Right from the start, we knew that the turkey would have to interact with the actors on-set and so we made the decision to do this episode in CG rather than 2D. In hindsight, we probably bit off more than we could chew! We had three weeks to produce all the animation, although that eventually stretched to four. Romano built the turkey from a design by Ryan and I built a lot of the backgrounds in 3D Studio Max with the help of Ben, Ryan and the rest of the team. Owen Simons also joined us for a month to help with the animation before he went off on his ten month travelling holiday. I'd originally hoped to light all the animation with global illumination but it proved too time-consuming and I was eventually talked out of it - not my finest moment.

We tried to use fur to give the turkey feathers around his neck and rear but the process proved very fiddly and we had to abandon it early in development. The short production time, however, meant that the feathers had to remain on the body as we didn't have time to replace them, so they exist as rigid objects that sit vertically on his collar rather than flat as intended.

My main involvement with the animation was with the lighting. When my original plan to design the lighting with global illumination flew foul of time contraints, I reluctantly (and with a certain lack of grace) resorted to using the standard Max lights instead. While perfectly valid, the Max lights suffer from being a little too harsh on the more basic models we were using. Whereas global illumination produced really beautiful soft, coloured shadows that mimic reality, the Max lights are mathematically perfect and either use raytrace shadows (which are harsh and definite), shadow maps (which are quick but lack resolution) and area lights (which are several lights combined together to produce soft shadow but which take much longer to process). After a few days of experimentation, I decided to use one area light for the main light in the scene (either the sun or the moon depending on the location) and shadow mapped lights to add extra illumination around the turkey and room to emulate the soft shadow look. The turkey also had his own lights just to illuminate the underside of his body where the shadow was too dark. Since we produced the animation in sequence, the better lighting appears towards the end of the episode where the turkey is trapped in the attic and plots his escape. Here I used warm lighting as the main light (coming from a light bulb in the centre of the room) and then a blue rim light to add detail to the edges.

In After Effects, I added depth of field to all the animations by outputting a z-depth image along with the main colour render. This softened the backgrounds and focused the eye on the turkey a little better. Glows were hand-tracked to the light bulbs to make them white out and the scene was also colour corrected to increase the brightness or contrast where necessary. Light wrap was also added to scenes where the sky appeared. My only regret is that I didn't output a vector motion blur pass at the same time to give the turkey motion blur on some of the more fast-moving scenes.

This Christmas Special was also the first time I used a network render system to run all the CG rendering overnight. It took a bit of fiddling but we eventually got the 3D Studio Max Backburner system to work properly and it meant that I could submit large numbers of animations to the central server and let about five or six computers share the load. This was much better than Cnex where I had to manually manage every single After Effects (and sometimes 3D Max) animation by starting it on several computers at once. Although I improved on the system for Con Passionate, it was great being able to leave the office running overnight and not have to worry about whether it would all be done in the morning.

My other area of interest was the live-action compositing that sadly only took up a small amount of screen time. I also wanted more moving shots (as all the live-action plates were shot static) but I think time constraints meant the the right decision was made, especially as this was our first proper CG/live-action compositing job. Owen did all of the CG animation for the live-action segments and taught me a lot about rendering shadows onto objects to insertion into the final scene. I also spent a bit of time studying the lighting setup to match the sometime harsh studio lights that were used during filming. The best scene was the one pictured above where the father is sitting on the sofa eating a box of chocolates with the turkey. Again, they cut too early and we all agreed afterwards it would have been better to have left it running longer, but we were under pressure to finish and they hadn't done any special effects before.

All in all, the Christmas Morgans was a resounding success and set the stage for us to work on Con Passionate and now the second series of the Morgans where we have a much more integrated role and a lot of CG compositing to do!