LazyTown Lays Down Staying in Data From Viper to Color Grading

Written by Debra Kaufman
StudioDaily, December 1, 2004 It’s a long way between Boulder, Colorado, and Reykjavik, Iceland, but the distance is even greater between a traditional television workflow and a futuristic, data-centric all-digital pipeline. Mark and Dana Read have traversed both divides with LazyTown, a children’s TV program running on both Nick Jr. and CBS. LazyTown Entertainment joined forces with Mark Read s’ Hypercube, a Boulder company specializing in virtual environments...

Written by John Gaudiosi
Unreal Technology 2008 Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) has already taken hold of the videogame industry, powering top games from game publishers like Electronic Arts, Sega, Midway Games, Capcom, Activision, and Sony Online Entertainment. Now, Hollywood can take notice, as the children's hit TV series, "LazyTown," is the first show utilizing the same powerful game technology to breathe life into its blend of live action, puppetry and computer-generated content. Produced and occasionally directed by Dutch television and film maker Raymond P. Le Gué, "LazyTown" currently airs around the world, including on Nickelodeon and Noggin in the U.S....

DIGITAL Cinematography. March 2005

Thomson Grass Valley’s Viper Film- Stream digital cinematography camera is being used to shoot LazyTown, a children’s program that airs on Nickelodeon Jr. and CBS. Mark Read of production company Hypercube (Boulder, Colo.) and Magnús Scheving of LazyTown Studios (Reykjavík, Iceland) began collaborating in late 2003 to create a children’s show that would blend puppets, live action and CG backgrounds—and to devise an all-digital, data-centric workflow to make it happen.

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Band Pro. April 2007

"For LazyTown, we needed lenses that would pump the image as little as possible while pulling the focus", explains cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson. "We also needed sharp, high resolution lenses for a good, high quality key when we shoot on green screen. The Zeiss DigiPrimes were perfect."...

Written by Stephanie Argy
American Cinematographer Vol. 86 Issue 9, p84. September 2005 When Icelandic athlete and entertainer Magnus Scheving set out to create the children’s series LazyTown, he knew he wanted the show to have a whimsical feel all its own. “I wanted people to say, ‘I’ve never seen this look before, what is this?’ I wanted to do something absolutely different, and I wanted to use live action with puppets and 3-D backgrounds.” Scheving gathered a team of artists and technicians from all over the world, and they devised an innovative tapeless workflow that not only combined all the elements Scheving wanted, but also did almost everything in real time on set. This brought production and post much closer together, something that the show’s director of photography, Tómas Örn Tómasson, found very exciting....