How Pikkukala provided production consultant services for seasons 2 and 3 of the Angry Birds Toons.

Angry Birds™ is the casual mobile game that changed an industry and became an international phenomenon. Today Angry Birds is not only the most downloaded series of games of all time, it is a renowned entertainment brand that has branched out into animation, licensing and more.

After a successful first season, Rovio needed advise and support to keep delighting the Angry Birds fans through animation, transforming the show into a repeatable formula of suistainable success until the arrival of the Angry Birds Movie on May 2016. And they chose Pikkukala.

We accompanied the production from the beginning to the end, to make sure it was delivered on time, and according  to the expectations of the exigent fans. Further than that, we carried out a job of style consolidation, an effort to optimise the production pipeline, and a constant impulse to help directors, artists, and technicians to challenge themselves and push further the creative boundaries of the rich universe of the Angry Birds Toons.

Style consolidation.

Together with the series director and the script editor, we renewed the literary bible of the series, and corrected the character descriptions of the characters according to the learnings from the actual episodes. We forced ourselves and the writers to write on the most difficult topics and develop the most obscure characters.  It was also necessary to go through the vast amount of graphic materials generated during the first season to pick and choose the best examples to follow in order to normalise the style of the show. The result was a style guide that helped the whole team (from writers to story artists or background painters), whenever they wondered about the exact location of this or that corner of Cobalt Plateau, or whether the trees or rocks were really supposed to look like that.

Production optimisation.

We streamlined the production pipeline by simplifying certain aspects, encouraging creative re-use of assets, and underlining the importance of  pre-production. We created inventory of materials in different stages of the production, which helped us keep all the inhouse departments, partner studios, writers and artist  from eight different countries in line and busy, and with a predictable workload.

Creative push.

Angry Birds Toons represents high quality standards and has always been noticed for taking things a bit further, comedy being pushed all the time. We wanted the series to be fresh and alive, and the talented people in the team to stay challenged and creative all the time. We made our best to protect them from the noise and the structural changes undergoing the company through the production, to focus on creating some of the best and more memorable episodes of the show, and keep being the number one series on the ToonsTV platform.

It was exciting to experience first hand a global brand like Angry Birds, and put our bit to create its universe applying our experience in animation development and production. We learned about the complexities of developing a multi-format brand with a huge global fanbase, that keeps evolving all the time with new products, games, feature films, books and merchandising.

We also learned a lot froom the amazing and varied team from many nationalities we had the privilege to work with.

You can watch Angry Birds Toons on ToonsTV.

If you want to know more about our work with the Angry Birds toons, or other business cases, contact us.

All images in this post are © Rovio Entertainment