Dec 16, 2016

Blue Zoo's latest Christmas short film is now available!

London-based Blue Zoo is one of several animation studios with an in-house shorts program, but its Christmas-themed films are annual must-sees among the studio's many productions.

This year, Blue Zoo continued the tradition with the action movie trailer parody "No More Stuff," a follow-up to its 2015 hit "More Stuff. "Cartoon Brew has been working with studio co-founder Tom Box and animation director Simone Giampaolo about how "No More Stuff" was made.

Before we get into that, check out the short film below.

Cartoon Brew: Can you talk about the history of Blue Zoo's Christmas shorts? Our studio has grown from a small group of animators to a multi-team of over 130 artists, making it difficult to maintain the small studio atmosphere and the creative and collaborative ideas that come from it. So we started an in-house short program where we present an overview a few times a year and ask everyone to come up with ideas. Several times a year, we present an overview and ask everyone to submit ideas. The person who gets the most votes gets to direct a short film the next day, with all of the studio's resources at their disposal.

We encourage everyone to participate, even if it is only a few hours of artistic contribution. Doing so allows everyone from different departments to talk to each other about the project and to work a little differently than they normally would. We also try to push experimentation and technological development. For example, last year's short film used GPU rendering; this year we are using GPU rendering in the cloud.

Simone Giampaolo (animation director): After the success of last year's short film "More Stuff," we were going to take a break from Christmas shorts, but everyone told us they were looking forward to what we would do this year. So I figured I had to do something. Since it was a very busy time of year at the studio, we didn't have much time to build all the assets from scratch, so we thought about how we could reuse last year's characters and sets and create something new in a few weeks. So, after last year's Disney musical parody, this year we decided to make a parody of an action movie trailer following "More Stuff."

To get things started, we did a little brainstorming about what the "movie" would look like and came up with a bunch of fun movie parodies that would be cool to recreate with naked elves. Then we went straight to Animatik to get the timing right, and recorded a narrator in the studio. Trying to be as cooperative as possible, we divided up the filming among those who were willing to help. [Simone Giampaolo: The characters were modeled in ZBrush, re-topologized and UV edited in Maya, and textured with a combination of MARI and Mudbox. The fur was created in XGen and rendered using GPU rendering software Redshift, leveraging YellowDog's cloud rendering, which rendered very quickly in the cloud while operating seamlessly from Deadline, making it possible for staff was completely transparent, whether rendering locally or in the cloud, without requiring different workflows.

What was the most challenging aspect of production? It was the timeframe: we started making the film in mid-November, so we only had a few weeks to produce it. But we designed it to be easy to accomplish, so once we knew what we were doing, it wasn't too bad. We used all kinds of creative shortcuts and visual tricks to achieve a high quality result in a short amount of time. We ran into a few problems initially because we used some new techniques, such as using Maya XGen hair in Redshift for Santa's long beard and cloud renderings. [Simone Giampaolo (Simone): I thought about what would work well visually in a short time and what would work well translated to elves, especially naked elves. We also tried to balance classic movie references with more recent iconic scenes. In all, the trailer is packed with 20 movie parodies.

What other films are you working on at Blue Zoo-

Tom Box: Tom Box: I am currently in pre-production on a feature film. I have spent several years writing the script, so it will be great to see the footage come together. We also have several children's TV shows in the works for CBeebies and Nickelodeon, an app and VR project, and three more short films in development.

Credits. Production Company Blue Zoo Animation Director: Simone Giampaolo, Joe Kinch Producers Tom Box, Damian Hook & Lizzie Hicks Lead Modeling & Texturing Pietro Ricini, Gerardo Zurla Modeling Hannah Wong, Dane Winn, Maxime Guillemin & Mélanie Gras Rigging Anthony Deliste Digital Matte Painter Izzy Burton Lead Writing & Compositing Charlie Batteau, Paul Mitcheson Lead Animators Simone Giampaolo, Dan Edgley