conveying the story

in animation, it’s essential that the story works at animatic stage

“We had many iterations of animatic to make sure the short worked, both in narrative and at an emotional level,” Tom explains. “It’s very tempting to crack on with animation and have the ‘we’ll fix it later’ approach, but this almost always ends in disappointment. At Blue Zoo we always try and make sure we’re 100% happy with the animatic before we move onto the animation stage.” In Mamoon this was even more important, as there was limited time to film, and no time to go back and tweak shots after filming. “The short was initially set around various locations, including our studio and a warehouse, but we soon realised that we needed to film in-house as we needed to access the location for a few weeks of filming due to the complexity of the projection process.”