I took my daughter to see how they make Bluey at Ludo Studios in Brisbane and it sort of blew her mind

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My daughter and I visited the "creative, beautiful sausage factory" Ludo Studio, where the internationally acclaimed animation series Bluey is built from nose to tail.

When I told my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter we were going to go and see how they make Bluey, she didn't really get what that meant.

Don't get me wrong, she was still excited — in the same way she's excited about Christmas this year without understanding what Christmas is.

Mae is hooked on the show, even if she's a little young to truly appreciate it. It was the catchy introduction which initially piqued her interest — her eight-month-old sister Rafi already pops her head up and squirms about when it comes on — but as she grew a bit bigger she became mesmerised by the cast of bright and playful characters, and the funny, tender storylines.

She's addicted to watching the seven-minute vignettes about the life and (play)times of six-year-old Brisbane blue heeler Bluey, her four-year-old sister Bingo, mum Chilli and dad Bandit.

I don't think Mae imagined Bluey being "made" … just kind of assumed it existed on iview or mum's phone.

So when we visited Ludo Studio, where the show is produced, located in Brisbane's slightly grimy, very hip nightclub hub of Fortitude Valley, her little mind was a little bit blown.

Plush toys, props from the show (more on those later) and awards sit on and around the reception desk out front of an industrial-chic, naturally lit open-plan studio.

Creative people sit quietly sketching on glowing screens. Producer Sam Moor tells me: "It's a sort of sausage factory in a way. A very creative, beautiful sausage factory."

After scoring a cuddle with the Bluey toy at the front desk, Mae's eyes flick from screen to screen, all of them filled with images of characters and scenes from the series, either fully or partially rendered.

You can see her mind ticking over and not quite comprehending why every adult in this large room is staring intently at pictures of Bluey.

From one room in Brisbane to global success

Even if you're not a parent of young children, you're probably aware of Bluey.

It's become a bit of a thing.

As a Brissie family with two daughters we might be the perfect demographic for the series, but the appeal is clearly universal.

Since its release in October 2018, it has become the number one program of all time on ABC iview, with 152 million plays. On old-school TV, it was the number one kids' show for 2019.

It has been snapped up by the BBC and Disney Junior and, just recently, released globally on the new streamer Disney+.

It won the Logie for best children's program this year and has been nominated at the upcoming International Emmy Kids Awards.

There is a second season well on its way, and Ludo is expecting huge interest in an inaugural Christmas episode, Verandah Santa, released on December 12, with a 12 Days of Bluey competition tied in.

And it all sprouts from the mind of creator Joe Brumm, who thinks up the ideas and writes the script for each episode.

"It all comes from him in terms of story," says Moor, who worked on big-budget live-action productions in the UK but is relatively new to animation.

"It's a very authored show. It's basically his life on screen."

When I ask executive producer Daley Pearson how he'd describe Bluey to a parent who hadn't seen it yet, he can't.

"This was a problem for two years when we were trying to pitch the show," he says.

"I think it's one of those execution ideas like Seinfeld, it's one of those things that sounds like … nothing. You know, it's just funny.

"We've had a lot of parents say that we have cameras in their homes … which we do," he says — hopefully joking.

"I think that's just a testament to the writing and the animation and the crew creating something, even though it's dogs, it's pretty close-to-the-bone stuff for families."

The beautiful sausage factory

At any one time, about 15 episodes of Bluey are being churned through different stages of production at Ludo.

From their initial conception, the scripts take one to two months until they're ready to be transformed into an episode.

The first step is to storyboard the episode. We take Mae over to meet Sarah Rackemann as she works at turning Brumm's ideas into pictures. Over three weeks, three storyboard artists will produce between 500 and 800 individual drawings.

Sarah shows Mae how she draws Bluey from scratch, first the rectangular body, "like a box of Tic Tacs", then the pointy ears. For the first time it starts to dawn on Mae what's actually going on here, and her eyes light up.

She recognises Bluey, then, to her delight, Sarah whips up Bingo as well. Rackemann says she's got a soft spot for Bingo, and she loves drawing the nannas.

Once the storyboarding stage is complete, the embryonic episode needs to be cut into an animatic, which is the black-and-white blueprint (Blueyprint?) for the rest of the production process.

The dialogue has been recorded by now — not all in one location but separately by the different voice actors from wherever they are in Australia — and it's all spliced together so that the seven-minute episode now has its major beats and timings locked in.

"The animatic is the recipe that everyone refers back to," Moor says.

Making it look 'Bluey'

Art director Costa Kassab then comes up with the "look" of the episode, particularly if it takes place in a new location, a park or a shopping centre around Brisbane, for example; making it "look Bluey", as Moor describes it.

