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ream Michelle Obama and her co-stars teach kids about cooking and nutrition.
Palate Cleanser Six Point Harness’s creative director Musa Brooker gives us a taste of his delicious work on Waffles + Mochi.
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etflix’s charming live-action puppet series Waffles + Mochi has been one of the unexpected delights of the spring season. Produced by showrunners Erika Thormahlen and Jeremy Konner, Tonia Davis, Priya Swaminathan and Barack and Michelle Obama, the 10 x 20-minute show features former First Lady Michelle Obama and two delightful puppet friends (named Waffles and Mochi) as they travel the world and teach young viewers about cooking and healthy eating. In addition to guest stars such as Samin Nosrat, José Andrés, Massimo Bottura and Preeti Mistry, the show features over a hundred animated segments, produced by L.A.'s Six Point Harness under the direction of the studio's creative director Musa Brooker. A stop-motion animation veteran whose nu-
merous credits include shows such as Robot Chicken, Tumble Leaf, SpongeBob SquarePants and Titan Maximum, Brooker began work on the series in the fall of 2019. He says he was very pleased when producers Swaminathan and Konner contacted him to join the project. “I was excited when they reached out to me about the project,” he recalls. “Separately, around the same time, I was also contacted by Six Point Harness as I knew the head of production Barbara Cimity, as we worked together at Stoopid Buddy.”
Diversity Wins Brooker says what was clear from the very beginning was that producers had a very definite idea about the role animation was going to play in the series. “They wanted to have ani-
Photo Credits: Higher Ground Productions Visual Treat: The team at Six Point Harness worked their magic on Mochi’s mouth. www.animationmagazine.net
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mation integrated throughout the show, so we helped them develop the different styles and visuals they were looking for,” he explains. The director says he got his initial cues by attending the show’s writers room. “Because none of the writers came from an animation background, I listened to what they were looking for and understood the genesis of their ideas,” says Brooker. “We had a lot of different style references. There was a cool wall in the room of images and references that they loved, which looked like this giant mood board. We were able to work together to pull from a lot of visuals both from animation history and contemporary work. The producers wanted different visuals for the different segments — we were going for the feel of a collection from indie animators.” Brooker and his team of about 30 designers, animators and some freelance vendors worked on the show’s animated segments for about a year. “We animated Mochi’s mouth, and he’s in every episode,” he points out. Other animated spots feature the “Taste Buds” who live inside Mochi’s mouth. He notes, “I really enjoyed working on the Buds. We also did the ‘pizzazz lines’ (the on-screen painted lines) that play around with the live-action elements. There are these patches and animated transitions created for the end of the scenes. We used a variety of animation tools, from drawing and designing in Photoshop to animating in Harmony and Adobe Animate, and some After Effects for compositing.”
Quick Adapters Brooker, who has also been the creative director at Six Point Harness and is overseeing
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