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CASE STUDY: TUTENSTEIN

This is a case study of DQE’s 2007 Emmy winning co production - Tutenstein.

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Tutenstien was an interesting and difficult project in all aspects of production. During its making, DQE's 2D division was moving into a new state of the art premises and there were new logistical challenges to be dealt with.

Tutenstien was a co production between Porchlight, DQE and Telegael for Discovery kids. The half-hour series features young mummy 'Tutankhensetamun' (based on a real-life mummy) called more often as "Tutenstein", who is awakened about 3,000 years after his accidental death. Tutenstein now has to face the fact that his kingdom has been destroyed.

From a design and animation point of view, a mummy is one of the hardest characters to design and animate with intrinsic movements. The reason being extensive detailing - for every bandage there was a line, and ‘Tutenstein’ was not only covered with bandages, but also wore a very intricate headpiece that made clean up of this character a very laborious process.

'Tutenstein' was not the only character that was extremely difficult and time consuming in line weight. It was a challenge for our artists to design the set of villains, and the other Egyptian Gods to get minute details right - in terms designing and animating the characters. The characters had realistic shadow separations, eye patches around their eyes and shadows.

On the other hand the 'normal human' characters were all quite easy to draw and they were a break from the tedious Tutenstein and other Egyptian characters. Another interesting thing about this show was the "Egyptologist" who works for Discovery. He would check every detail to make sure everything was drawn and colored correctly. Many Egyptian Gods portrayed in the series resemble their historical portrayals and all the Egyptian myths mentioned in the show were genuine.

Also interesting was the detailing done in terms of all the artefacts in the museum. Care was taken that all artefacts of the museum were exactly decpicted in the layouts and backgrounds, to make sure they were historically correct.  

The show had about 18000 to 21000 drawings and approximately 325-350 scenes. The series was broken up into a “teaser” of about 1 min before the show started, and then followed rest of the show in 3 equal acts, separated by commercial breaks.