Cluckie the Vampire Chicken

The first incarnation of Cluckie happened over a decade ago. It was a very different beast from what it is today. Firstly, it started as a single one minute film, just a super short movie with a one gag payoff. It was also called Cluckie the Vampire Cock (something that was immediately changed when it was pitched to the Nickelodeon network). It stayed as a quick sketch on paper and a brief outline for many years.

As Freakish Kid began to make inroads with the TV and cable networks we all thought it was time to test the waters and see if we could sell one of our own ideas, just a taster – a step to bigger things. We’d already been providing services for many years and had garnered a very good reputation for being solid, creative and reliable. So we pulled out Cluckie, blew the dust off, ruffled his feathers and took a new look at him.

The original idea had Cluckie stalking the hens of the farm he occupies, springing from the shadows and hunting for blood. When he was about to get his grub and quench his bloodlust the sun started to rise. He is instantly caught in a massive dilemma – crow the sun or run for cover (the sun kills vampires). But he could not ignore his primal instinct and so as he rushes out and leaps on his perch, inhales and crows he ignites into a shower of fire.

We decided to expand a little on his character and add a few more gags to the film. It started the same with him prowling through the coup yard, searching for his food. We designed the hens to come from different nations to add a choice of menu for him – does he want Italian? Chinese? British? or Spanish?. The rest of the story stayed pretty much the same with the explosion at the end staying as the final gag. We produced a storyboard for the pitch and went to see Nickelodeon.

The actual pitch was a success but it threw something up that we didn’t expect – they loved the idea but wanted more than a single film (always something that creators want to hear!) We left the meeting with the prospect of a new direction and a tight deadline to get the revised idea back to Nickelodeon. After many hours of brainstorming we came up with our new take on the idea. We all love the classic Looney Tunes of the 40’s and 50’s, the legendary Chuck Jones and one of his creations in particular – Road Runner. There’s something about the fanaticism of Wile E. Coyote, his inability to give up and his creative genius to invent contraption after contraption to try and capture the Road Runner. So we decided to try and make a series of shorts that harks back to the quality and ingenuity of the golden age of animation – but at the same time update it for a modern audience (not that those shorts ever need ‘updating’. Our belief is that they are the foundation of modern cartoons).

We needed to put Cluckie in a real dilemma, something that would make him defy his vampiric habits (well some of them anyway). We did this in two ways . Firstly we placed the farm in which he lives in a town called Nowhereville, with absolutely no life around for hundreds of miles and, secondly, to have the hens on ‘lockdown’ at night. This would mean Cluckie would have to hunt the hens and he would have to do it during the day, creating different means of protecting himself from the UV rays of the Sun, traveling across the farm and getting his grub.

Once we’d figured out the main plot devices, his nemesis and his goals the rest just fell into place. We were able to take the premise and bend it to whatever creation we gave Cluckie to build. The end result of every episode was the same – Cluckie failed and exploded in sunlight. It was important he never succeeded. The audience knows he’s going to end up a pile of ash, the amusing thing is watching him get there! We created a pitch bible of the show for the network. These included several different story ideas as well as some sketches of Cluckie and his various creations.

Nickelodeon ordered five episodes and pre-production began. We were obviously very excited about bringing our latest creation to the screen and were very confident that what we produced would exceed all expectations. We started with the scripts. The story treatments we wrote for our pitch were pretty well developed, it was just a case of fleshing out the gags and adding tiny details that would give the storyboard artists inspiration.

One of the things we always loved about the Road Runner cartoons were Wile E. Coyote’s blue print designs – we wanted to add something like that to Cluckie. It would give us a chance to see how his devilish mind worked and also a moment where he could be very satisfied and overly confident – this would ultimately lead to his downfall. Most importantly we wanted to show his undying optimism, his continuous drive to get what he wants and what better way than to show him ‘going back to the drawing board’. In this case though we made it a computer workstation.  We also made Cluckie a budding animator! To get himself revved up he would produce little ‘animatics’ of his plan in action – very much like Wile E. did with his blue prints but ours was designed more for the modern audience.

