LOS ANGELES — Stop-motion animation specialists Screen Novelties (http://screen-novelties.com) have directed and produced a new one-hour holiday special that will air on NBC.Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas was created on behalf of the company’s client, Warner Bros. Animation, and marks Screen Novelties’ biggest project in the company’s 11-year history.
The show is set to air on NBC on Tuesday, December 16th at 8pm. A mashup of the beloved feature film Elf and the hit Broadway show “Elf: The Musical,” the special will star the voice talent of Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory), who portrays Buddy. The story retells Buddy’s delightfully absurd, yet heartwarming story, and blends the look and feel of the classic stop-motion animated Christmas TV specials of yesteryear with the sharp sensibility of the modern-day classic holiday film.
Screen Novelties' Caballero, Walsh and Finnegan.
Warner Bros. Animation created the script in early 2014, and Screen Novelties’ co-founders Mark Caballero, Seamus Walsh and Chris Finnegan soon got to work designing the special’s cartoonish world, including characters, sets and props. The design team included Craig Kellman (characters), Dan Krall (visual development), Kyle Arneson (3D environments), and Rob Ronning and Robin Walsh (character fabrication). In March, the company broke down the script, created story boards and planned the animation. From April through June, the studio built the puppets and sets.
The Screen Novelties team comprised up to 50 crew members at its peak, and shot the show, frame-by-frame, over the course of four months, spanning from July through October. Multiple copies of each puppet were used to allow for concurrent shooting on multiple stages.
“This was a very intense and amazing project for us, as we had a very talented crew working very hard to make this project look its very best,” notes Caballero. “But we also had a great deal of fun here because it was such a lighthearted and absurd story. We enjoyed creating these stylized Elf characters, each with his or her own personal style, to help get the story across in a simple, whimsical way.”
“When we are working with puppets, we, as animators, get to become the ‘actors’ ourselves,” adds Walsh. “We are in control of the expressions, emotions and dynamism of the puppet characters as they perform in each scene of the show. We like to think that our approach to stop-motion animation is engaging and presents a lot of personality, spirit and heart. We’ve learned that you don’t need a zillion dollars to do something funny!”