Ingredient Dish

This project came to us through a colleague at Titmouse. It had originally been pitched to them by a father-daughter duo and passed on — but the colleague felt the idea had real potential and just needed a punch-up, so they sent it our way.

The goal was to elevate it on every front: art, story, and the educational angle, all at once. The client was the daughter half of that duo — a bright, recent-grad showrunner with a strong idea and not much industry experience yet. So this wasn't just a production job. It was as much about mentoring her — walking her through how animation actually gets made and done properly — as it was about making the short itself.

This was a full 360° rig production, styled in the vein of other rigged chibi shorts — think Disney's Miraculous Chibi — built for fast turnarounds without losing charm.

Backgrounds took cues from Bluey, with an anime-influenced touch applied to the compositing, lighting, and character designs — giving the whole thing a modern feel and a fresh take on what kids actually want to watch right now.

The animated short was only part of it. This was also a pitch development project, so alongside the clip we built out a full package for shopping the series: episode scripts and outlines for the season, a series plan, a series budget, and a pitch deck. Ingredient Dish is now part of our own development slate.

The show explores different foods and cultures as its core hook, so almost every creative decision — character, background, prop — had an educational job to do on top of a visual one. This project was education-driven from top to bottom.

Since the show is built around food and culture, we didn't want to design any of it secondhand. Our background artist, Linnea Solomon, bought and ate real hot pot herself and shot her own reference photos, rather than working off whatever came up in a quick search.

We also spent time in Chinatown gathering research in person — looking at the ingredients, the building structures, and other details a photo search wouldn't give us. That research fed directly into the prop and background design work.

The result: a fully produced short and a complete pitch package — stronger art, a tighter story, and a genuinely educational throughline, backed by scripts, a series plan, a budget, and a deck ready to take to buyers. We're now looking for development partners to take Ingredient Dish to series.