Creating a mini-movie…a short insider look from Art Director Jamie Judd:

Creating animation…

From the very beginning of America’s Heartland I have been privileged to not only create all the show’s graphic elements, logos and animation, but to dream up several “mini-movies” for each show.

These “mini-movies” are fun informational animations that run anywhere from 20 seconds to one minute in length, and give the viewer an entertaining look at farm facts, history, crops, cattle, machinery, locations, farming fun and just about anything you can think of related to the world of farming and how it relates to all of us.

Along with visual animation and pictures, they include narration, sound effects and themed music that all match what’s happening on screen at any given moment to make the whole piece come alive -- a small by complete movie.

My goal is to visually teach a concept or little known fact quickly and effectively so that you walk away with something new each time.

I really enjoy building these little movies each week and the many challenges I face on how make them, different, entertaining and fun; but at the same time find that interesting epiphany that will make people sit up and say “I didn’t know that!”

For example, putting a beard on a fish, creating dinosaurs that explode and bringing hand drawn machines to life are some of my favorites.

Harvesting Knowledge, Fast Facts About Food, Farm to Fork, Location Maps, and three or so “mini-movies” per show add up to a lot of animation, and so I need to plan out very carefully how much creative time, element creation, research, animation and rendering time, (the time it takes the computer to draw out each frame of animation to create a finished movie), for each segment I will need. Not to mention that full HD animation takes up a lot of space!

It all starts with a script that comes from one of our wonderful producers. From there I will read through it and highlight words and concepts that pop out at me. It can be a location like Vermont and how dairy cows are big business there, so I immediately think of a covered bridge, fall colors, and dancing cows in business suits. If I can find images from our photo library and separate those images out as separate elements to animate, all-the-better; but I often create the pieces I need from scratch or model them in 3D as I create those worlds.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more on “Creating a mini-movie”, as I talk about how to bring the elements together and animate them frame by frame and my recent use of more and more 3D, and how I get all these pieces to our post production editor for final inclusion in the show!