Greeny Phatom/How episodes are produced

This page describes the animation process for Greeny Phatom, its movies and other GP-related material.

Seasons 1-7
First, episode storyboards would be drawn with MS Paint, printed out, then retraced and numbered with pencils (for those of you wondering, Nataraj pencils imported from India were used to do the job), and then sent overseas to a foreign animation studio, roughly animated, put on 35mm, transferred, and then put into TVPaint for animation, clean-up, inbetweening, painting, checking, and compositing. After the animation was made in TVPaint, the completed footage was transferred to either Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas 9 for editing. The voices are then recorded, mixed at a commercial recording studio, transferred to the computer, and then imported into TVPaint for lip-syncing. For post-production, the video was edited and post-production work was performed at The Film & Tape Works in Chicago. The final episode is then transferred to an S-VHS tape and after that, transferred again to a Betacam SX cassette (the original master tapes for Season 1 and Season 2's episodes were on Betacam SP tapes), and copies in various formats are sent to broadcasters around the world.

Intro
The intro was animated by Robert Stainton using Cambridge Animation Systems Animo.

Seasons 8-19
Season 8 features a brand new animation style, with storyboards drawn with paint.net, and animation created with TVPaint. When the animation was completed, the animation clips of the episode were then exported into either Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas for editing and transferring to digital broadcast files. Since season 8, the show has been digitally animated instead of being traditionally animated using cels.

Season 20
Season 20 features a whole new animation style, with episodes being made with Adobe Flash, GoAnimate, Aardman's Animate It, Microsoft Paint, paint.net, Scratch, Sony Vegas, Windows Movie Maker, EpocCam (both the iPad app and the Windows EXE for the EpocCam drivers, before it was BANNED from being used on Keegan's iPad forever in 2015 and before the iPad broke in 2017), Bandicam, Audacity, TVPaint Animation, Blender, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Cinema 4D. Former Mock Reviewers for Hire Productions had 65 animators working on the project with 6 layout men, along with members in America and other countries.

Opening titles
The opening titles are made with Microsoft Paint for storyboards and backgrounds, TVPaint Animation for layout, animation, clean-up, inbetweening, painting, checking, and compositing, Cinema 4D for background modeling and texturing, lighting, and rendering, Adobe After Effects for visual effects, compositing, and color grading, Audacity for audio editing and recording, Adobe Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas for video editing, and Windows Movie Maker for video editing and uploading.

Episode
The episodes are composed of the following parts:

2D scenes
2D scenes are made with paint.net, Scratch, Adobe Flash, TVPaint Animation, and GoAnimate.

Stop-motion scenes
Stop-motion scenes are made with Aardman's Animate It and TVPaint Animation.

CGI scenes
3D scenes are made with Blender and Cinema 4D.

Mixed animation scenes
Mixed animation scenes are made with a blended mixture of hand-drawn, Flash, stop-motion, and/or 3D CGI animation.

Visual effects
Visual effects are created with Adobe Flash, Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, TVPaint Animation, and Sony Vegas.

Audio
Audio is recorded and edited with Audacity and Sony Vegas at Greenyworld Recording Studios in Chicago, Illinois and some other studios including the Dreamworks Animation recording facility in Glendale, California and Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California.

Video Editing
The video is edited with Adobe Flash, WMM, Sony Vegas, Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Bandicam, and GoAnimate.

Live-action scenes
Prior to 2015, when live-action began getting involved, they were filmed with the iPad via EpocCam and Debut Video Capture software. After that, it switched back to the Camera app in iPad, and after the iPad broke in 2017, they switched to the DXG 5B6V-HD until it was broken for months (July until September), and then they switched to a generic Chinese action camera and a TASCAM DR-40 for better audio quality until October. As of October 2017, most live-action scenes are filmed with a Canon VIXIA HF R700, with audio getting picked up by a Sidande MIC-01 hooked up to it for a bit better audio quality. Underwater parts are filmed with a Sony Bloggie Sport MHS-TS22 and a GoPro HERO6 Black 4K Action Camera. More professional-looking parts are filmed with Red Digital Cinema Camera Company equipment.

Closing titles
Closing titles are made with Microsoft Paint, TVPaint Animation, Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas, Windows Movie Maker, and Endcrawl. (Sony Vegas/WMM is more preferred)

Season 21-present
Season 21 has a completely new style of animation.

Episode
The episodes are composed of the following parts:

2D scenes
2D scenes are made with Moho, Adobe Animate, TVPaint, DigiCel FlipBook, and Toon Boom Harmony. The storyboards are either digitally drawn on the computer in MS Paint with Wacom Cintiq graphics tablets or traditionally hand-drawn with Nataraj pencils imported from India or gel pens on specially-made storyboard sheets.

Stop-motion scenes
Stop-motion scenes are made with Aardman's Animate It and TVPaint Animation.

CGI scenes
3D scenes are produced at Blue Sky using Autodesk Maya and its own proprietary rendering software, known as CG Studio.

Mixed animation scenes
Mixed animation scenes are made with a blended mixture of hand-drawn, Flash, stop-motion, and/or 3D CGI animation.

Visual effects
Visual effects are created with Adobe After Effects.

Audio
Audio is recorded and edited at Greenyworld Recording Studios in Chicago, Illinois and some other studios including the Dreamworks Animation recording facility in Glendale, California and Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California.

Video Editing
The video is edited at Meatball Taco Studios in Chicago, Illinois.

Live-action Scenes
Same as Season 20.

Closing titles
Closing titles are made with Endcrawl and the blooper reel is added in at Meatball Taco Studios in Chicago, Illinois.

D'Ocon-animated episodes
Episodes would be animated with the D'Oc Animation System after the studio got the storyboards from the US. Tapes with the animation on them would be sent back to the US for recording the voices, transferring to computer, and editing.

Behind the scenes
The early episodes that were animated in-house were produced in a converted high school in Utica, New York, where character designer Rod Rodger had attended for high school classes as an exchange student in the 70's. A team of artists drew the frames and storyboards in a computer lab adjacent to the break room located in a carpet-covered former fitness room. The episodes were animated in another room located in an old kindergarten classroom. The original frames used before animation, inbetweening, and clean-up can now be seen at GreenyWorld Studios' Chicago headquarters and some were sold on eBay. Now, as for the original rough pencil test animation frames, they were sent to Greenyworld Studios and its overseas animation studios all around the world for animation, clean-up, inbetweening, scanning, painting, checking, video transferring, compositing, and editing.

James Clayton told a magazine in an interview: "We took digital animation apart like a children's toy and put it back together all wonky, then catapulted it into the future".

The series is considered one of the pioneers of digitally-animated cartoons.

A behind-the-scenes work for seasons 1-20's animation was included in the season 20 digital release.