Brumm will have specified exactly where he wants the scenes taking place, and Ludo has a photographer go out and take reference photos.

Part of the fun for Brisbane Bluey fans is recognising their local haunts when they appear on the show.

The artists also render any new "props" which the characters interact with, many of which (the magic xylophone, the yoga ball) can be seen scattered around the studio, something that Mae enjoyed immensely.

The episode then passes along the production line through to the background artists, designers and layout teams to do their thing.

Mae stops by for a casual workplace chat with Susie, who is assembling the ingredients of a scene on her screen; the background, the characters and the props, always referencing the recipe, the animatic.

After a final four weeks with the animators, the whole Ludo team gets together on a Friday to view the almost-finished product.

"We watch the episode, have a beer and go 'hooray!'," Moor says, but for Pearson it's become a bit more fraught than that.

"The screenings started off just for the studio but now friends and family come, and our kids come, so it's probably turned into a weird version of a test screening," he says.

"I'm looking at the kids and I can see all the animators and directors looking at the kids to see where they laugh."

Before completion, VFX artists have to hand-draw, frame-by-frame all the things that are difficult to animate, like water or flapping blankets, while a composer adds a unique score to every episode.

Then comes the final sound mix and the Foley — in layman's terms, where every single noise has to be created, "whether it's shopping trolleys crashing into each other or the birds in the garden."

"We spent a long time getting the footsteps right of the characters — finding something that wasn't annoying, but sounded like it was soft enough to be a paw print," says Moor.

And what sounds like a paw print, I hear you ask? A sound mixer's fingers tapping on the back of a guitar, apparently.

'Something in the water'

From storyboard to delivery, each episode takes three months to make.

Only the voicing and post-production (which is done in South Brisbane) take place outside of the Fortitude Valley studio, which Pearson says makes the show stronger.

"We've had the luck to be under one roof and be able to sharpen it up through the whole production process," he says.

When I explain the concept for my article to the affable Pearson, who is sipping from a giant coffee cup like it's manna from heaven, he says, "so you're essentially using your toddler?"

"Yes," I say.

But what other dark secrets can he reveal about Bluey and its immense success? How can a cartoon about dogs make kids cackle with laughter and mums and dads shed tears in the space of seven minutes?

"Joe and I were chatting about this last night and he said he doesn't think we could reverse engineer an episode," he says, not revealing any dark secrets.

"So, to keep relying on that gut, I think, it has to be that."

Pearson says it's not a bad thing there's some confusion over whether Bluey and Bingo are boys or girls (it's the most common question people ask about Bluey on Google), pointing out it shouldn't really matter.

"We're not being ambiguous about it on purpose, they're just girls because both Joe and [producer] Charlie [Aspinwall] have two daughters, as does [the voice of Bandit] Dave McCormack," he says.

"There must be something in the water here in Brisbane, everyone's got two girls.

"I think the fact they are female is just not drawn attention to in the same way that some female characters are, that fit into a trope.

"Bluey's pretty rough and tumble. But they're puppies. They pretty much have the characteristics of puppies."

A child's first draft of life

It can be hard to put your finger on why Bluey feels different to other kids' shows, but one thing that stands out is that there are no baddies. There aren't any dinosaurs, dragons, foxes or owls chasing the pups around, or rats causing mischief.

"The antagonist, I guess you call it, is set up within the games they are playing," explains Pearson.

"But it's all based on that a child gets that this is a game and that's where the whole idea for the show came from, in that it's idiosyncratic play.

"So you learn communication and cooperation and responsibility but you also learn some of the stuff like jealousy and regret and I think in a weird way that's the villain.

"If you look around Joe's desk or around the studio there are child psychology books everywhere that are about idiosyncratic play.

"It's like a child's first draft of life."

From my own academic studies of the show, which involve sitting there watching Mae watch the same episodes over and over again, including Verandah Santa three times in a row, this seems to be the key.

She doesn't laugh at the same jokes I do, but will sit there giggling, for example, at the kids pretending to be asleep — because that's a game she plays too.

And she took home from our visit to Ludo a realisation that there's a room in Brisbane full of people working away at creating Bluey so it can appear on our screens at home. More importantly from her perspective, she also took home a Bluey sticker book.

So a show about nothing other than kids using their imagination turned out to be a decent idea after all, even if it is all but impossible to explain to people.

And what about us dads who fear Bandit is setting too high a bar for fathers everywhere, with his boundless energy and endless patience?

"Well, he's a dog," says Pearson.

"You can never get to his level. He's half dog, who are the purest beings in the world."

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Topics: television, arts-and-entertainment, brisbane-4000, qld, australia

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