Heather Ferreira is a filmmaker who is all about producing authentic retro looking films. As a part of her journey to opening her own film company, Sellino films, she produced a kids show called Sunshine Again in 2007.
Her dream at that time was to recreate children’s programming that was as good as Sesame Street was back in the 1970’s. She felt that contemporary kids educational programming, including today’s Sesame Street was severely lacking. The way that I found out about this project was when I was looking for classic Sesame Street videos on YouTube. I remember this show so fondly from my childhood and wanted to post something about it in this blog. I came across a video for Soul Alphabet. The music in this video is so incredibly funky that I fell in love with it. After viewing it I assumed that this was a Sesame Street skit. In fact, I could have sworn that I had seen this as a kid and was quite pleased that I had rediscovered it. It had cool muppet looking puppets and some really funky music. I didn’t read the text that came with the video. I just put the video in my favorites until I was ready to write the blog entry. Little did I know that I had actually stumbled on to something completely new. When I finally was ready to write the blog entry and started to do my research I discovered the true origin of this work and found the rest of the videos that Heather and her team produced for the Sunshine Again DVD. I have posted these videos below. This is really good stuff.
The production process used to produce Sunshine Again is old school. They used the lost art form of hand-painted cels to produce the animated segments instead of Flash, shot film segments on 16mm instead of videotape, and hired live musicians to record the songs instead of digital software. “The grain and texture look like the 70s because it was done on 70s equipment.” says Ferreira in MetaFilter blog comment. So if you love everything old school because you just believe that it is better, then check this out.
