A montage of my compositing and motion graphics work for the daily animated comedy series Your Daily Horoscope, created by ATTN: and executive produced by Will Arnett. The show was comprised of twelve episodes five days a week for five months.
Each two minute episode explored the personalities, relationships, and workplace shenanigans of the twelve Zodiac signs. During its run, over 1200 episodes were aired and it was the #1 daily show on Quibi.
Keep it simple, stupid!
The main challenge of this gig was time management. Our four person comp team had to deliver, in total, about twenty minutes of final renders to the edit team by the end of every day - in addition to tackling notes on previous day's scenes. There was no time to sweat the details or spend hours agonizing over a single effect. The mantra was to keep things simple but effective.
We were each assigned three zodiac signs to work on for the entire series. I was responsible for the Aquarius, Pisces, and Sagittarius episodes. Typical daily tasks included reading scripts, watching animatics, rendering out the characters from Adobe Character Animator, positioning the characters into the scenes, and adding any VFX if needed.
If all that wasn't enough of a challenge, we had the backdrop of a global pandemic and a studio of remote workers who had never been under the same roof!
Turn Baby Turn
Quibi had a unique viewing experience called Turnstyle which allowed the show to be viewed in either vertical or horizontal orientation. To accommodate this, we had to comp our scenes in a square 4000 x 4000 format and position the characters to work in both orientations. This gave the edit team enough resolution to punch in for close ups and create separate horizontal and vertical versions of the episodes.
Working smart
I wrote a custom After Effects toolbox in Javascript which sped up a variety of tedious tasks, such as setting up each scene to Quibi's unique specs and adding custom title/action safe guides for their Turnstyle technology.
The most useful of its features was a series of 'Auto Blocking' buttons that determined the active character and adjusted their scale and position according to the active scene, eg – placing a character precisely at their desk. In addition to saving us time, it ensured consistent layouts across all episodes.