The Hens’ Coups needed to be together, highly visible and somewhere that is continually taunting Cluckie. The Hens come across as chicks without a care in the world. One of the main points storywise for us was that they never feel threatened by Cluckie, they just think he’s a strange little creature with a severe feather problem. The Hen’s design wasn’t so straight forward, at first they all looked different. Giving them individual personalities was very important but as the design process continued it was clear that we needed to simplify them as much as possible. They were not the main characters, just onlookers and bit players. To have them all look different would be a problem both from a cast point of view and an animation point of view so we decided to make them all look the same. This would save time with model building and animation; it would also mean we could just focus on developing Cluckie’s personality and his maniacal obsession with them.

The design process progressed throughout the production, with many things being brought back and tweaked until we were very happy with them – this is not the way we would usually work but seeing as it was one of our own we didn’t want to limit ourselves. The first job in the design process and to help produce the board from the script was to nail down the geography of the location. A rough overhead location design was produced to give the board artists an idea of the layout of the farm and this proved to be invaluable in the boarding of each episode.

Cluckie was the first production where we used Flash to produce our storyboards digitally. Up until that point we always did them the traditional way, the great thing we learned was that it sped up the pre-production process, there was a better sense of timing and the animatics came together a lot easier. It’s something that has stayed with us on every new production that the studio has produced. It’s much more efficient and there’s a lot less paper flying around! The boarding is where we really brought out Cluckie’s character. We were able to define him much more in this phase than in the writing. We set the building blocks for the animation making sure that the poses drawn were strong and defined. We also found that the scripts we wrote were actually longer than the one minute running time we were aiming for so without actually compromising the story we had to try and find ways of bringing the runtime down on each episode. We did this by combining certain shots and deleting others that really didn’t help the story. Once we had the animatics timed to our satisfaction we moved to the next phase of pre-production.

The colour scripts were produced from the boards.  Painted digitally, these little ‘mood’ ideas were designed to give us a better understanding of how the overall colour of the films should look, creating the different moods and atmospheres within the episodes.

It was important to make the inside of Cluckie’s lair considerably cooler than it was outside, whereas out in the open we wanted to have the heat very visible, almost scorching hot so the audience could see things from Cluckie’s point of view. The colour scripts also made it easier to approach the final backgrounds, using the mood boards as a base in which to produce the final colour work.

From the storyboard background layouts were designed. Then using the colour scripts as a general guide a final colour was produced. The aim was to try and reuse as many of the backgrounds as possible. We found that this limited our vision too much so instead opted to reuse certain elements from the backgrounds and incorporate them into new designs. The only design notes for the exterior shots were the hot scorched atmosphere and the sparse open land. The aim was to create an environment that Cluckie wouldn’t want to go out in; we wanted to show how obsessive he was, so much so that he would continually risk death – in the most painful ways possible – just to achieve his obsessive goals.

The inside of Cluckie’s barn needed to be his safe haven, shielded from the Sun, cool and full of his creative genius. The entire barn is full of junk that Cluckie uses to make his ‘contraptions of capture’. Another prominent feature in the barn is Cluckie’s computer workstation, the area he spends the most time creating his diabolical schemes. We wanted to create a sense of night within the barn, a comfortable surrounding for Cluckie to hatch Hen hording schemes, a place where he could feel safe before his inevitable spontaneous combustion!

Whilst the backgrounds were in full production the model building process started. Frames from the board were exported then redrawn with a ‘clean’ line. These were brought into the animation software and redrawn again in vectors. There were many poses to build for each episode, a bone system was added to each model and the character was then ‘rigged’ to the bone system. The production was finally ready to start animation.

