Your work with Go Togo feels like a beautiful blend of nostalgia and innovation. What inspired you to bring handcrafted filmmaking back into children’s television?
Lindsay: Nostalgia and innovation is the sweet spot for many of our projects, so that’s very kind of you to say! In the case of Go Togo, we wanted the world of Transitville to be full of details and textures a kid could almost reach out and touch. The way the characters act and move also has a spontaneity because our remote control animators are bringing them to life in the moment — sometimes leading to happy discoveries we keep in the series.
Justin: Creating this way is also so wonderful, because everyone is so present on set. My background is in visual effects and animation, and while I love working on projects that use CGI, etc., there’s a bit more “put your headphones on and shut out the world” in that context. Making Go Togo, I think the crew’s communal energy on set goes right into the finished episodes.
In a world dominated by CGI and digital animation, what do you think audiences, especially children connect with when they see something tangible, something real?
Lindsay: I think they almost feel like they’re watching their toys come to life.
Justin: To me, there’s a direct connection to the real, physical world we live in that just comes for free when we film physical models. It has a chance of being a little more timeless, since Togo is clearly a little model subway today and will still look like a little model subway in the future.
Lindsay: Even though I didn’t grow up with the kinds of dazzling CGI today’s kids have, I still had a lot of fast-paced cartoons fighting for my attention. While I definitely watched a lot of those, my kid brain also wanted to chill out and watch Shari Lewis trade snide remarks with Lambchop or hang out with Ernie and Bert on Sesame Street.
Can you walk me through your creative process at Gazelle Automations? How do you decide when to use practical effects, miniatures, or animation to tell a story?
Justin: If there’s a shot we can achieve completely in-camera, we’ll try to do it that way (within reason of our budget and resources!). For Go Togo, everything practical is filmed in miniature, so it’s just a question of if we need to augment something digitally or get characters to perform in a way that may be impractical to achieve on set with our crew. Togo the subway, Stella the streetcar, Wheeler the bus and their other vehicle friends are almost entirely brought to life as miniature practical effects, operated live by remote control. But the Riders — the townspeople of Transitville — are cute little squat figures have a staccato, stop-motion movement. For a simple shot of them waiting for a bus, we might do the stop motion right on set since it can be done really quickly. But when we have elaborate shots of two teams of Rider soccer players kicking a ball down a field with a moving camera, we need to use CG animation during post-production.
Lindsay: To add energy to the storytelling, we also use paper cut-out 2-D animation and digital animation to transition between scenes and show what the characters are thinking.
Season two of Go Togo expands Transitville with new characters and deeper emotional lessons. What kind of messages or feelings did you most want to explore this time around?
Lindsay: We were really excited to explore the relationships between the characters and connect them to each other this season. Season one’s stories are woven with basic preschool math concepts (above and below, in and out, sharing equally, etc.), and that had to take up a lot of our five-minute runtime. Having the opportunity to broaden these concepts in season two to include the more emotional issues kids face like jealousy, FOMO, and dealing with change feels very satisfying. We’ve still got the colourful characters and world, the funny little Riders with their funny babbling sounds, but now we get to add this extra layer on top.
The show teaches empathy, teamwork, and resilience in such a gentle and playful way. How do you approach writing stories that resonate with preschoolers while still touching parents or older audiences?
Justin: I think it’s fair to say Lindsay and I haven’t really grown up, so we’re putting our kid selves into every episode!
Lindsay:It’s true! Kids experience the same kinds of emotions as adults, except for them it’s still so new and raw. We were excited to explore these themes from the point of view of someone who’s still learning how to process and understand them, and still remember the awe and confusion that came with having these new emotional experiences as a kid. It also helped that some of our writers have kids either in the show’s demographic (3-5 years old) or just a little older and have that outside perspective — some season two stories are actually things that have happened to our writers’ kids. One of our writers is also a teacher with lots of experience working with young kids, so he helped shape the storytelling for both seasons.
There’s a sense of calm and warmth in every frame of Go Togo. Was that an intentional contrast to the fast-paced nature of modern kids’ content?
Justin: Absolutely. We’re slow TV for kids. We like that we can sometimes just vibe to Togo driving through Transitville, set to the chill electronic music our composers write. From the beginning of the series, we also worked closely with our longtime collaborator and director of photography Jeffrey Mackey to make sure the way we lit the show gave the feeling of a calm, sunny day.
Lindsay: Except when it’s raining, of course.
Justin:Oh yeah, we did stuff with weather this year we would’ve never done in season one. Pouring rain on one-of-a-kind animatronic vehicles? We had to do it because it added so much to the storytelling!
You’re both partners in life and in creativity. How has that dynamic shaped your storytelling and the way you collaborate day to day?
Lindsay: We’re lucky that we both share this love of miniature filmmaking and the types of stories we like to tell. But it does mean we have to be very disciplined about when we’re working and when we’re just being a married couple. Sometimes we’ll be trying to fall asleep and something about work will sneak its way into the conversation. And before we know it, it’s four in the morning and we’re still trying to break a hypothetical story we’ve just fully committed to in our heads.
Justin:Yeah, we definitely have to be intentional about when we shut off that part of our brains. But it’s also wonderful we can bounce ideas off each other and get excited about an idea while we’re out grocery shopping.
Lindsay: We still have to remember to buy the groceries, though. It’s a balance.
Gazelle Automations has become known for celebrating the artistry of practical filmmaking. Why do you feel it’s important to preserve that tactile creativity today?
Justin: Despite many advances in film storytelling, practical filmmaking has never really gone away. I find it so delightful that a production like The Mandalorian or The Orville brought back physical spaceship models because their creative souls wanted to work that way. It seems as new storytelling technologies evolve, there’s always a place for what’s come before to continue to weave through. I equally love working as a digital artist as I do building puppets or performing objects, and you think and problem-solve differently when you work in these different mediums. One isn’t fully a replacement for the other, and there’s a special kind of discovery when you’re doing something tactile in the moment.
Lindsay: For a new film project we’re developing called Space Bao, after digitally designing our main character, Justin decided to sculpt her head in clay and make a silicone mould from it. I then cast the head in fibreglass and flocked and painted it. Even though both of us aimed to follow the initial design as closely as possible, there were subtle deviations that crept in. The result is that she has an expression that conveys a particular outer confidence and inner sadness. That was a happy discovery that informed the way I’ve been writing her in the script. Working this way just brings about its own unique challenges and rewards.
Looking ahead, how do you see the balance between traditional craftsmanship and new technology evolving in your future projects?
Justin: I love all the tools we have for our style of storytelling. I’m equally likely to be watching a YouTube video about how mechanisms on a 60-year-old puppet worked as I am a Two Minute Paper about the latest advances in CG fluid simulation or AI image generation. I find all of it fascinating, and our goal is to find the right use for the right tool. On one of our projects several years ago, I got so excited about what we could do with photogrammetry that I now think I went overboard with how much I used it in our pipeline, but that’s a great lesson going forward. For Go Togo, Space Bao and beyond, our aesthetic at Gazelle Automations is to lead our visual storytelling with practical filmmaking, and there’s no better way to do that than with the real thing.
And finally, if there’s one feeling or idea you hope Go Togo leaves in the hearts of kids and families, what would that be?
Lindsay: That it’s okay to be human. Which is funny, because our characters are transit vehicles. But we tell a lot of stories this year that are ultimately about self-acceptance and, by extension, accepting others. When you’re striving to do the best you can, whatever that is on a given day, that’s an amazing thing.
