Big Barn Farm tells the story of the farmyard bunch, a friendly group of talking animals. iCarley Media contacted James to help bring the animals to life and communicate in over 450 visual effects shots.

In order to achieve the talking animal VFX, James animated CG models of the animals mouths over the live action footage, before tracking the position and rotation of the CG model mouths so that they matched the position of the live action mouths on the filmed plates.

The mouths were then animated using a variety of modifiers in 3DS Max, in order to lipsync the mouth movement to the audio. Once the mouth layers were rendered, they were composited using After Effects and additional layers of the original live action footage were rotoscoped in as overlays or blends to help the CG sit in the scene.

With a quick turnaround time required, it was important that a balance of speed vs. quality was reached in order to get through the large number of shots before going to air.

The series was aired on the CBeebies TV channel in the UK in 2010.