Tim and Bash -- Behind the Scenes
Introduction
Tim and Bash is a series following the adventures of a firefighter (Tim) and his pet dragon (Bash). As Bash is prone to lighting things on fire, Tim has his hands full!
Their original production process involved a traditional manual method of shooting ‘blind’ without an animated character reference, while trying to imagine the location and reactions of Bash.
Jetset Discovery
Andy, the animator who creates Bash’s movements, was looking for an improved method to shoot their scenes. He discovered Jetset, and started to experiment with its capabilities.
A Workflow Transformation
Andy realized that they could completely revamp their production workflow, using Jetset both for the previsualization process, and for the actual on-location production.
Here’s how they are approaching this:
Location Scan, Animate, and Pre-Shoot
First, Andy scans the planned shoot location with an iOS scanning app like Scaniverse or Polycam. With a LiDAR-equipped iPhone, this can provide a 1:1 scaled scan of the location with color textures.
Andy imports this scan into Maya, and then adds scene locators to enable shooting in Jetset from different points.
He then animates Bash running through the scene, leaping onto couches and sofas, and finally dashing out the door.
He can export the entire scene, including the textured scan of the location, Bash’s animation, and the scene locators into a USD file with Maya’s standard USD exporter, and convert from USD to USDZ with Autoshot’s USDZ conversion tool. He then pushes the USDZ file into Jetset via Autoshot’s file transfer system.
Inside Jetset, the team can try different camera angles and focal lengths, and test shoot the entire sequence, all without needing to be at the actual shooting location, because the whole scan is in the iPhone!
They can edit the shots together to find the right rhythm to tell the story.
Dancing With Dragons
In this video, Andy takes it to the next level. Using a character rig of Bash in Unreal that can be ‘driven’ with a standard video game controller, Andy can rapidly act out Bash’s movements in the scene.
Since these animations are based in an environment scan of the actual live action location, he can make a quick 1:1 animation of Bash leaping up on to a digital ‘sofa’:
He can then import the rapidly-created previsualization animation into Jetset, line up the live action set to the scanned previs set, and shoot takes of Bash jumping up — all while spending a few minutes doing the animation instead of days!
He can also do a quick ‘production geometry’ scan of the set ‘on the day’ that is invaluable for post-production work to see exactly where all the objects in the scene were located; this scan will match the actual live action photography of the shot.
Finally, he uses Autoshot to generate an image sequence and a tracked camera for his shot which are automatically imported into his original Maya scene along with the scanned ‘set geo’ from the production shoot. The combined Maya file has the previs scene scan and Bash animation, along with the production camera track and geometry scan, so it’s ready to hand over to the animator!
Project Overview
This popular series of a firefighter and his pet dragon are remaking their pipeline with Jetset. In this video, Andy Bash uses Jetset to import a scan of the location along with a CG dragon animated in Maya to plan the shot sequences!
Tim and Bash

A baby dragon adopted by a firefighter! https://linktr.ee/timandbash