A London children's animation studio, behind the BAFTA-winning pre-school series Sarah & Duck, that writes, designs and animates its shows under one roof.
Karrot Animation is a London studio that makes animated television for children and families. Its first original show was Sarah & Duck, a 2D pre-school series commissioned by CBeebies and BBC Studios in 2010. It ran for 120 episodes over six years and won the BAFTA for Best Preschool Animation in 2014 after five nominations. Karrot has also made Magic Hands, which pairs animation, sign language and music, and Night Zookeeper, which turns children's own drawings and ideas into a 50-minute story with Sky Kids. It has done service work for the BBC and Amazon Prime, and has Love Monster and Tish Tash among its projects listed in 2019.
The studio was founded in 2008 by Chris White, Tim O'Sullivan and Jamie Badminton. O'Sullivan and Badminton studied animation together at Arts University Bournemouth, and White's design agency led to the studio's first job, animating CBBC's One Minute Wonders, with a team of eight. Karrot says it aims to make stories that are immersive and entertaining for all ages, with an emphasis on emotional authenticity. It has focused on building expertise in writing, storyboarding, editing and art direction, and it works under one roof to keep control of the process.
In a 2019 Animation UK interview the studio was based in London, with its production studio at Elephant & Castle. That is a few years old, so check the current address on the company's website. A Kidscreen headline also reports that Karrot opened a rights-management arm. The studio's wider setting is the UK animation community, which meets at events such as the Manchester Animation Festival, where Jamie Badminton has appeared as a guest.
The company says it works to create "a family atmosphere within our team", with karaoke and gaming nights. A technical profile describes a careful pipeline: audio is edited in-house first, storyboards become animatics (rough timed versions of a show), the art director prepares an art pack that must be signed off, and animators then work in tools such as CelAction, After Effects and Photoshop. It says each episode of Sarah & Duck needed an art director, two designers, a storyboard artist, a scriptwriter, an animation director and four animators. The team grew from eight to roughly 35 to 50 people, according to the 2019 interview.
The jobs at Karrot are the ones listed above, plus producers, production managers and editors who keep a series on schedule, and sound and music people who work on the audio. Drawing, storytelling, animation, writing, design and film editing are all in play. If you like children's television and want to know how a series gets from script to screen, Karrot's own pipeline description is a good place to see the steps.
Website: www.karrotanimation.com
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