Commissioned by the UK’s CBBC, Totally Rubbish, produced by Dot to Dot Productions, is a new 10x30’ art series which inspires children to transform their trash into treasure, by focusing on recycling, upcycling and repurposing.

Animation production studio Beakus was commissioned to produce a series of stings and short animations to be incorporated into the new art-based kids’ TV show. The full production schedule ran for around 20 weeks from July through November 2012. In keeping with the show’s recycling, hand-made, art-based theme, the project included the following:

Totally Famous – Ten one-and-a-half-minute animations depicting the life and times of famous artists and their works such as Andy Warhol, Picasso, Van Gogh and Banksy.

These profiles were animated in Adobe After Effects, and composited onto photos of a model set created out of recycled materials

Bin Stings – Ten one-minute animations in which two bins, with graffiti faces, tell each other “rubbish” jokes and a little fact about recycling. We filmed 2 large industrial bins in simple stop motion on location, and then added animated graffiti faces and re-animated the whole thing in after effects.

Graffiti Stings Thirteen 30-second stings. Again, using a live action backdrop and footage shot around London, we composited Flash animated characters, creating an animated graffiti effect.

The stings consisted of a short joke or funny story told in picture form, centred on various reoccurring characters, including pigeons, rats, squirrels and foxes.

Fun fact: One of the walls that Beakus shot to use as the live action backdrop to animate the Graffiti Stings was actually used by Banksy himself for one of his masterpieces!

As well as the animated stings, Beakus also produced a number of different animated transitions, straps, wipes and graphics, to be used throughout each of the episode. These were created mainly in After Effects with animated text and photographic elements.

Source: Beakus