SupERScientists Animation Short Film

Our animation short, SuperScientists - Origins, based on our comic, is done! Here’s the trailer. We’re getting out to festivals and are now developing a series. The series will explore different fields of science through the teen characters we’ve created and of course the wonderul Mrs Ples.

It’s played now at the Cape Town International Animation Festival and will be part of the Goethe Institute Science Film Festival later this year. The film is being translated into French and we’ll hopefuly get it dubbed too.

Credit for the animation to The Hidden Hand Studios, with funding by the National Film and Video Foundation.

Want to bring some SuperScientists into your home? Download and colour-in (for free!) or print most of our materials (also free!).

How it’s made

How does an animation come together?

It starts with the writing. We started with our comic that Justin Yarrow and Clyde Beech created. We took it and some funding to The Hidden Hand Studios and Ross Lelliott, the cofounder of the studio, took it on as director. The comic worked as a comic but needed to be reconsidered for something with more action, tension and humor. Two accomplished writers took on this task, Greig Cameron and Pete O’Donoghue.

From there the storyboard artist, the awesome Adrean Sigogo, made rough sketches of what they wrote. Lots of them but very rough. Applying the character art that Lesego Vorster created, Adrean then made the animatic. It’s the bottom half of this video. As you can see the animatic really defines the look of the final film, everything from the looks of the characters, to the camera angles that are used. From there with lots of iteration and meetings in between we have the final animation by Tshiamo Kadiege

Here’s another animatic by Immanuel Maxie Jr Pirikisi (@sonmadmax on Instagram), for the transformation of scientists into SuperScientists.

Of course there’s more to include. Info about the voice artists, music and how it all came together will come. In total about 40 people worked on this short film!