Rocking the Titles for ‘The Muppets Mayhem’ How Penny Nederlander and Shine created a psychedelic, music-filled video with Maxon One.

A comedy musical television series for Disney+, "The Muppets Mayhem” follows the antics of Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem on an epic, music-filled journey to record their first original album.

We talked with Emmy-nominated Penny Nederlander about how she worked at Shine to create the show’s main title sequence.

Read on to learn how she and Shine used Cinema 4D, Redshift, Red Giant Trapcode suite and After Effects to create the animation, including kaleidoscopic effects, in keeping with the style that made “The Muppet Show” house band famous.

Nederlander: I mostly work on execution at Shine, which means I come in after we have boards selected. I was the only animator on this, so I was the lead. As always, I worked closely with Shine’s Creative Director Michael Riley. Other people on the team work with us sometimes too, but often it is just the two of us.

Disney provided Shine with the first eight episodes to review and, even though they weren’t finished, it was clearly a charming show. Michael helped supervise the green screen shoot at Henson Studio where various props and fantastic keyable elements were captured of the band singing, dancing and playing individually and together. Disney also signed off on the kaleidoscopic effect for the titles once we did a motion test.

Working with Michael, I gathered the assets and set to work. It felt like we were making magical 1960’s mandalas with things you can identify when you watch the show and the kaleidoscopic effect played to that psychedelic feeling.

Nederlander: The background throughout is a 3D lava lamp texture that I created in Cinema 4D. The kaleidoscopic effect picks up on how the bubbles rise, break up, cool down and then fall before heating back up and rising again. I used color shifts to separate the feel of the characters and wanted every moment to be a pleasing color combination that reflected the dreaminess of the lava lamp.

It was really great to see the characters in this kaleidoscopic world, like the magenta and purple sequence with little hints of tangerine around Janice playing her guitar. Michael and I played off the different elements but kept a consistent feel and worked to maintain the energy throughout.

Stylistically, it was fun working with so many different types of layers — the lava lamp background, color shifts, photos, videos – there were so many different things to work with and try. For example, the keyboard is not just a spinning 3D element, I ran a Mograph effector across the keys so they played along with the audio.

Nederlander: One of the things I love about C4D is that I can really knock out elements and then render and change them quickly. It is definitely the kind of workflow that I’m set up for. I used C4D to make elements like the 3D piano keyboard, microphone, guitar pick, marshmallows, shrimp, polaroid pictures, the gold album and more.

To get the fine details of the gold album right, for example, I used bump textures and displacement tools to make sure the light played off the surface the way I wanted. It was a bit hit and miss and took some time, but it worked.

Nederlander: I was worried about the transitions because when you do these kaleidoscopes you can only have it blossom open so many times. I really wanted to throw in some stuff that wasn’t just 2D elements, photos or video.

I was inspired by the sequence in “Ant-Man” where the character falls into the Quantum Realm for the first time and all these tiny elements unfold symmetrically, which was really visually striking. So I went into Cinema 4D and had a lot of fun making a 2D, 45-RPM record adapter and breaking it out and replicating it in 3D.

I ended up making three adaptors and bending them over each other, so as the three folded together, they seem to fold reality. Going through the RPM adapter made a great transition because you get a new sense of space and visual style with the 3D character in the foreground.

Nederlander: I used Trapcode Particular for the sequence featuring Animal so I could make create explosions made up of small marshmallow spin loops.

It’s an old trick that I have been doing for at least 15 years and it works by combining an element, like the marshmallows, in Cinema 4D and doing a multi-axis spin cycle so the object tumbles in space. It worked great because when I fed that footage into Particular, randomized the start time and looped it, I got this huge explosion without having to sim the explosion in 3D.

Nederlander: The 3D stage with Muppet flats and crowd flats were all made with Cinema 4D and rendered in Redshift. The crowd really made this scene, but I had to learn some tricks to get it right.

I got the crowd character elements from Action VFX.com and placed them in Cinema 4D. But when you throw that many frames into a sequence with a keyed character, it needs some compositing to get rid of unwanted edges. To add variation, I rendered out frame sequences for every character, so it wasn’t always the same clap timing being repeated.

Using the Cloner object and the stock assets, I created the whole crowd and lit it from behind. But that was a lot of textures sequences for Redshift to handle, so I learned how to batch process thousands of images to Redshift proxy textures.

Nederlander: This was such a fun project, it really felt like a big Easter egg hunt. We didn’t want to give away any secrets, but everything and everyone was from the show, and all the elements represent a character or moment. And it’s been fun to identify those things in the show now that it’s out.