Onkel Reje og Børnenes Brevkasse
15 episodes á 13 min.
Produced for DR Ramasjang
Produced by Made in Valby
IDEA, SCRIPT, MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN and EDITING - Mads Geertsen
ACTORS - Brian Lykke and Mads Geertsen
DIRECTOR - Jesper Rofelt and Mads Geertsen
PRODUCTION DESIGN - Fredrik Lindgren og Mads Geertsen
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, ANIMATION and VFX - Fredrik Lindgren, Studiosapiens
CAMERA - Claus Rosenløv
BOOM TECHNICIAN and SOUND MIX - Atical
GAFFER - Emil Kaae
PROPS - Joshua Beckford og Allan Elsass
EDITING ASSISTANT - Maria Tjørnelunde
ANIMATION - Hjortefar
COLORGRADING - Morten Balling
PRODUCTIONS ASSISTENT - Cathrine Møss
PRODUCER - Tanja Paik
DR REDAKTØR - Ulla Hæstrup
Onkel Reje is an oldschool answer-letters-from-kids box. The driving force in the show is Onkel Reje and his fantasy fuelled answers and asociations to letters from made up children like Birthe Rønn from Hornbeck and Biker Jens, 4 yr.Onkel Rejes partner and best friend Brille is with him for the ride, and the two of them travels the world, fight ninjas, goes to the moon and meets all kinds of different interesting people and places.
It's a satirical comedy show, for children between 3 and 7 years old filled with saturated colors and music. A magical place where fantasy is more fun than science.
At the core of my work with Onkel Reje, there's supervising and carrying out the post production process. To make all the fun and crazy possible we shoot the entire show in greenscreen and build all sets in 3D. As technical director I break down the scripts into all the bits and pieces we need to shoot in the green-screen work out camera angles and how to solve how to shoot Brian playing two characters when they go visiting somewhere with the traveling button. I also design and build the 3D enviroments that is a major driving force in the our visual universe. Basicly, the work with every episode starts the same way. Before Mads starts to write the scripts, we sit down and brainstorm around the musicvideos and where it would be fun and otherwise interesting to go visit, with the Travelling button.
Due to the short production time, and the fact that it is us two who handle all post-production except sound mastering and color grading, we've chosen a very minimalistic approch to computer generated 3D. The use of Videocopilot's Element 3D gives me fast 3D compositing directly in After effects.
I model the 3D in Cinema 4D and sometimes use models from archive3d.net and other free web-resources. Low-poly and optimized textures is essential for the fast render times required. Element 3D didn't support shadows at the time of production wich gives a bit of old computer game feel to everything.
When Mads starts to write, I start to design sets. For season two we knew we would visit a wizard in a Lord of the Rings inspired tower, visit a super-hero in the big city, attemp a world record in the Arizona desert, and try the world largest slide at a kindergarden i Holland and so on.
Before we start filming in the green-screen, Me and Mads do storyboards for the music videos and parts of the script, and I pre-visualize more technichal demanding sequenses like the slide ride and the world record attemp in Arizona.This is to get a good understanding of lighting, camera angles, and mood for the different setups. It's a key tool for communicating with the camera man Claus Rosenløv and gaffer Emil Kaae.
After shooting Mads starts editing the episodes while I make music videos. In every episode a walking television show up and shows one of the 5 videos we produced for the show. Because of the heavy recycling and Ramasjangs use of them as spots for the show we put some extra energy in them.
Musikvideoer med Onkel Reje
When Mads are finished editing the green screen material I move the whole project into Adobes After effects and Premiere for compositing and animation. There is about 5 to 6 days work for every episode, plus a good week for every music video. Before I do the final touches, Mads does the sound design and we send it to Ulla Hæstrup at Ramasjang for approval.
After all episodes has been aproved I go back and try to finish as much as possible of the known issues and in some cases the don'ts Ulla has pointed out.As an example, we weren' allowed to let god, by misstake, burn the amarican flag on the moon. We prioritise everything by how important they are and try to get as many as possible done. Even though our ambition is to jam as much as possible in to every situation there are a lot of ideas that has to be droped due lack of time...And the end result can be seen at anytime at Ramasjang's Onkel Reje og Børnenes Brevkasse site.