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

COMMUTER GLITCH: My First Short with Blue Zoo

Last summer, I worked on my first short with Blue Zoo. Commuter Glitch was a super fun concept. We created a piece of animation with a "pass the pose" mindset, or I believe the technical term for it is ‘Cadavre Exquis’.

(one of my poses from the end of the film)

Animators signed up, and created poses of the lead character, an old man listening to his walkman. We all used the same locked off camera, then took it in turns to animate a few short frames making the character move between a start pose and end pose, and of course, due to the virtue of the whole piece, no one knew what anyone else was doing.

(one of my poses from the end of the film)

It worked kinda like that drawing game, where you draw a head, fold over the paper, and pass it to someone else to draw the body, then pass to someone else to finish off. To add a layer of complexity, each shot created was given to different lighters, to light however they wanted.

I didn't actually animate on the shots, but I created a series of poses with the character, that you can see flicker on screen at the end of the shot.

(one of my poses from the end of the film)

Joe, our director, wanted everyone who worked on the piece to be as creative and out there as we could. 

It was a really fun project to work on, as there was so much freedom to do with the character whatever we wanted. It was also really exciting waiting to see what the finish short was going to look like!



The result, a crazy and surreal animated adventure telling the tale of an old guy on a journey through public transport!

You can find a cool article about the project here!

Cheers
Marc x


P.s. by the way, incase you can't click on the Vimeo link to check out COMMUTER GLITCH, you can watch it here on youtube...but if you can, go to Vimeo as the quality will be much better ;)