Adeline Cook / Work / Teletubbies Let's Go
Teletubbies Let's Go.
Unreal development and team lead on a broadcast children's series, and the virtual-production pipeline behind it.
December 2021 – March 2023 · Fika Entertainment · Lead Developer & Unreal Team Supervisor
The work
Real-time 3D for broadcast production.
A series has an air date and the air date does not move, which sets the priority order. Anything blocking a shoot day gets fixed before anything that is merely wrong, and refactoring stops once the risk of changing it outweighs the benefit.
Adeline led Unreal development for Teletubbies Let's Go and the American Girl YouTube series, built the virtual-production pipelines and AR/VR work behind them, and supervised a distributed team of artists and developers.
Tooling
Built for artists working under deadline.
Virtual-production tooling gets used all day by artists who are not engineers and who are on the same deadline as the rest of the show. If a step is awkward they work around it, and the workaround ends up on screen. So the tooling decisions were made against what the team would actually use under time pressure.
Detail
The pipeline, and leading the team.
Unreal sat in two places: a live composited preview during motion capture, and — the bigger workload — the VFX stage, where scenes were assembled, animations imported and dailies generated at production volume. Most of the pipeline and workflow tooling exists to make that VFX stage run at speed without losing quality or production tracking.
Adeline built and supported that pipeline herself, and led a team of six Unreal staff who used it to assemble scenes — everyone at least proficient in Unreal, animation, lighting and general game development, working mostly remote. She also wrote a lot of the tooling they used day to day.
Other departments in the wider pipeline were siloed, often down to one person holding the hardest part of a process. She worked to break that down on her own team and with the departments around it, which was one of the biggest sources of speedup the show got.
The hardest technical problem was grooms. Unreal didn't support externally animated grooms while storing only the sparse version, which blocked production on the American Girl series until she extended the editor to add sparse groom cloning.
Early on she let herself get overloaded finishing overdue work herself instead of fixing why it was overdue. Once she stopped doing that, the pipeline improvements it forced her to see took the show from one episode a month to two episodes a week.