Work on The Ten Commandments  began in 2004, when Promenade Picture’s president and COO, Cindy Bond, asked screenwriter Ed Naha (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) to write a script for an animated film that would depict Moses as a normal, very human person, a rare approach to this well-known story.  After developing the script, Promenade “went on a worldwide search for an animation house that had the technology to bring this picture to life,” Bond said. 

“Our travels took us to New Zealand after we were introduced to Trevor Yaxley, the CEO of Huhu Studios.  We immediately hit it off and went into a co-production deal whereby Trevor agreed to provide animation production services and help us arrange production funding.  Huhu introduced us to Sparky Animation, which had the proprietary plugs-ins to animate the plagues and the thousands of characters that were essential to bringing this story to life.  These plug-ins were just amazing, and that contributed to The Ten Commandments’ epic scope.”

With Naha’s screenplay in hand, the filmmakers began breaking down the script and listing all the characters, sets and effects shots they would need.  Design began in September 2005, led by production designer Henoch Kloosterboer.  After initially exploring a more traditional “cartoony” look, the filmmakers decided that the gravity of the material called for a more serious tone for the character design.  Moses and other lead characters went through dozens of design revisions before the final look was settled upon. (Continued below)

One of the main requirements was to clearly differentiate between the Hebrews and the Egyptians.  This was done with clothing color schemes -- the Egyptians were given off-white colors for their main garments with contrasting vibrant colors while the Hebrews were given more earthy colors.  The Egyptian characters themselves were made more angular, the women with a supermodel-like superiority and air, vain and image-focused, their skin tone pushed more towards yellow.  The Hebrews, by comparison, were more organic and rounded with a browner skin tone.

The organic vs. angular concept was carried through into the sets:  the roughly constructed mud brick housing of the Hebrews and the clean, smooth lines of the Egyptian buildings.  The houses themselves were arranged haphazardly in slum-like Goshen, the Hebrew quarter, while the Egyptian streets were neatly planned, tidy and clean.

The palace was placed atop a hill in the middle of the city to ensure it was visible from anywhere in the city, and the area behind the city was framed with large pyramids.  In reality, pyramids, as burial sites, would have been found symbolically placed on the far side of the river from the city and some distance downstream.  For the sake of appearances, however, the filmmakers claimed cinematic license so the audience could see more of the pyramids.

Production designer Kloosterboer and the directors did a Herculean job researching the look of Egypt during the reign of Ramses II (circa 1300 BCE), considered by many Biblical scholars and archeologists to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

While producing Charlton Heston Presents: The Bible in 1991-2, Stronach had spent three months on the ground in Egypt with unprecedented access to all the sites mentioned in the text of the Exodus story.  His experience, along with the research that director Bill Boyce and Kloosterboer did, gives the film a wonderfully accurate look at ancient Egypt.

“The joy of  animation,” Boyce said, “is the ability to create pretty much anything we can imagine.  We could design and build an ancient Egyptian city and its citizens and slaves from the ground up, exactly as we envisioned it, and exactly as required by the script, in the style of our choice.  It was a very heady feeling.”