Jelly London's A+C Studios Animate a City in a Suitcase for Key Travel

jelly London animation directors A+C Studios were approached by design agency Stream, who were working on a re-brand for travel management organisation Key Travel.  

Key Travel aim to simplify travel and needed a bespoke video for their home page and social media to simply explain what they do, their company values and communicate how they can help with complex travel arrangements to unpredictable destinations all over the world.

It was decided early on that stop motion would be the chosen approach, with hand crafted bespoke elements to reflect the individual experience Key Travel offer to their clients in the faith, health and education sectors.

Titled ‘City in a Suitcase’ the film captures the magic of travelling and tells the charming story behind Key Travel’s ‘hands on’ service. Beautifully hand-crafted and delicately made, the piece uses the visual metaphor of a miniature city contained within a suitcase, and a narrative hand helping intricate paper characters into the suitcase city to capture Key Travel’s ‘hands on’ service, and story of the brand.

A+C Director Dan Richards had an interest in paper engineering and felt this would be a fantastic project to take advantage of paper and its tactile qualities. The team created a ‘traveller’s desk’ environment complete with paper travel documents and paper engineered elements such as people, buildings, cars, trains and planes.

As the saying goes, it’s the teller that makes the story, not the story.  Using their expert knowledge of stop motion, the animation illustrated the message in a simple yet charming and arresting way; Key Travel get people to their desired destination easily and without hassle.

How A+C Did It

‘City in a Suitcase’ was shot as one continuous piece of stop motion animation, elements such as the flying planes were shot separately on a blue screen and composited into the animation.  A small team of animators worked on the shoot, directing movement and acting as the hands for the piece.

The method of using live action footage of a real human during stop motion animation is known as ‘pixilation’.   Frames were captured ‘on fours’, meaning when the animation is played back, the animation advances every four frames rather than every one or two frames, like you would normally expect with stop motion animation.  This was a stylistic choice, to give the animation a deliberately ‘choppy’ look.  Using this technique makes ‘City in a Suitcase’ easily differentiated from live action video and CGI, which generally has a smoother motion.

See more of A+C's work on jelly London.