The first series of Lunch Monkeys was recently shown on BBC Three. Lua were asked to create the titles, interstitials and supporting websites for this exciting project.
Lunch Monkeys centres around the mischiefs of a bunch of ineffective employees in the post room of a personal injury law firm – Fox Cranford. The series, produced by Channel K, stars Nigel Havers and Sian Reeves. It was written and created by David Isaac, directed by Matt Lipsey with music by Gus Bousfield.
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The ten second title sequence descends from the roof, down the stairs, through the shambolic surroundings of the post room and finishes at the back door. (The full animated sequence will appear here soon.)
How the titles were created
From the outset, the intention was to use line art and one solid background colour. Several colours were tried before the burgundy was chosen. Each element of the Post Room was hand drawn using Illustrator. The stage was also composed in illustrator and imported into Flash for animation. In fact, five stages were used to create the ‘wobbly’ effect reminiscent of ‘Rhubarb and Custard’. Due to the complexity of the elements, movie clips were used to handle some of the transitions. As a result, the movie could not be exported as an image sequence. Instead, the sequence was exported as an HD .MOV file with a frame rate of 1fps. Finally, to make our HD broadcast quality file, the MOV was recompiled in AfterEffects at 25fps and rendered with green screen areas ready for the addition of footage from the completed show in the final edit.
The websites
To help market the show, two supporting websites have been developed.
The first site, lunchmonkeys.co.uk adapts the look and style of the title sequence with a line drawing of the disorganised Post Room. The site engages the viewer with teasers, show clips and extras – all can be discovered as you explore the post room. Each main character has a profile page and the date of the next episode appears on the fax machine.
The series is set within the fictional law firm Fox Cranford and the second support site is FoxCranford.com, designed to appear like a real solicitors website. On the site you can apply for a job, make a claim for compensation, keep up to date with the latest Fox Cranford news and discuss legal issues with the various Monkeys.
Both sites are built within CMS frameworks with full visitor tracking. Our client can maintain and update the sites and analyse visitor data without our help.
Additional elements
Other elements created for this project included the caricature for Mike Cranford (played by Nigel Havers) and the TX card for the show.
More about the show can be found at the Lunch Monkeys page on the BBC Three website »
