What's Your News? is a children's television programme on the Australian version of Nick Jr., Sprout and CBC Kids launched in January 2009. It is billed as the first ever news show for and about 4-7 year old children and helps their transition from their home and family environment into the wider world around them.
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Overview
What's Your News? is a preschool, children's television series that concentrates on children's news. Hosted by animated news anchors, Grant the Ant and Antony the Anteater (who thinks he's an ant), it follows the classic news programme format and features interviews with children, special reports, traffic updates and weather reports). The show aired in the UK and Australia on Nick Jr. The series was also commissioned by the CBC in Canada and re-versioned for North American market. The series also aired on Sprout in the USA
Production
The show was created by Original Pictures, and TT Animation; a small Production Company, which is a subsidiary of TT Games. It was produced using a technologically innovative combination of Live Action, Motion Capture, CG and Performed Animation. A total of twenty-six 25-minute shows were produced over an 18-month period. The entire production staff numbered around 70 people based in both Knutsford and London.
It features pure CGI content as well as CGI characters composited into filmed live-action sequences. The show's production framework sidesteps many of the labor and time intensive activities normally associated with animated content creation. Character animations are obtained via acted motion capture methods, with instrumented puppetry rigs being used for facial and other auxiliary animations. Once combined only minor manual editing of the animation data is required.
The show also forgoes the use of large-scale software render farms, instead tapping into TT Games game engine technology, using a modified PC game engine for rendering on mainstream GPUs. This approach allows hi-def production quality images to be rendered at around 10 frames per minute.
Cast and crew
Many of the production crew were made up of ex Jim Henson puppeteers.