Nonprofit educational organization Sesame Workshop has commissioned Brooklyn, New York-based Dancing Diablo Studio (DDS) to design and produce 11 short animated short films for use in both international and domestic TV productions.
The shorts Get Up and Grow, Snake in Snow, Home Sweet Home, Cat and Mouse, Counting Snake, Shaping Rivalry, Monkey Mosaic, Fish Mosaic, Owl Mosaic and Frog Mosaic will be inserted into half-hour international programming, while La Abuela will be incorporated into a one-hour domestic Sesame Street show sometime in April.
"Sesame Workshop came to us looking for innovative and engaging educational content to be inserted into their programming," explains Dancing Diablo chairman/creative director Beatriz Helena Ramos. "This was our first collaboration with Sesame Workshop and it was a wonderful experience. They encouraged us and gave us the freedom to experiment."
Lisa Annunziata, Sesame Workshop’s assistant VP of international production, comments, "Dancing Diablo got us. They were sensitive to our needs and the needs of our audience. They have a strong background in the Latin community and it brings an added dimension to this international work."
In creating the animation, Dancing Diablo employed Adobe After Effects, Adobe PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro and, for the stop-motion work, a high-resolution digital still camera. The shorts vary in length from two t0 four minutes, and exhibit a variety of different styles ranging from the moving painting feel of Get Up and Grow to the 2D Flash look of Cat and Mouse and the clay-animated Snake in Snow and Home Sweet Home.
Get Up and Grow has been selected for screening in the New York Int’l Children’s Film Festival 2005, and all of the shorts will be making the festival rounds in the U.S. and abroad.
Founded in 2002, Dancing Diablo provides traditional animation, stop-motion, CG and Flash work for clients including 4Kids Prods. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV/Paramount Pictures and Noggin, as well as a number of advertising entities. For more information, go to
http://dancingdiable.com.
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