LETTER TV is an educational series of 5-minute episodes intended to teach the nuts and bolts of As, Bs, and/or Cs to captive tots. The show was produced by Destiny Images from 1999 to the mid-2000s, and is currently distributed directly to classrooms using space-age technology.
I designed the main LTV characters, and modeled various incarnations of them (with the last season partially modeled and mostly rigged by Joe Justice). I worked on nearly every episode of the extremely low-budget series, and after the first fifteen or so were completed, our composer drifted away and I provided the incidental musical score for the rest (featured songs were by The Zucchini Brothers).
The SK episode was a special one for me because I wrote and completed the entire show alone, except for narration provided by Jim Wolfe.
Unfortunately, after it was completed there was a slight snag. Even though the production had been approved every step of the way by the distributor, the finshed short was not well-received by the consultants who sat in judgement of each show. It was ruled "too fast" and "abrasive" and "distracting", and a slower version was "requested". The first version, which had been produced at breakneck speed with several consecutive up-all-nighters, had to be redone at an even faster pace. I wrote a new slow-motion score, threw out about a third of the script, stretched some existing animation to a glacial pace, and Jim read the new version v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y to avoid the imagined spectre of small children thrown into cardiac arrest.
Producer Jamie Cope felt bad that my original work was discarded, so he instructed one of the video guys (Joe? I forget) to cut a new version, omitting the regular LTV characters (which were contracted to AIT). Destiny Images submitted the recut SK episode to TechTV's weekly EYE DROPS compilation of short animation. It was shown several times before TechTV changed into G4 and most of TechTV's shows went away.
I tried to get a copy of the original cut of the SK episode which featured a cool zeppelin sequence and lots of other gags with the core LTV punctuation-head characters, but the original frames of the edited sequences got lost in the shuffle somehow, cast aside in the day-to-day hurry of production, hidden among the studio's teetering stacks of unlabeled backup CDs. I could re-render those shots and re-edit the show into its original form, but, uh, I won't.
This clip is the truncated TechTV version, followed by a few shots from the lobotomized version currently in distribution.
Interesting (to 3 or 4 of you) production details:
The first version of SK was produced in approximately three weeks. Even though Lightwave 7.? was available when this show was produced, the studio, which rendered the sequences, had not updated its software. Therefore, most of SK had to be done with Lightwave 5.6. 5.6 was solid but severely limited in terms of modern 3D animation software. There was no fast and convenient way to rig characters, implement IK, or use sub-Ds and weight maps. So, most of this video features hard-poly models (watch for the occasional non-planar 'pop'), unrigged hands (they were morphed when necessary), relatively primitive facial morphs, and lots and lots of short cuts and workarounds. All things considered, I think SK came out fairly okay, if you squint when you watch it while breathing through a chloroform-soaked hankie.
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2:21Alyssa Milanoby detailsdotcom381,150 views
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