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Virtual plan to revive Here’s Humphrey

Hopes to revive an iconic character drawing on a mix of live-action and virtual sets.

Plans are afoot to revive Here’s Humphrey when rights owners pitch to broadcasters at MIPCOM and MIPJunior in October in France.

Queensland-based OzPIX has managed the Humphrey brand since 2016 after a sale of assets by Imagination Ventures.

The new plan is for a hybrid of live-action characters and various virtual moving sets, using virtual production with Deakin University’s newly-launched commercial entity, Fika Entertainment.

Deakin Motion.Lab has been an innovator in motion capture-based technology and has worked on several commercial projects in recent years, including the CGI-animated ABC Education children’s series Minibeast Heroes. The software was forged out of the gaming industry in Melbourne.

“We wanted to create a cartoon in a day as opposed to in a year. We explored ways of leveraging the growing processing power of computers and game engines and we have got a closer to that goal,” Dr Jordan Vincent told IF.

The creative team for the new Humphrey project includes executive producer Julie Greene, former EP and executive commercial director of Hi-5, and early learning entertainment specialists Dr. Catherin Martin and Helen Martin.

Here’s Humphrey first screened on Adelaide’s NWS-9  in 1965 and ran until 2008, becoming the second longest running children’s TV program in the world. He last screened regularly on West TV in 2013.

No broadcasters have been attached as yet.

10 Responses

    1. The Paddle Pop Lion is still around… maybe not in a physical form, but certainly in an advertising/packaging form. In the UK he appears on the boxes for Calippo!

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