Lockdown could turn out to be responsible for the birth of new programmes, formats and even genres, if the latest animated political satire Tooning Out The News, from Stephen Colbert (pictured) and which made its CBS debut in the US on April 7, is anything to go by.
The concept is very appealing – a cast of animated programme anchors and reporters spoofing and lampooning the day’s news stories and even interviewing live action guests.
As many of the people reading this will know only too well, making a (live) news or current affairs programme during lockdown is extremely difficult to pull off. It no doubt requires far many more people than is apparent; only something the very large (news) media organisations can pull off.
Before the pandemic hit, Tooning Out The News was pretty much ready to go on air from the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, with virtual sets and fast-turnaround animation. When the production team was suddenly and abruptly obliged to work from home they had to pivot quickly and adopt lockdown-friendly, decentralised, cloud-based workflow that leans heavily on collaboration and productivity apps, as writer RJ Fried told Indiewire.
“We had to apply Slack to replace conversations in the office, apply Box to replace the office server, and apply Zoom and remote access to computers to do the recordings,. But the end result is that you can’t tell whether it was made in the studio or remotely.”
For the executive producer in charge of animation Tim Luecke, the “remote reinvention” as Indiewire’s Bill Desowitz puts it, was a strange way of doing animation, with artists animating the radio plays by looking at separate faces on Zoom, and yet it works.
“If the in-studio experience was like jumping out of a plane and trying to construct a parachute before you hit the ground, then now it’s doing that blindfolded, and the only way you can check in on the status of the parachute is over Slack,”
File sizes like those produced by the Adobe Character Animation software they use were soon identified as a bit of a problem, writes Emma Gray Ellis in Wired. The producers needed to either significantly increase the speed of everybody’s home broadband or dabble with compression. They also looked at ways of simplifying the characters and backgrounds to ease the pressure on their Internet and bandwidth needs.
There have also been upsides to working remotely on a daily animated news programme, says Fried..
“There are a lot of newsmakers sitting at home who can, by pressing a button, hop on and do a live interview with us. We can get guests from anywhere. We can take talent from anywhere in the world as long as they have a good internet connection, and a lot of people are looking for work right now because live-action shows have pressed pause.”
Tooning Out Of The News looks like it has a lot of promise, notwithstanding the fact it covers a lot of stories that will be obscure for an UK audience.
We will keep an eye open for other lockdown-inspired production innovations to bring you, and we’d welcome any of yours you would care to share.