The most important part of the animation process, for us, is the character. We needed to clearly define who Cluckie was, what he wanted, why he wanted it and most importantly – what drives him. I think it’s safe to say that he is so obsessive that he has gotten to a point where he doesn’t even know why he wants to capture the Hens. Even if he did get his hands on them he wouldn’t know what to do once he had them – he’d probably let them go only to chase them again instantly! And that was the main point in finding Cluckie’s character; his obsessive relationship with the Hens. He doesn’t really want to eat them – cause then he couldn’t create ways of catching them if they were gone. He is addicted to the chase, it makes him feel alive (even though he is the Undead and every time he does chase them he dies… again!)

Another part of Cluckie’s character that needed to come across in the animation was his undying enthusiasm and optimism. No matter what is thrown at him be it a an egg or nuclear explosion, he doesn’t give up. He constantly changes his game plan to fit a situation and when that doesn’t work he goes back to the drawing board certain that next time he’ll get it right. It’s his inability to give up that we found endearing about him. Even with the choice between death or giving up he will choose death! That kind of character trait is admirable! Even though Cluckie is the anti-hero we needed to make the audience feel for him, to like him and to create hope that he will succeed, even though we all knew he wouldn’t! We did that by adding a kind of dumb sweetness to him and his actions, this coupled with his over the top optimism made him a loveable character.

We decided that when it came to the Hens their animation should be quite simple. They mainly stand around all day and eat. They aren’t exactly oblivious to Cluckie but they know he’s not really a big threat. When he does get too close however their resolve is swift as they bend over and crack an egg out at high velocity – kind of like firing a warning shot across the bow of a ship! Since we’d decided to make all the Hens the same design we created animation loops that we could apply to the different model set-ups then we’d mix and match the loops to create mini performances. All their movements were meant to be subtle and calm – which pretty much summed up their characters, it was also meant to be a direct contrast from Cluckie’s maniacal, hyperactive motion.

The Sun is another important character within the show and it had to pose a real threat to Cluckie and even though she just sits there in the sky we needed to make her alive in some way. We decided to do this through visual effects. Whenever Cluckie blunders and fails the Sun ‘greets’ the defenseless vampire with a burst of sunshine. This works well visually but there was still something missing so we decided to add angelic harp strings and choir voices to really reflect the Sun’s awesome power.

Each episode has a lot of visual effect shots in them and they play quite an important role within the action and story of the shorts. Be it fire, rain, smoke, lightning or a nuclear blast they help the story move along whilst never really overshadowing them. The most important effect across all the episodes was Cluckie’s death. It had to be quick but also a vicious flash of white heat. Many different colour setups were tried but we settled on a midnight blue flash – a kind of ironic nod to the fact that he was out in daylight. In the explosion shots we also changed the lighting in the background setup, making the surrounding turn into night colours. The idea being that the light was so blinding it out-shone the Sun. Also the sudden change in colour on screen helped the flash appear to be brighter and in so doing made the death look more painful for poor old Cluckie.

The composite for the episodes were the most complex we’d undertaken, more than La Reine Soleil (The Queen of the Sun) which was a feature. The reason was simple – we take great pride in the work we do and felt the project deserved nothing less than the best we could offer. It was important that it looked vibrant and full of depth so whenever we could add more details to the foreground, mid and background we did. It didn’t matter whether the shot was 10 frames or 200 we wanted to create a feeling of real space. The composite was so large that it took 3 render passes to get to final picture. The first was the setup, spacing out the stage with characters, props, foreground and background. The second was the addition of visual effects such as extra lighting, heat haze (on the outdoor distant shots – just to add those few more degrees in temperature!) and motion blur. The final pass was for colour grading and general tweaking of the final image.

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Because we’d put a heavy focus into the animatics, tweaking the timings until we were happy with them, the final edit just fell into place. It was literally just a question of dropping those scenes onto the edit timeline and watching the magic unfold – sometimes it pays to be prepared!!

The sound and music are a very important part of the Freakish Kid pipeline. Audio can add a whole other level to a film. You can imply things off screen or just heighten the mood and add weight to a character’s actions. We always imagined the music as something of a Country and Western feel with a bit more bite – a little more twang!! So the brief was simple – make it funky and Western! What we produced was something that sat alongside the images comfortably. It didn’t feel out of place and seemed to gel with the visuals like they were always meant to be together.

