“We turn your drawings into movies.”
Doodles is an Australian animation series created by Emmy award winning director/animator Benjamin Zaugg. The series features a colourful array of artwork created and submitted by children through doodles.com.au. Each drawing is accompanied by a title and a short descriptor, which is then translated by animators into stories. Doodles is playful, whimsical, creative and encourages children to use their imagination. The series incorporates fun character voices and music as it aims “to inspire kids to keep drawing and creating. To keep building worlds in their minds”. Doodles is nominated for Best Australian Animation at this year’s MWF.
What process was undertaken to source the children’s artwork?
Our artists (the kids) submit their drawings to the Doodles Gallery on our website – doodles.com.au – where they also add a title and descriptions. In season 2 and 3 we also held a couple of drawing-days where we’d host a large group of kids and collect drawings and ideas.
Was it difficult to translate the children’s artwork into stories, and did they have a say in the type of stories they wanted to create?
When it came time to write our stories and give our selected characters voices, we tried to draw inspiration from the written descriptions provided by the kids and stay as faithful to the drawings themselves as possible.
For example, one of our favourite characters is Wisard the Wizard, who, as the artist specifies, “wears his underpants over his pants” and “spells his name with an ’S’.” He can also make “rainbow fireworks”.
So of course we made Wisard the Wizard sing a song about these things. In the case that we get very little written description, we just try to imagine how the character would move and do what makes us giggle.
What do you want your audience to take away from this series?
To inspire kids to keep drawing and creating . To keep building worlds in their minds.
What is unique about your series?
Our characters and stories are derived directly from our audience – directly from kids.
What was your release strategy?
In series 3 our episodes were released weekly on ABC ME on iView, then online (YouTube). The week before releasing an episode we’d announce which drawing/s would be starring in the next weeks episode on social media. Our production was only ever a month ahead of broadcast at most, meaning we could incorporate submissions (props or characters) from our audience very late in the process. If we needed a prop for a character we could do a call-out for a drawing on social media and swap it in just a week or two before release.
What was your target audience and how did you build a relationship with them?
Kids – and anyone who ever was a kid! On Facebook and Instagram we shared our latest episodes, and showed off cool new submissions. We encouraged kids to send in clips of themselves watching their episodes go live, or talking about their characters, and we’d publish these contributions on our Facebook page. Even the drawings we couldn’t incorporate in episodes were still celebrated on our website and Facebook.
How long did it take to produce and shoot the series?
Each of our three seasons took around 4 months, with user content being sourced from the submissions on our website both before and during the production period. Every episode featured a completely new character – sometimes more than one. Each character had to be faithfully (re)drawn, rigged and animated in less than a few days, to then allow sound and music to contribute to the magic.
What is your background as a web series creator?
I myself have a very mixed skill set, both creative and technical. I’ve done animation, visual effects and a lot of background tinkering on shows like The Strange Calls, Secrets & Lies, No Activity, Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am, Soul Mates, and the Emmy® award winning #7 Days Later. I’ve also directed my fair share of short films. A lot of my early career was spent shooting, cutting and sprinkling magic on short clips for web delivery, so I have a lot of experience in pacing and what works well in a short span of time.
What did you learn from making this series? What would you do differently?
I’ve learnt that kids drawings have an even greater pull on people than I initially realised. People respond really well to seeing drawings talking, running, dancing and interacting with the real world. It’s magical. When constructing the pieces its easy to forget that. So as I’ve written more and more episodes I’ve learnt to focus on the simple magic element and not make things too complex.
I would love to explore longer pieces that use similar techniques, gaining a bit more time to invest in child-created characters and what they can do.