Blue's Clues - Production

Production

Blue's Clues was set in the home — the environment that was most familiar and secure for preschoolers — and looked like no other children's television show. Each episode, from idea development to final production, took approximately one year to complete. Writers created a goal sheet, which identified their objectives based on the show's curriculum and audience needs. Script drafts, once developed and approved by the show's creators and research team, were tested at public and private schools, day care centers, preschools, and Head Start programs by three researchers, who would narrate the story in the form of a storybook and take notes about the children's responses. The writers and creators revised the scripts based on this feedback. A rough video, in which the host would perform from the revised script in front of a blue screen with no animation, would be filmed and retested. The script would be revised again based on the audiences' responses, tested a third time with animation and music added, and incorporated into future productions.

Most of the show's production was done in-house rather than by outside companies as with many other children's TV shows. The show's creators understood that the show's look and visual design would be integral to the attachment children would have to the show. Johnson expanded on the "cut-out" style she had created during her college years. Blue's Clues was the first animation series for preschoolers that utilized simple cut-out construction paper shapes of familiar objects with a wide variety of colors and textures that resembled a storybook. Johnson also used primary colors and organized each room of the home setting into groups. The green-striped shirt worn by the show's original host, Steve, was inspired by Fruit Stripe gum. The goals were to make the show look natural and simplistic, as Tracy put it, "freshly cut and glued together with a vivid array of textures, colors, and shadows" similar to picture book illustrations. The music, produced by composer Michael Rubin and pianist Nick Balaban, was unlike that in most other children's shows. The music was simple, had a natural sound, and exposed children to a wide variety of genres and instruments. According to Tracy, the music empowered children and gave the show "a sense of playfulness, a sense of joy, and a sense of the fantastic". Rubin and Balaban encouraged the musicians who performed for the show to improvise.

The host performed each episode in front of a "blue screen", with animation added later. The show's digital design department combined high-tech and low-tech methods by creating and photographing three-dimensional objects, then cutting them out and placing them into the background. This made the objects look more real, and added perspective and depth. Their animation technique was at that time a new technology. Johnson hired artist Dave Palmer and production company Big Pink to create the animation from simple materials like fabric, paper or pipe-cleaners and scan them into a Macintosh computer, so that they could be animated using inexpensive computer software such as Media 100, Ultimatte, Photoshop and After Effects instead of repeatedly redrawn as in traditional animation. The result was something that looked different from anything else on television at the time, and the producers were able to animate two episodes in eight weeks, as compared to the sixteen weeks necessary to create a single episode by traditional methods. Their process looked like traditional cut-out animation, but was faster, more flexible and less expensive, and allowed them to make changes based on feedback from test audiences. Unlike traditional animation environments, which tended to be highly structured, the animators were given information about the characters and goals of the scenes they would animate, and then given the freedom to work out the timing and look of each scene themselves, as long as their creations were true to the characters and to the story. By 1999, the show's animation department consisted of Palmer, 20 animators, 11 digital designers, and 5 art directors and model makers. By 2002, Nickelodeon had built a "state-of-the-art" $6 million digital animation studio that housed 140 people, including 70 animators.