Recess Bell

Running is a genuinely hard thing to animate convincingly — the foot-strike timing has to be exact or it reads as a slide rather than a stride — so every race in this series was animated on ones for the sprint itself and dropped back to twos for the build-up and reaction shots around it, a hold pattern chosen entirely for what the human eye can and can’t forgive.

The final relay in episode 22 is the highest genga-density sequence we’ve produced for a TV budget: ninety seconds, four legs of the race, each runner’s stride cycle animated from a different set of reference frames so no two runners share a silhouette.