The Official Pocoyo Blog

Pocoyo Awards (V)

We’ve just been told some days ago that Pocoyo is once again nominated for Best TV Animated Series at Annecy Festival, the best and most prestigious animation award in the world. In this edition, Zinkia will present an episode from the second series, Big Scary Slide. To give you an idea, amongst 1855 programmes presented from 56 countries, just 20 have been nominated as finalists. As you can see, just been nominated is an achievement for any worldwide production.

Just thinking about that mythical day of 6^th June 2006 when Pocoyo won the Annecy’s Crystal, is a thrilling feeling. What nerves! We never thought that we could reach such recognition.

Following, please find attached a summary of all prestigious awards obtained by Pocoyo.

Hooray for Pocoyo!!

More Pocoyo Awards

...and a Happy New Year...

It seems that Pocoyo has behaved very well this year. At least, that is what Santa thinks so... ;-) How about you? Have you been good? Pocoyo and his friends would really like to know YOUR WISHES for this new year...                      Click here to see the PocoChristmas

Pocoyo "The movie"

Maybe is a good idea, maybe not..we are deeply thinking about it, first of all it`s not the same 6 minutes script than 90 minutes...long way! Will it works?..and what about white backrounds...definitily we have to think about other places, underwater, space, yes, but some more also...
Its going to be a huge challenge, but what if is it possible!!!...lets give it a try, at least lets see how a Pocoyo script for a film would be.
We are already involved in the develop of a new series and we are not planning doing Pocoyo´s 3rd seasion by the moment. It´s too long to explain here why, we first need to consolidate the series, and this is really hard for a preschool one. I think we will, but in the next years and at this time we will need to develop diferent contents as, for istance the movie.
We did some tries with the illumination which is one of the more important issues in this adventure as long as we just work with this caracteristics white backgrounds and global ilumination.
Samanta Undari, the profesional who´s in charge of the matter, did a great job bringing Pocoyo to the inside sets, here you have a couple of examples.

Pocoyo 2 is almost here

It´s been a long time, i know...
We are almost done with the seasion 2 of Pocoyo, just one more week!!
Here you have a clip we did to launch it on television. I think the new episodes are going to be great and we really hope you like it.
Season 2 has got plenty of surprises, new caracters, new wonderful machines, even new planets!! And of course all the humor that we had in the previous episodes. All the team did it with the same love and hard work. Hurray for them and Hurray for Pocoyo!!

Pocoyo opening midi

Here you have another little treasure from our music/audio team. It is the opening music theme tune in a midi file just ready to bring to your mobile... everyone here has the ending music, so each time anyone receives a call we all start looking for our mobiles!  We thought it would be a good idea to have another one! I hope you enjoy it.Download opening_pocoyo.mid

Pocoyo´s Picture Gallery

I found this on the CITV webpage. It's a nice idea, all of our children can send their own version of Pocoyo and his friends and then CITV show the drawings on TV. You can also send them to me at host@zinkia.com and I will post them here!

Here is the link

Sleepy bird´s car

Have you ever seen Sleepy bird´s car?...it appears just in one episode "Pocoyo Race", but, isn´t it great?!!
I love it so much and we were so lucky to get Bandai on board to make it as a toy, and in my opinion it is a great one!

Pocoyo Awards IV (BAFTA)

David Cantolla, Guillermo García, Kathryn Hart, Anne Brogan, Jonathan Doyle

The photo was taken at 7.30pm in Hotel London Milton. After we’d met in the lobby, we shared a champagne cocktail with very elegant and glamorous people in an enormous function room with reserved seating. At our table were Anne Brogan (Executive Co-Producer), David Johnson (Financial Director), Catherine Williams (Script Editor), Giles Ridge (Head of Production), Emmanuelle Namiech (Int'l Sales Exec.) and Lynda McNaughton (Post-Pro) from Granada Kids and Granada International, Jon Doyle (Executive Co-Producer) from Cosgrove Hall and us three: Kath Hart (Executive Co-Producer), Guillermo Garcia (Co-Director) and myself (Co-Director).  Kath, Guillermo and I flew from Spain the previous night and we stayed with our friends/associates. We made out that we weren’t going to be that bothered if we lost…but of course … who did we think we were kidding!?  Before the ceremony started, Guillermo and I had already finished our bread and butter, despite the incredulous stares from our fellow guests! …  We Spaniards are always lowering the tone!

After about 5 or 6 award presentations came our category of nominations. Next to "Charlie and Lola", "The Koala Brothers" and "Postman Pat" , Pocoyo appeared on the screen … and the crowd applauded ferociously … this really did touch me … my heart was pounding and I could tell by the faces around the table that we all felt the same way …

fingers crossed….

the moment arrived …. “and the winner is: ……… Pocoyo”

Wow!  I was absolutely over the moon!  We were all absolutely thrilled!  Anne was euphoric and Jon too … how fabulous for them, after all the bad news we’ve had over the last few months.

