Blue Zoo's 'Commuter Glitch' Is a Wonderfully Weird Animated Short

The next stop is Arse-End, but it’s not so dull journeying on the Picaloo and Jubadilly line in Blue Zoo’s new short film directed by Joe Kinch. The multi-BAFTA award winning Animation Company have released, ‘Commuter Glitch’, the latest of their in-house animation shorts. Over 30 Blue Zoo Animators and Lighting Artists pitched to create a ‘cadavre exquis’ style animation - each contributing a short section, with no idea what had come before or what would come after in the sequence of events.

Blue Zoo Founder and Head of the Short Film Programme, Tom Box, came up with the setting for the brief. Discussing the process he comments: “Every animator had a short section of music and a start pose from the end of the animation from the previous animator. Then lighting and 3D rendering artists were given a section which they could light however they wanted, so the final animation actually had two layers of random going on at once! Our one staple was to keep the film as a single shot with a locked-off camera to encourage focus on animating the characters.”

The Blue Zoo team maintain that  the characters hold no actuality to real people they’ve met on the tube, apart from the fact that the bystanders completely ignore the craziness and totally avoid eye contact at all times. (We’ve all been there!)

Of course compiling sections upon sections of animation with only a frame of music and a start pose had the potential to be messy. Blue Zoo Animator and Designer Joe Kinch won the pitch against his colleagues for Director and was responsible for leading the project in design, style and pacing as well as allocating the sections and music.

Blue Zoo Animation creates three to four experimental short films a year centred on playful character animation. Everyone in the company is given an opportunity to pitch a treatment and the favourite is voted into production. The animations give all creative minds involved in Blue Zoo a collaborative expressive output.

Full Credits

Director / Design / Editing / Sound: Joe Kinch

Look Dev / Lead Modeller / Lighting: Dave Hunt

Compositing/Lighting: Charlie Batho

Producers: Tom Box, Damian Hook

Rigging: Anthony Delliste

Modelling: Nastasia Bois

Music : Freddie Lewis-Wall, Sam Lewis-Wall

Sound: Zelig

Animators:

Dan Edgley

Ben Steer

Simone Giampaolo

Lizzie Hicks

Dane Winn

Alessandra Rosso

Krissy Josephides

Raphael Cenzi

Ben Imber

Lighting:

Tom Martin Davis

Rhys Davidson

Leo Tsang

Jay Tsang

Maud Bourgeais

Random Pose Animators:

Joe Kinch

Dave Hunt

Fiona Dulieu

Tom Flavelle 

Sam Potter

Marc Godfrey

Steve Kimbrey

Camille Turon

Alan Serra

Lorena Diaz

Charlie Batho

Stuart Harvey

Atif Ebrahim