Commissioned by S4C, Happy Valley was Dinamo's first wholly-owned animation series. This pilot was animated over three or four weeks with Toonboom Harmony during a break from CNEX and O Na! Y Morgans in the summer of 2005. Complimenting the work I'd already done with the multiplane environments for CNEX, I was given the task of creating the opening flythrough of the valley and helping the animators with effects throughout the episode. One of the major selling points of Harmony is that it contains a rather sophisticated node-based compositor to put together the various animated elements of the scene. Although it was something I'd always wanted to try, node-based compositing was, at that point, still a relatively high-end technology and all I knew was After Effects. The power and freedom of using nodes in a program like Harmony, however quirky, was immediately apparent.

A number of the effects in the episode include the light wrap around the trees and landscape during the flythrough, various reflection effects and environment effects and then the end transition, which required a very large scene to generate the dissolve from fantasy to reality. All in all, we produced something that really pushed the boundaries of the program, sometimes building up to a thousand vector layers and using multiple outputs to matte and blur areas of the scene. I used all the tricks I'd learnt in After Effects and pushed Harmony to the limit. It held up well despite the treatment we gave it!

The pilot was very successful and Dinamo has since produced a twenty episode series with plans for another series starting soon.

(Sept 2008)