad agencies started to want work that was a bit less cartoony, a bit more designed. 

Grant started doing stylish commercials for Adman John Webster. One of the first adverts was for for Orange (the phone company) - commercials that were "clean, stylish and modern".  Later Grant did an advert for Compaq computers, to teach the public what a search engine is. The idea was to have a crow, searching for stuff.  That commercial was animated with Mario Cavelli in four months.

Personal Work

At the same time as he worked on commercials, Grant Orchard started doing short films of his own, which soon got noticed by advertisers. So the personal work was noticed by industry - and this led to more and better commercial work. 

A Morning Stroll

2011 - A Morning Stroll

Studios do have downtime from time to time. Maybe you have been pitching ideas, and maybe the clients aren't getting back to you. So what do you do? The answer is "a short film".  The result was the 2011 short "A Morning Stroll", which was nominated for an Oscar in 2012.  Everyone at Studio AKA worked on it, and it took two years to get it done.  It won a bunch of awards, including a BAFTA. 

Then in 2012 Grant made "Yeah Just There", a slightly rude 2D animated Short. 

Kid's TV Series - Hey Duggee

Around this time the industry "was getting a lot more competitive, with a lot more pitching, and less success in landing commercial projects".  So Studio AKA said, "what about a kid's show? What might that look like"? Grant had worked on The Amazing Adventures of Gumball (including the logo and the title sequence).  Soon, Hey Duggee was born (originally titled "Chop Chop"), a TV series aimed at 0-5 year old kids.  Each episode would be seven minutes long, and was eventually broadcast on CBeebies.  

Fun Stuff with Kids

Hey Duggee

Grant imagined that the show should be very activity based (he had two young boys at the time), to give parents ideas for what to do with their kids.  

Keep It Simple

The key thing from a design point of view was to "Keep It Simple".  The overall structure must be direct and clear.  Hey Duggee is a colourful world, "a bit of a cliched world maybe, but it's bright and cheerful and funny".   They did a pitch deck, that looked like a Children's Book.  The dog gives out badges - so all the kids get badges, like being in the Scouts. A familiar world recreated in a fun, colourful style.  

Hey Duggee "Sizzle Reel"

Hey Duggee

To pitch the show, Studio AKA did a 90 second animated "Sizzle Reel" with narrator Alexander Armstrong.  Ninety seconds is about right for a sizzle reel; this is enough time (but not too much) to show what the series is all about.  It was animated in Flash - now Adobe Animate. 

Cartoon Forum

Grant and Studio AKA pitched the show at Cartoon Forum, the TV Series pitching forum in France.  There "you hope that industry folks will come up to you, and want to help you get it made".   At Cartoon Forum a distributor was interested, but they wanted some changes. For example, the main character should be a kid, not an adult. And there needed to be a toy that is associated with the show.  

Enter the BBC

Back in the UK, as Studio AKA processed these changes, they pitched to the BBC - who loved the show and didn't want any changes.  The BBC had just one note - that everything should be grounded in reality.  They also thought the title "Chop Chop" was "too aggressive, so it became Hey Duggee instead.  Studio AKA was commissioned by the BBC to produce 52 episodes, which is about normal for a TV series.  

Scripts and Storyboarding

So Studio AKA wrote about a dozen scripts, and then began storyboarding.  The team would do rough animatics, with sounds FX and rough voices.  Everything was drawn in Photoshop on a Cintique.  The show was loosely based on Grant's own family.  He was also inspired by a number of TV shows from his youth - he wanted the show to be a bit like "The Mighty Boosh" and "Miffy". 

Route Sheet Tracking

To track the progress of the shows they used Route Sheets - physical paper schedules pinned to the wall  to track the progress of each episode.  Grant misses the use of Route Sheets - they keep everyone on their toes. "Once this process gets digitised, something gets lost". 

Design

In Hey Duggee each character occupies its own physical space

The design was always intended to be super simple.  The Style Guide developed a series of rules, for example that each character had to have space around them, with no overlapping characters.  This simplicity helps kids navigate a complex world.

Frog

Hey Duggee Frog

Some characters, such as Frog, are so simple they are just a triangle shape, hardly more than that. "It's a frog because we say it's a frog" 

Different Styles

They also did a number of episodes in different styles, just to keep the series inventive and fun.  

And they even got an exhibition at The Design Museum, the only kid's TV series ever to do so.  This made Grant "extremely proud". 

They also built a Pose Library in Animate in case anyone wanted to use pre-existing poses. Costume changes were also stored in the library.  Everything was animated in Adobe Animate. 

Post Production

The sound work and post-production was all done by Fonic in Hackney.  Hey Duggee became a big global success story - it was sold all over the world (except Germany and Japan, "who just didn't get it"). 

New Projects and Remote Working

Squirrel Club

Grant is currently working from home, but he "misses the energy of the studio environment".  Soho animation is a small world; animators who worked on Peppa Pig came to work on Hey Duggee also some of the Gumball animators - "everyone was very generous in sharing their knowledge". 

As Hey Duggee got more and more successful, the demand grew for more episodes, more series, more work.  Hey Duggee even spawned a spinoff show "Squirrel Club" a magazine show with the Hey Duggee characters. 

Burnout

Eventually Grant "got burnt out" - after ten years on Hey Duggee.  Grant got "fed up with too much talking... and too many meetings". So Grant left the production and the studios to recharge his batteries. He is currently working on new projects, writing stories and pitching ideas.  He explained that "it is hard to get commercial work right now".  But Grant has done a lot of development work and also festival work, and has a number of new projects ready to go. 

Keep It Simple

Grant Orchard at Escape Studios

How does Grant develop new ideas? The answer was, if in doubt, go small:  "Small is Sweet. And enjoy the process. Keep it simple". 

Pitching Ideas

Grant advised our student animators "not to be too precious about your ideas. Do a few pages of it, show it to people.  All broadcasters and Studios really want to see is a single page. If they like the first page, they will ask for more. If they don't like it, then they don't need to see more.  So don't waste time on long pitches. "

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