Working like a dog has never been so fun. An opening title sequence, 34 educational interstitials, and 2 segment titles plus transition animation - made for a fluffy day at the office with this live action Disney+ docu-series.
When Disney Legend Bill Farmer - voice of Goofy and Pluto, among others - and his team approached us about the Disney+ children’s docu-series they were working on about working dogs in the real world, we were thrilled to be part of the project. We had to develop the opening titles of this project from scratch with a tight timeline that featured cartoon versions of the actual dog’s of the show.
Developing a visual language for the series with their team, we came up with the concept above, tying nostalgic Disney design with the modern language of tablet finger swipes and gestures. Who better to be watching along with us, than our mascot Pluto? This became the transition language of the entire show, and we created a jumbo of Pluto’s fingers swipes, pinches and taps on the screen to use throughout the series.
With a mix of modern mo-graph movement, nostalgic Hollywood squares, and traditional animation and design harkening back to our favorite Disney dogs, It’s a Dog’s Life had its visual language.
Obviously the toughest part of this project was the sheer amount of dog design we had to do. This is some of our explortation that we ended up making our final designs off of. These were all based off dogs we knew would be part of the show.
As a final gag of our animated opening titles, Bill takes center stage of the Hollywood squares and then we transition to the real life host.
Usually when developing a concept, we will do a test to show the client how the idea will work in the real world.Here we made up two dogs.
Eventually we pushed the gags and lost the titles, but you can still see how this look made it into the final project.
We wanted to infuse some classic cel animation into the project but had a tight timeline and a tighter budget. By keeping it rough and maintaining rougher quality, we were able to infuse these elements into the each dog scene of our opening titles.
Jojo here loves to surf and has blown up as a social media personality. Here we’ve pictured him enjoying his ride on a wave.
Remus was paired with Kris, an orphaned cheetah to help her socialize at the zoo in Cincinnati. They’re best friends to this day, and are inseberable in constant play. We wanted to show Remus in that parental role, playing with his cub.
Sometimes not knowing what segments were going to look like until a week before the animation was due, we threw everything we had at creating 13 interesting animated segments that helped illustrate what a dog’s job was and why it was so important.
Truffles have been a delicacy since Roman times. They believed they were created wherever lightning struck.
Of course we know now they are a fungus - “like the mushrooms on your pizza. Except under ground and kinda stinky!”
Snakes aren’t indigenous to Hawaii. When Bill says the line “That doesn’t mean they might not try to take an all expense paid vaction here.” - We couldn’t help but picture a snake enjoying a Mai Tai, lounging on the beach..
With over 20 maps to create, we didn’t want the animation to get boring.
We always found little ways to plus the visuals, adding new elements for different types of travel or special locations.
Each segment ends with a heartwarming tale of how a real life dog has done something incredible for a person or town around the country.
We wanted to harken back to the Super Goof Design, with a classic Disney retro feel.
This segments gives kids small tips in how to interact with and take care of dogs.
We wanted to throw in a little extra animation to call back to Pluto’s classic moment from the old Mickey short “The Pointer.”
