“Kino Bino created a beautifully illustrated and animated collection of nursery rhymes featuring a set of animal characters that are perfect for the age group. ”

— Andrew Barnes - BBC Education

CLIENT

BBC Teach is home to all of the BBC’s teaching resources. It consists of thousands of free curriculum-mapped videos, arranged by age-group and subject.

BRIEF

BBC Teach commissioned us to create six nursery rhyme animations for their School Radio Nursery Rhymes. The rhymes sung by close-harmony group The Frockettes and also by CBeebies presenter Cat Sandion, could already be heard on the BBC school radio site, but BBC Teach wanted some eye-catching new animation to bring these traditional rhymes to life.

RESULTS

We created a whole new range of charming animal characters in vibrant scenes to engage with the early years audience. The overall design was created to reflect the fun audio tracks. Each animated rhyme is paced with the subtitles so singing along is easy and enjoyable.

The end result was 6 engaging animated nursery rhyme resources, which teachers could confidently use for the early years foundation stage audience.

“We were consulted every step of the way through creative concepts, character development, style sheets and storyboards.
We’re delighted with the final results. Kino Bino have been a pleasure to work with.”

— Andrew Barnes - BBC Education

THE PROCESS

We worked closely with the BBC Teach team and agreed that cute and cuddle animal characters would be perfect for the Early Years Foundation Stage audience, before we started work on the initial character designs.

From the outset, our aim was to create a visual style that was reminiscent of traditional hand-drawn animation, as we felt this would give the series of animations a unique feel and appeal to teachers, kids and parents alike.

The style frame we created to set the tone for all six episodes used partial, tapered line work on the characters, reminiscent of traditional inking techniques, set on a realistic paper background. We then treated the characters with an animated watercolour texture, which, when combined with low frame rate animation, created a convincing hand crafted aesthetic. To keep the audience's attention on the colourful characters, we opted for simple, primarily monochrome, environment designs, taking inspiration from classic children's cartoons.

All animation was created in After Effects. We knew that our characters would need to be extremely versatile, so the characters' heads were rigged in JoystickNSliders, allowing a wide degree of rotation. For the rest of the body, we opted for a Rubber Hose rig, which provided lots of squash and stretch and ensured arm and leg joints remained soft.

We finished the styling with a soft lighting technique, which added warmth and helped to give our 2d graphics a sense of depth