MORE STUFF by Blue Zoo...A Year On

More Stuff was the Short that we created at Blue Zoo, that sent the internet into a melt down of animational delight. I worked on a small section of the short and I thought I'd mark the almost-a-year-anniversary by sharing my experience.

 

Around October 2015, staff at Blue Zoo were invited to pitch an idea for the BZ Christmas short. We were all given a song, and a concept and we had to provide the rest. The song and theme was about consumerism, and all we had to work out our idea from, was that the song, More Stuff. 

Vimeo sent us these funky stickers/coasters/frizbees

Four people were chosen to pitch to the studio, me being one of them (...bloomin 'eck). After we pitched to the whole studio, the company voted. Simone and Joe's pitch won the vote, and so work began on creating models from their brilliant concept art and the animatic development continued. 

As a thank you for pitching, the studio took me off my project (Tree Fu Tom) and was I allocated time to animate on the short itself. Quite a privilege really, as this only happens with a select few from the studio, if additional people wanted to animate on it, they had to do so in their own time!

I was given two shots and had to create a selection of dance cycles. In the early stages of development, there were a couple of shots of all the elves dancing, but this got scrapped (or at least made small and not very noticeable) - and in the end, the studio used our dances for promo videos on social media, in the run up to the short's release.

Our awesome More Stuff Advent Calendars!

More Stuff was received very well, better than any of us could have hoped for, really. We've won a couple of awards at festivals across the world and were chosen as a staff pick on Vimeo - a very honorable accolade, indeed!

I really enjoyed working on the project, especially working on a Christmas themed short in the run up to Christmas itself, was really fun. The studio had lots of fun promoting it too  - from filling the studio with various elves to giving out specially designed advent calendars.

Who knows what Blue Zoo has in store for this Christmas (wink)

Cheers
Marc x