When I first heard about the story
I immediately thought;
"It's not Wallace and Gromit,
it's Daniel and Casper."
Casper is the cat who is our lead
in this and he went missing for
three years and travelled 55 miles
which is crazy in itself.
Casper is like a really adventurous
cat and I thought that he'd gone
to Paris and climbing up the
Eiffel Tower and everything.
You're doing something animated,
why not do something that you can't
do in live action?
So for us it's these imagination
sequences where Casper is trying
to send a microchip laser signal
to a satellite to tell Daniel
of his whereabouts;
"Come and find me!"
because it's all really about Daniel
longing after his best friend,
until one day when Mum gets a phone call.
Hello, Cats Protection.
Oh hi there, our cat's gone missing.
His name is Casper and he has a microchip.
We scanned Casper whilst he was nice and warm
in our treatment room.
When you scan a cat and you hear that beep
it's a really exciting moment
and to make that phone call,
knowing that you are going to
potentially reunite a cat with it's owner
is really a nice a feeling.
So the magic really, is in the microchip
and we're just sprinkling it with
a bit of imagination from a
six year old's point of view.
It was definitely a magical phone call.
Yeah. To say we've scanned your cat and
his chip details are yours.
That was magical.
If it wasn't for the microchip we wouldn't have him.
Cats Protection have never done a project
of this sort of size and scale
completely remotely before.
Because of the global pandemic we've had to
do everything in such a different way.
For us the biggest challenge has
always been the amount of time
we've had to get this done.
The core team of us are in Bristol,
one of the animators was working on a boat.
The compositor was in France,
the composer in Brighton,
Cats Protection were in Sussex
and then obviously Holly Willoughby in London.
Hello.
Hi Holly.
It's so weird doing it like this, isn't it?
I'll go in.
The first line, you're calling your
son Daniel and Casper from a distance.
Right, here we go, let's give it a go.
"Daniel, Casper, come on!"
Don't stay out long Casper.
The Cats Protection animation started
ten years ago.
It was originally just an e-card
and we wanted to get a bit of
fun animation to it.
It's turned into a yearly tradition
that people look forward to.
The whole concept and the whole storyline
is about the family and it's about that
relationship you have with the pet.
So even though it's for Cats Protection
it's about creating a world and creating characters
and a scenario that people with pets
people who talk to Cats Protection or who are
part of that community will recognise.
Cats Protection wouldn't exist without it's community
and the Christmas animation is a way
of us celebrating the work we do together.
And this year I think the animation
is going to be something really special.
Looking at this film and having that snowy,
Christmassy feel meant adding lots more colours
and having a bit more of a painterly texture
to backgrounds; the sky is pink
and there are purples and that works really well
with the white.
It has to feel bright and optimistic and loving and warm.
I think we originally set out to make something
more visually simplified, but then the artist
made such beautiful background art we had to match that
for the rest of the production.
At that point, none of the characters
had been animated.
So that was when we had to decide
how is Daniel going to run through the street?
How is Casper going to bounce, walk, jump up?
The movements had to be very fluid,
they had to be very lifelike, very realistic
and that's really why we had to do it
as a freehand, drawn animation.
it took a couple of days of working out
the physical locations of everyone.
What about if we get rid of the tree,
how easy is it to move a lamp post?
We're all in different locations as well,
and I'm holding up my sketchbook,
on Zoom to David the artist.
Oh, it's a bit of a conundrum, okay.
I do feel like my head is going to
explode though, do you? Yeah.
Working from home, the amount of Zoom calls
we had where a cat walks in front of the camera
or meows to the side,
but I suppose because that's all
we've been doing all year,
is Zoom video calls, it sort of became the norm.
So it's really really clear then,
that the boy and cat belong in...
Oh yeah, that's a good call.
Making an animation was certainly a
collaborative effort, it used to be just me
on my own doing everything.
And this stuff is happening around him.
Yeah.
So he's asleep and then Santa
kind of comes out from behind his head or something.
We've had more people involved, more teams,
and this year we've got Aardman involved.
Heaving a Christmas tree along the street
through the thick powdery snow.
How can you show that the characters have gone
on this journey through time
and yet we only have say six seconds to do it in?
And this was going through the seasons
and this is where we see the poster,
the missing poster of Casper.
So it was "Okay, we're definitely going to
use a telegraph pole because we're
going to put a poster up on there.
Oh, we should include it on these earlier shots,
even though we're not seeing it until later on.
Any luck?
No.
There was always that time pressure coming into play
to get something ready for Christmas.
I was up 'till 11 and I did three edits last night.
I was directing by day and then getting
all the other little elements ready for the animators
for the following day.
Don't worry about the head turn at the moment.
We had three animators.
Just insert 10 frames of extra bum wiggle.
And you know, the animators did have a lot to do,
Start on the head then it goes down to the bum,
so the little tale ends, sort of like ripples down.
It was coming closer to the wire...
Oh, Zoe's ringing me.
...and my head was over so many different places.
The little paws can be more like a trot.
Every day there would be edits coming through to check.
And it's just that last shot, they want the end on this shot
for five seconds.
It's and important shot.
We were asking the background artist to do
multiple backgrounds per day
I like the idea of it framing Daniel.
Yeah, I love it, I love it.
Immediately when we see the bedroom,
we know that it's a positive thing
it's warm, you've got the light twinkling
through the window and Casper jumps up
on his bed and I wanted to sort of
draw out the process of their reunion a little bit
with Daniel just slowly waking up,
and almost; "Casper, is it you?"
It needed to be a really warmth, magical moment
for that reunion.
He would go up the Christmas tree,
he would basically be the star at the
top of the Christmas tree.
We all need a bit of feel good.
We all need a bit of something warm this Christmas
to make us smile, because it has been
a tricky year.
He's just the same mischievous...
he would be the one who takes the Christmas decorations off.
As I'm decorating it, he'd be the one running away with them.
Yeah, Christmas is fun with Casper.
Merry Christmas Sweetie.