In a style and story reminiscent of the old Christmas classics created in the ‘60s and ‘70s by Rankin-Bass Productions, Reel FX created the animated short video The Very First Noel, which tells the tale of the journey by the three wise men to witness the new messiah, Jesus.

The story was created and directed by Carrie and Yarrow Cheney. After seven years developing the story and creating the first three minutes of animation, they approached Reel FX, which purchased the rights to the property to be produced under their home video entertainment subdivision Exclaim Entertainment.

“We’ve mainly been a company servicing outside clients but over the past few years we’ve been seeking to develop our own properties and we very much wanted to be a family oriented business with faith based titles,” explains Bryan Engram, Animation Supervisor, Reel FX.

With only 10 weeks to create 17-minutes of animation the elves at Reel FX (27 animators, 10 lighters and four riggers) had to move quickly and develop a style and workflow that would allow them to get the project done in time to hit the shelves of WalMart for this holiday season.

“When he first came up with the look he had something that was very detailed, because that was at a time when everyone thought for any animation to be successful it had to have a Pixar type look,” says Engram. “As he went on the story he thought it would be interesting if the characters resembled little toys, so that’s what we tried to emulate in the design. Since we had to do the entire production in 10 weeks so we needed something that was really fast. There weren’t a ton of controls in the rigs so it allowed us to move at a pace of about 8-10 seconds per week per animator. We decided on a fairly simple animation style. Because these are wooden characters there wasn’t a lot of squash and stretch and things would move a little slower. So we didn’t want to go so far as to make the movement staccato like clay-mation but it would have that feel to it. In addition to allowing us to work faster it gave it a charming look to it while not appearing stiff.”

Soon into the project Reel FX realized that creating new background characters was going to take up too much time so they developed a modular system, “sort of like Mr. Potato Head. If we needed a face, we’d grab the face off one character, then grab the arms from another character and the legs from another character and very quickly we were able to create new characters. This meant there was a lot of scripting to do but within a day we were able to create new characters on the fly.”

www.theveryfirstnoel.com