Red Rover’s Andy Knight has delivered a new interstitial for Turner Broadcasting’s The Cartoon Network, which could very well change the way we all look at Fred Flintstone. The 60-second piece, which has both animated and live-action elements, features Flintstone selflessly shedding his infamous spotted moo-moo to make the spot truly memorable.

The interstitial was directed by Knight and Chris Kelly of The Cartoon Network, who utilized a crew comprised mainly of freelancers in Atlanta, Ga. The production and post-production was handled by Red Rover staff in Toronto with Cartoon Network contributing to audio post, Inferno compositing and Avid editorial.

The Cartoon Net spot features classic animated characters Flintstone, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Weasel from Cow and Chicken. The toony foursome tries to enter a convenience store but is turned away by a store employee, saying the place has a ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service’ policy. None of the characters has shoes except for Mr. McGraw (for our younger readers, Quick Draw is a horse, and thus wears horseshoes), so the other three characters give him all of their clothing so he can get some service on their behalf. The employee turns away Quick Draw once more, sighting the difference between shoes and hooves.

‘The clerk also points out that Quick Draw doesn’t have any pants, at which time Fred points out the sign doesn’t say anything about pants,’ explains Knight. ‘Then the shot pans over to Fred and all the characters are naked. Because it’s Fred, it stands out that they are naked. The others are naked too, although they were naked before except for a bow tie and a hat.’

Knight says he agreed to co-direct the live-action elements of the interstitial as well as the animated portion because he wanted to ensure that once completed the two elements would come together seamlessly.

‘Even when there is live action involved, we are involved in the animation,’ says Knight. ‘The live action is an element we would intend to shoot to make sure the shots concerning the animation are shot with the animation in mind.’

He says it was important to keep the characters in their element, as it were, and to make sure they were portrayed in the spot as they were originally drawn.

‘One of the challenging things was the nature of the characters themselves,’ says Knight. ‘Quick Draw, Huckleberry Hound and Fred are all very flat characters, and the one thing I didn’t want to do was get into that whole Roger Rabbit world, where you take all the tones to make them three-dimensional. They are not three-dimensional characters, they are two-dimensional characters. The challenge, without doing that, was really still figuring out how to incorporate them into the live action so they are convincingly sitting in the scene.’

To get the effect he wanted, Knight had the crew bring cardboard cutouts of the characters onto the set to work as stand-ins. With the cardboard aids, the crew was able to set up everything needed for the animated elements and post, as well as the live action on set.

‘We set the lighting up so we could use flat lighting on the characters, and in compositing, rather than use tone work, we used camera light on the characters,’ he says. ‘So we had a flat cutout of Fred, and we separately lit that to fit him into the environment, but it was lit as a flat cutout so you get the sense that they are really in the environment.’

Once shot, Knight says Red Rover worked on the animation and post completely in-house, as they have become accustomed to doing. Knight estimates 70% of Red Rover’s work is done in-house. Going elsewhere for post, in this case, did not even register as an option to the director.

‘We were able to do whatever tricks we wanted to do here,’ says Knight. ‘We used a little bit of cgi because we have it available to us. We did matte painting, which we have available to us. All of it is pretty much unnoticeable in the spot, but it is there nonetheless.’

The live action for the interstitial was shot in February and the completed spot was delivered at the end of July. Knight was pleased with the timelines given by The Cartoon Network, a relief from the stringent deadlines offered up by advertisers, who provide the majority of Red Rover’s business.

‘They don’t have the same air-date demands to the uncontrollable extent of advertising where they book their air-date and they’ve got to hit it,’ says Knight. *

-www.redrover.net