When we first pitched the idea to Nickelodeon we had no intention of making a title sequence. It was literally going to be a card with the name and a funny image on it – our main goal was to get straight into the show. It soon dawned on us though that it would be a great place to introduce everything including a little back story as to how he became a vampire chicken. Originally a vampiric fly was involved and Cluckie was the farms best cockerel. He’d crow the sun until it was awake then strut his stuff – until one day he’s bitten (in the eye) by a vampire fly (yes, buzz buzz fly). When it came to boarding this idea we found it was too long and too confusing to get across quickly so we opted for a simple version. A vampire bat bites baby Cluckie’s egg and so a vampire chicken was born. After that we quickly moved through the ‘locked down’ hen yard at night and the subsequent attempts by Cluckie to catch the Hens during the day only to explode in a flash of blue pain! It does what it should do and set us up for a funny little cartoon!

Shadow Assault was the introductory episode and the one that needed a simple idea to get the show and character across to the audience. If we’d have had him creating a ship or a giant catapult in the very first episode it would have been very confusing as to what he needed to do. So the setup was for him to use the shadows to get him across the farmyard. An ingenious plan- until he decides to hide in the shadow of a delivery truck. The wing mirror shot at the end of the episode is our homage to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.

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Jet Propelled Cluckie was our take on the rocket pack Road Runner gags. Cluckie is so convinced it is going to work that he is way too confident from the outset. It’s his downfall as he is propelled up into the stratosphere and down into a nuclear explosion. This episode is one of our personal favourites because the shots have so much depth from the ground disappearing behind the clouds to the chickens being blown about from the nuclear blast. There is so much to look at within the episode. What’s not to like about hens wearing aviator glasses?!

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Teflon Intruder started out a very different episode to what it actually ended up as. The start was the same, he makes himself ‘cook’ proof. Where the episode changed was in the ‘dash across the farm yard’. Originally we tried to make a ‘war movie’ episode with a General Hen laying down suppressing fire from his battalion of egg firing chickens. When that doesn’t stop the Teflon Intruder the General orders an ‘old hen’ to crack out a green egg (a mustard egg). It hits Cluckie square in the face and begins to ‘melt’ the Teflon which in turn exposes him to the sun and he explodes. We found that there were just too many characters in this episode and it was way too confusing. Also it kind of went away from our original idea of making the hens oblivious. The final film was a compromise and we felt much more understandable – he succeeds in getting to the hens only to be baked inside the Teflon suit!

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Umbrella to the Stars was an episode that was different in so many ways from the others. First and foremost it was set within a thunderstorm. Continuous rain in all the outdoor shots, all the characters had to be slightly changed colour wise too. They were subdued a little with a shade of blue. As there was no Sun the only thing that Cluckie needed was an umbrella – obviously he didn’t really need one but his vanity about getting his feathers wet was actually his downfall. The title is a homage to one of the great Looney Tunes shorts starring Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian – Hareway to the Stars.

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Sunblock 3,000,000,000 was the final episode that we were commissioned to produce. Simple in its story, the idea was to have Cluckie cover himself in sunblock (the highest level of protection a vampire can get hold of is factor 3 billion), propel himself over the farm yard and grab some lunch. The fundamental flaw in his plan was that he hadn’t figured out how to get back to his barn, not that this mattered as he was destined to become crispy fried chicken anyway! By the time it came to production on the fifth episode the show was in full flow. Many problems had been sorted out previously so there were not too many creative issues. The only real disappointing thing about the episode was that it was the last one!

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Its in the final moments of a project that you can really see the fruits of your work pay off. Everyone crowds around the monitor and watches their work come to life before their eyes. It’s a great feeling to produce something that everyone is proud of but most importantly, to produce something that everyone enjoys and watches again and again. We hope that Cluckie hasn’t exploded for the last time, we hope he lives on in infamy and we hope that our little feathered fiend will find away to go back to the drawing board and catch those dam chickens!!