THE MAKING OF LYNX & BIRDS
We chat to Blue Zoo about their adorable short, and their tips for animating for a young audience
It’s always satisfying to end the year on a high, and for Blue Zoo that was achieved with the release of their furry festive tale, Lynx & Birds. Featuring an adorable but all-too-curious little baby bird, his mother and a lynx with a knack for knitting, the two-and-a-half-minute animation secured them a staff favourite accolade on Vimeo and heaps of praise from both peers and critics.
“With this short we said, we want to do a fur system, it has to be a creature, it has to be funny, it has to be festive somehow but doesn't need to say 'Happy Christmas' at the end, it needs to be under two minutes and it needs to be Maya animated,” Box explains of the brief. “It's very hard to write a brief that's creatively liberating but at the same time creatively focused. It's about trying to provide some threads but at the same time providing limitations to make sure it works for us as a studio as well as the animators.”
The brief garnered ten pitches, with an online voting system consisting of varying categories – creativity, originality etc – set up for the staff to pick their winner. “We wanted to force people to think about the story and the content, rather than just picking their favourite,” Box continues. “A lot of feedback for Lynx & Birds was that it really answered the brief succinctly. It had a very clear, simple story that made everyone laugh just from talking about the storyboard – and you know you're onto a winner when that happens.”
Created by Simone Giampaolo and Francesco Mazza, the pair explain that the purpose of their story was to develop and push their capabilities in creating the effects of a creature with fur and hair. “We made the fur the central piece of the whole story,” Giampaolo explains, adding that they came up with the idea of a hairball after brainstorming around the ‘fur’ theme. “In the original story it was just one bird, but adding this element of a very sentimental, moving and strong bond between mother and son really added another layer of emotional storytelling. That was one of the first decisions we made before going into production.”
While the team were given more time than previous shorts, it didn’t come without its own set of hiccups. “Artistically, one of the main challenges was to keep the frames really clean and to not use lots of colour or overdo everything,” says Mazza. “In terms of detail, we wanted to keep the colour palette really limited, to three or four colours maximum and at times, that can get really hard in 3D.”
“The other one was the density and the amount of fur and also the simulation that this fur had to have – the whiskers moving, the cheeks moving. Lynxes have this very
long fur around the neck, so the nature of the creature and the density of the hair was a big challenge for the studio because we are not used to that,” adds Giampaolo.
“We have never dealt with that size of data set with millions of hairs,” Box continues. “Technically, they've learnt a lot on the hair systems, so we'll be using some of the tools they helped refine. It’s one of the reasons for pushing ourselves in the shorts: to really battle-test our new tools so when we go into production on a big furry character, we've already ironed out a lot of the problems.”
originally the team set out to do something more photoreal, but during the process decided to pour their effort into making something that looked beautiful and funny rather than being super realistic. “At the end of the day, it's not going to add to the enjoyment, so we really had to pick our battles,” Box adds.
Looking back on the success of the short, Giampaolo explains that the process allowed him to experience directing in a
“It’s one of the reasons for pushing ourselves IN the shorts: to really battle-test our New tools” Tom Box, co-founder, Blue Zoo
new way. “I learned a lot in terms of letting the audience breathe,” he says. “To give the right pace, to make the audience wait, to make the right amount of suspense between hitting the gag. That's something we're not really used to in commercials because everything happens much faster. That really made me better as a filmmaker I think.” Adding to its impact, Tom Box concludes, “I think it's the highest quality thing we've ever done.”