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Playtime with a Feisty Feline Matt and Paul Layzell give us a tour of their new interactive animated show Battle Kitty.
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s recent offerings such as Black Mirror and last month’s Cat Burglar have proven, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what we can expect in the brave, new world of interactive athome entertainment. This month, the new children’s series Battle Kitty, which is based on animation veteran Matt Layzell’s popular Instagram toon The Adventures of Kitty & Orc, ups the ante even more. In the show, our main characters Kitty and Orc have to battle monsters and beat their rivals to move around the wild world of Battle Island. Of course, the kids at home can help them unlock new paths and layers in this futuristic/medieval universe. “The show is based on a series of animated shorts I did for my Instagram during my spare time, just for fun,” says Matt Layzell, who has worked on shows such as Pinky Malinky, Sanjay and Craig and Apple & Onion. “The more of them I made, the more I fell in love with the characters, Kitty and Orc, and it seemed like they could make for a cool show. “ His brother, Paul Layzell (I Love You, America; Apple & Onion) is the show’s supervising
producer. As he tells us, “Matt and I worked on developing a wider world for Kitty and Orc to inhabit and pitched that, along with Matt’s shorts to a number of studios, and Netflix picked it up for development.”
Supportive Vibes The creative siblings began work on the project about four years ago. “We were very lucky to be part of Netflix Animation just as it was starting up, so there weren’t many people there, which meant things were moving really quickly,” recalls Matt. “Everyone was super supportive and eager to get our shows up and running, so there was a lot of trust and a really cool ‘yes and’ kind of vibe at the studio. It was like working at a small independent start-up, but with the backing of a massive, successful company!” The Layzells love the world of video games and they tell us that they were quite excited about using Unreal Engine to make their show. “It’s an amazing tool for producing animation and helped give the show that authentic video game feeling that we wanted,” says Paul. “Unre-
al Engine has some really interesting features that can be leveraged to make the whole TV animation pipeline more efficient and conducive to directors, real-time rendering being a big plus,” adds Matt. “I don’t think it’s the norm yet, but I’m excited to see how other productions will use it in the future. Battle Kitty relied on the talents of about 250 people in total — that’s including preand post-production team. The animation was produced by Sydney-based studio Plastic Wax, led by Nathan Maddams. “It was an absolute joy to work with them,” says Matt. “It was a great creative fit and they really poured their all into the show. They’ve got tons of experience using Unreal and totally understood the language of the video game aesthetic we were after, and had the most amazing character animators who totally got the sense of humor and comedy.” Paul mentions that Plastic Wax had made a lot of super realistic, and often gritty, cinematics, so it was fun for the brothers to provide them with cute, colorful and (comparatively) simple models to play with. “Their
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may 22
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