Granada Kids is closing down, yes, it’s unbelievable.

Television is above all a question of money, if the business plans are not profitable then companies and their projects close down and disappear. For those of you who have not been following the issue, here is more or less the chain of events:  1. OFCAM in the UK is prohibiting the advertisement of sweets and junk food in any area of children’s products, which of course is great for our children, but…. 2.  As a result of this, ITV’s business plan has had to be reworked looking at its children’s products.  It has ruled that the business plan cannot sustain this area and has therefore decided that they are not going to commission anymore children’s productions.  3.  On making this decision, the plan for Granada Kids’ co-productions has become unviable, and Granada International has announced its closure.  4.  Not only Granada Kids, a whole host of producers have been left alone in the market and are only going to be able to look to the BBC in the future… which indicates a desolate panorama for our children… at the same time, it is a possibility that (as is the case in Spain) the majority of the children’s’ products will be imported from countries who produce them internally … as we say in Spain, that’s football for you!

For this reason (as well as the obvious!) I was especially sorry for Anne, after the efforts she has gone to with us.  I can’t tire of thanking her because she is the before and after in this series, which has made it a very special award.

I wish to dedicate this award to them, to Anne and Jon who have been the best travelling buddies we could have hoped for in Pocoyo!  With them we have learned so much. And of course, to all the others at Granada, some of whom were with us at the table, and to those who have also been part of this adventure but, for one reason or another, could not be there with us.

After everything that you’ve read …and as you’re now getting to know the ins and outs of Zinkia and about how we make Pocoyo, I suppose that you can imagine how wonderful an award like this is for us. Yes, Annecy is, in the world of animation, almost an Oscar, but this award is like winning the best pre-school product on television!!  And even more so in England with competition in infant products as fierce as it is…….. thanks to all of you who support us, to all of you who write here, and to those of you who have believed in us right from the start.  And lastly, a very special thank you to the whole Zinkia team who have made this adventure possible.

more about pocoyo awards here

Animation References

For many of the sequences in the series, animation references are needed.  Most of these have been done by Alberto Sánchez and Luis Zamora and they are done so that the animators have a better idea about how we want the characters to move within a scene.

These references are made using the scenes from the animatic (animated storyboard) and the more references given to the animation teams, the better.  Often, the intent or the way the character acts is not easy to see or understand just by looking at the animatic or the written explanation accompanying it. I will leave you with a couple of examples, one is from the episode “Elly´s Doll” and the other is from “Musical Blocks” these episodes were released in autumn 2006.

Download sc-36.mov 

Download cap_051_pocoyo_jazz-4.mov 

Backgrounds

It’s true that in the pilot episode Pocoyo appears in a boat in the sea counting fish, as you will have seen in the post we published a while back.  But even before this, the first sketches of the character and his first movements were done on a white background.

The problem is that although we were quite clear that we wanted little or no backgrounds, the idea was only in our heads and as what we had presented in the markets had backgrounds, it was difficult for us to allow ourselves to understand this concept as in pre-school it hadn’t been done much before and so it was quite unique.

It might have been for this reason that at first we had a major, intense debate concerning the backgrounds we would use in the series, and it even caused us a delay of a couple of months in the production due to the necessity to go through all the backgrounds for all the episodes in the series. Yes, Pocoyo may not have been white …. Can you imagine it?!

For us, the white background was basic, it gave more focus to the actions of the characters, highlighted their design and movement. It also seemed as though it would encourage the children to pay more attention to the episodes. It gave the series a unique aspect, although we were still planning on using episodes in which Pocoyo would travel to other places such as the Ocean background, or Space, but we also realised that it was a decision that had various risks … and would the children really like it?

From here we will go straight to the journey we made to research how the backgrounds in series would be, something which took an enormous amount of work.  After two months of tests and sleepless nights, experimenting with all types of backgrounds, fog as a tone, with clouds, without clouds, with many props, simple etc… we finally arrived at a compromise which we thought was best and we finished the first episode “umbrella, umbrella” with a background filled with trees, flowers and which was completely green!!!

This is when the decision was made, without the background the difference to the episode was so huge (and let me tell you that the background we came up with was anything but bad!) that the decision was made to use white backgrounds on all the episodes apart from very few special occasions. (You have to understand that this decision lead to a backwards step of two months of production – or rather a lot of money and risk for the sake of trying out the proposal.)

I’ll leave you with some of the images of the backgrounds and the work that was done.   I haven’t found the definitive versions, the ones that were used in the end, but I’m sure that this is sufficient to judge whether we did or didn’t ….