Behind the scenes: Preschool programming
By Tom Sosnowski -- Playthings, 11/3/2005 1:12:00 PM
NEW YORK—Amid the bustling streets of Greenwich Village, the buildings take on an almost mystical aspect to what they contain. The old buildings with ornate, weather-worn facades hold some of the most intriguing and unique businesses in the city.
There are few eye-catching corporate signs blasting a company’s name like in other parts of Manhattan (see Trump, GE, Louis Vuitton). And here, hidden away on the fifth floor of a basically typical neighborhood building, is preschool programming company Little Airplane Productions.
The company founder, Josh Selig, is quite a story himself. He first entered the youth programming industry as a child actor on Sesame Street during the show’s first two seasons. After college and stints as a street performer (juggler, fire eater, etc.), he returned to Sesame Street as a writer. He rose through various positions at Sesame Street before leaving, and in 1999 founded Little Airplane Productions with the goal of creating innovative, preschool television—which he did and still does today.
After many hits on preschool-oriented channels, he is nearly set to launch his newest preschool programming in a series called 3rd & Bird. The basis of the show is to teach kids, through the interaction of the show’s birds, the importance of community.
The action takes place high in the trees with various scattered birdhouses serving as the “community,” with the birds learning to interact and live as a functioning society.
Selig’s goal for the series was to alert preschoolers to a larger view of life.
“The idea is that with everything going on in the world today, we should be getting children to see the bigger picture,” says Selig. “It encourages children to see the community; that there’s more than just their immediate surroundings. We wanted to replicate humanity in the trees so the kids could see the larger personal needs of the community.”
The show is about 30 days or so away from its pitch-and-land stage at one of the targeted channels, with the likely suspects being Nick Jr., Noggin, Discovery Kids, among others.
But the most fascinating facet of youth programming is how it all comes about. Playthings.com had a private, behind-the-scenes tour of how Little Airplane Productions takes an idea and transforms it into real programming.
The road to a program:
The genesis
• Ideas, ideas, ideas. All show programming originates in-house at Little Airplane, and Selig creates and has final say over all shows.
• An industry tool called a “bible” is made for the show. This has rudimentary art and a script, and is generally a condensed version of what the program will contain and how it will look.
• The bible is shown to the networks that carry preschool programming. If it is picked up by a network, scriptwriting takes place. That script is tested on focus groups of preschoolers and the feedback is considered and worked in.
The art process
• A storybook is constructed through a process called Cintiq. A program call Flash, basically a monitor which acts as a computer, serves as a drawing "canvas." This item is what replaced traditional paper and pen cel drawing, as amendments can be made quicker, easier and more precisely with Cintiq.
• Music is then added and timed with the storyboard.
• Photo casting then takes place as show elements are either shot in-studio or purchased, and Photoshop is used for creating final images. In this phase, graphic artists use Photoshop and combine different photos of the same subject to create a character. For example, one picture of a cat may have nicely posed back legs, but its tail is hidden. The artist will take a tail from another photo of the same cat and cut and paste it in the photo with the nice hind legs. It is sort of like building a character piece-by-piece. People in publishing know this well.
• Next, all the visual elements are collected and prepped for animation, taking into account every possible point of articulation (blinking of eyes, nose movements, legs, anything that possibly moves).
The animation
• Animators basically have everything completed in front of them, except any character movement, when they receive the near-finished program. Their job, through a program called After Effect, allows them to make just about any action possible. In my visit with one animator, he made a static cat shake his head and wink in about 30 seconds.
The process is laborious. That 11-minute program a child watches on Saturday morning takes 30 people 33 weeks to make. Half-hour episodes are sold to networks in 20 half-hour blocks (two 11-minute programs equal a half hour episode). A full 40-episode package takes about a year-and-a-half to complete from start to finish.
“And every program has to have a stated curriculum [in its bible],” says Selig. “Go into a channel and say ‘kids will like this and it’s cool,’ and they will show you the door. But that is good for everyone. The lesson is important and everyone involved should know what this show is going to teach [the kids]."
