By Randi Altman

Quibi’s Your Daily Horoscope is a daily, animated show from the mind of actor Will Arnett and ATTN that stars 12 animals whose names and personalities represent different signs of the zodiac. These millennials work together at technology startup Estrella. It’s funny and definitely adult-themed, and it started streaming in early July.

Taye Shuayb

We reached out to executive producer and ATTN:’s VP of production, Taye Shuayb, and post supervisor Lauren Stone, to find out how they and their team of designers, animators, compositors and editors produce the show’s 12 minutes of animation every day… during a pandemic.

Let’s find out more.

Tell us a bit about the show and how early you got involved?
Taye Shuayb: The coolest thing about Your Daily Horoscope (YDH) is that it’s real astrology presented as an animated workplace comedy. Every week, 12 zodiac signs are brought to life as characters featured in their own episodes that reveal their horoscopes for the day through funny workplace moments. My role started with development and helping shape the direction of creative to ensure our approach aligned with the cost and timeline of delivering the show. My production experience helps me put story first and not let cost or time restrictions take away from meaningful storytelling.

A daily show during a pandemic is quite the undertaking. How did you go about setting up a remote workflow to allow you to create something like this daily?
Shuayb: The show was specifically designed to be produced on-site to increase the speed of production. Unfortunately, we went into production just before the pandemic hit. Our workstations were set up in office, configured with Adobe software and connected to our shared server via 10 Gigabit fiber connectivity.

Pivoting the show to work remotely took a hugely collaborative effort to relocate all our workstations and hardware to peoples’ homes, reconfigured to work locally, then synchronized to upload and download project data to our sync platform, Google Drive File Stream (GDFS).

GDFS also controls versioning of our files in case we need to roll back. These files are synced to our on-premise data center to collate at a central location, where we copy that data to our backup server on a nightly basis using software called “bvckup.”

You are calling on the Adobe suite of tools. How does this help you get a head start on the animation? Are you reusing assets?
Shuayb: This show would not be possible without the Adobe Creative Suite. Our characters, backgrounds and props are all designed in Photoshop. Then we rigged and animated our characters using Character Animator, composited it together in After Effects and then edited it together in Premiere.

Lots of preparation and planning went into designing the characters, building a library of props and backgrounds for reuse and understanding the guardrails of the characters’ actions and surrounding world.

Lauren Stone

Can you walk us through the workflow?
Lauren Stone: Our production starts off with scripting and the VO records. Our talent had to shift from recording in a booth to recording themselves at home with the help of a remote audio engineer. After VO records, edit begins.

The biggest examples of where we’ve deviated from regular animation pipelines are that we do not have a storyboarding phase or a separate radio play phase in our pipeline. We have fused the radio play into our animatic phase during edit. Our edit team also handles rough comping themselves in lieu of a storyboarding phase. All three stages that normally would have their own dedicated teams and timelines are all handled during a 24-hour period by the same team.

It’s pretty remarkable. The animatic phase became the most crucial part of our workflow, as this is where all major timing and framing decisions are made. We are pretty married to decisions made here. All further cuts made by edit include very minor framing tweaks after animation is applied.

Each day, our team turns around one-episode animatic consisting of 12 segments (one for each zodiac sign) and preps those for animation. Our amazing animation team, using Character Animator, only has two days to turn animation back around to the edit team to begin rough cuts.

Edit will then lay in animation and make very minor tweaks going forward as needed. The edit team then creates a horizontal version of the original vertical pass. Our network platform airs both versions that can be seamlessly watched on mobile platforms sharing the same audio.

For finishing, we send to mix and then send our cuts through a very rigorous quality control process before delivering final assets.

What challenges have come up, and what might have been hiccups at the start that have been smoothed?
Stone: One of the biggest challenges was needing to switch to a remote workflow on a dime due to COVID-19 shutdowns. We had very little time to prepare for what that looked like in terms of staff and workflow, especially since we had just set the entire staff up in a production office.

It was a brave new world for all of us, and it took teamwork, a lot of brainstorming and tenacity to get to where we are. We learned quickly from our missteps, and now everything is pretty seamless. We move at breakneck speeds and make every effort to keep the mood light during the workday.

What have you learned during the process, and what would you have done differently from the start knowing what you know now?
Stone: At the beginning of production, we started some processes and workflows that just didn’t translate in the remote environment. I think a lot of that was us needing to shift our mindset from “this is temporary” to “this is what we’re doing now; how can we make it work?”

I think our amazing product reflects that tireless effort. Our team was very lucky to have very supportive executives who waded these uncertain waters with us until we found land.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.