January 26th, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
Jed Hathaway is the director of Ted Lasso: The Missing Christmas Mustache, a four and a half minute stop-motion presentation from AppleTV+. In this Animation Scoop Q&A, Hathaway shares how he and his team collaborated with Jason Sudeikis, Apple and Warner Bros. TV to give Ted Lasso fans a fun gift that’s now a 2023 Annie Awards nominee for Best Sponsored Production. (This interview was edited for length and clarity. Behind the scenes photos courtesy of JedHathaway.com.)
Jackson Murphy: Congrats on the Annie Awards nomination. How does it feel?
Jed Hathaway: It feels fantastic. Really appreciate the Annie Awards responding to the work that we did. Working with Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and Kip Kroeger — they gave us a lot of latitude and freedom to be able to play with the skit. We had a basic script and some sound records. I was able to direct all the actors in the booth so it was great working with everyone from Hannah [Waddingham] to Brett [Goldstein] to Juno [Temple] and Brendan Hunt. It was a really great experience, and we appreciate the Annies recognizing all the hard work we put into it.
JM: Terrific. I am a big fan of “Ted Lasso”. I’m so excited for Season 3. Were you a diehard “Ted Lasso” fan before getting involved in this?
JH: I actually was! Season 1 had come out and I was a fan. I got a call from Corey Campodonico at ShadowMachine, who I’ve worked with off and on for over 20 years. Corey reached out… and he said, “I got this project. You know Ted Lasso?” I said, “Yeah, I know Ted Lasso.” He said, “They had an idea to want to do an intro.” We got a call from Kip and Bill Lawrence. Jason had this idea to do an intro for their Christmas special.
From my understanding, they had [conceived] their [10] episodes [for Season 2], and [the show] was so wildly popular that [Apple] asked for two additional episodes. The live-action Christmas episode (“Carol of the Bells”) was actually an additional episode that they did after [getting into pre-production], and they wrote that… so it doesn’t have any thread throughout all the other episodes. It’s sort of a standalone episode. Jason had a great idea to stop-motion for the intro. Everyone loves stop-motion at Christmastime. It reminds you of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.
We created that introduction sort of reimagining the live-action intro with Jason coming into the stadium, but then we had to add-in all the other characters as well. So we took that formula and format and brought it into the animation world. Everybody really liked it and responded to it. So they came back to us maybe six months later. I think we shot the intro in March [2021] and then they came back in August and said, “Hey, Jason has an idea for a Christmas special — a standalone for AppleTV as a little love letter to the fans.” We thought it was fantastic. We had already built the puppets. We have some of the assets. It was really easy for us to pop-up a few stages. We got to build the locker room, which was amazing.
I got to direct all the talent and do voiceover records and run through the script. Jason was fabulous to work with. He was very open to all my ideas. He came in more as an actor than as a producer, which I really appreciated. They gave us a lot of latitude and freedom and somewhat autonomy at a certain point to just run with it once we had an animatic together. Come shoot time, we were just having fun. It was really cool the way it all unfolded over the course of six months or so.
JM: That’s great. Jason Sudeikis is great with his voice work in the Angry Birds movies. And I really love the “Carol of the Bells” episode. When I watched it, I thought, “This is going to be a classic Christmas episode.” And we have this complement to that with your presentation. It’s really fun and cool for diehard Ted Lasso fans to look at the designs of the puppets of the characters. What went into making those puppets?
JH: I’ve done a lot of ‘re-interpreting live-action’ work. I direct the Happy Honda Days commercials every year for the SoCal Honda Dealers Association, for the past eight years. It was similar in that what I was able to do was study the rhythm, timing and cadence of the actors and their performances from live-action and be able to direct them in the booth, one by one. I peacemealed together a radio play and an animatic, ultimately off of different takes. It was really cool to dive into the Ted Lasso universe and re-imagine it in stop-motion, yet we had a blueprint. We worked with a production design team out of England, and they sent us all of the schematics, floor plans, graphics package, their color palette. We were set-up for success. We were just using a different medium to tell the story. If I screwed that up (laughs) I would’ve been a really bad director if I can’t translate that.
It was challenging in some aspects. We worked with Nikki Rice, an amazing character designer I’ve worked with on a lot of projects. We originally did some two-dimensional drawings and a typical character lineup and looked at what outfits, colors and who should be wearing what (hats) — just for the basic designs. And then we embellished them for Christmas. We went into ZBrush and 3D modeled the characters — a digital sculpt. We were able to digitally print out the heads, which was fantastic. And we had wonderful costume designers. Nikki led a really great team on the character designer front. Jed Voltz, my production designer for 20 years, was able to translate all those floor plans and essentially built it within the millimeter — an inch or two in real life, recreating the locker room with all the lighting.
JM: Does the locker room you made still exist somewhere? I think every “Ted Lasso” fan would want to see that in a museum or a showcase somehow.
JH: Yeah, we were hoping they would possibly circle back with a full Christmas episode in stop-motion. We do have the set and all the puppets. They’re resting in their trailers waiting for a call back. We’ll see if we can bring them back to life. We’re ready to go at any point but Jason had originally pitched this as a three-season series, right? So there’s already a story arc there that’s going to wrap up. Really looking forward to Season 3. Maybe no room for that but they dabbled in it and enjoyed it. And it worked. Really proud of what we did.
JM: Maybe you should bring one of the puppets to the Annies. That would be fun!
JH: It would. Yeah! I’m looking forward to going and seeing all the other nominees. Obviously in great company. Happy to be in the conversation.
JM: Do you have any insight into what’s coming in Season 3? Any secrets?
JH: Not a single thing. Nope. I wasn’t even informed of what was going on in [“Carol of the Bells”]. They would let us know a few things, like when we started talking about outfits and what somebody might be wearing. That was for the intro. Once we did our standalone, I got the full script.
JM: Okay. By the way, I love the moments where you have the bows over Roy Kent’s mouth. Very funny. And I saw on your Instagram that you’ve been working on “Plague Poppets”. That looks cool. Tell me about it.
JH: It’s a really interesting project. I was brought on board to direct stop-motion sequences and build out where the Plague Poppets live and get ready for adoption. This is from a wonderful artist and painter, Juli Adams, out of Seattle. She created these during the pandemic as a way to share love in the community and have people adopt these puppets. She would cut-up all her sweaters, t-shirts and jeans and create these fun little creatures to be adopted for people that were lonely — and people who were adopting cats and dogs during this time. I directed some stop-motion animation and helped design and build the Orphanarium. We had a good connection. And I’m helping to design NFTs — 3D sculpting and digitally creating various NFTs of these Plague Poppets. It’s a very exciting venture.
JM: Very cool. I’ve always admired the craftsmanship of stop-motion work. I congratulate you on your “Ted Lasso” short and wish you good luck at the Annies next month!
JH: Thank you so much. It’s always fun to be recognized in the stop-motion community. I support all the artists, filmmakers and crews and the fabricators. Everybody put a lot of time and attention to detail into this. We made them proud. The whole Apple team and Warner Bros. TV, Jason and Bill really let us run with it and knew they would be in good hands. My crew did great work, and I couldn’t be prouder of all the work they put into it. A lot of love and respect to them.
- INTERVIEW: Inside The Music Of Pixar’s “Dream Productions” - December 11, 2024
- INTERVIEW: The World Of “Au Revoir Mon Monde” - December 4, 2024
- INTERVIEW: Precious Details On “The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim” - December 2, 2024
Posted in 
Tags: 
