Zaffi Zoo Pilot
In the summer of 2022, when we were still all working remotely, we collaborated with Sophie Deen and her team at Bright Little Labs on the charming pilot for their series, Zaffi Zoo! Following our success with using Blender for Secret Spring, we decided to make this our next Blender project and give ourselves more experience with full animation, character rigging, lighting and rendering.
Zaffi is a young girl who owns the most amazing Zoo! All the animals are robots and are always making a bit of mischief with their programming. With her yeti mentor Jam Jam, Zaffi must learn programming rules and figure out the bugs in the system. In this pilot, the Ocko the octopus has gone bananas, and it’s upset the monkeys! Each episode ends with a dance and a song. The themes of problem solving and environmental responsibility really drew us to the project.
The design for Zaffi already existed in 2D, but Tom Lucas worked with CG builder Kim McCarthy to bring her into 3D, using series like Pocoyo and Tru and the Rainbow Kingdom as an inspiration for the shape and shader. Josh Doyle built on his Blender knowledge to create a character rig for Zaffi and Jam Jam, and also built an eight legged rig for Ocko. We used 2D textures to make the mouth shapes for all characters and Tom created some 2D rigs for background characters that didn’t need making in full 3D. Kim also built the environments, matching the clean style and designing a lighting style to match. Final shots were composited in After Effects.
Working remotely on a CG project was challenging! The file sizes were larger and we needed a few separate workstations to get through all the rendering. We hit some challenges with Blender, and these were overcome with a bit of R&D. Since this project, Blender has improved considerably, as has our experience with it!
We really enjoyed bringing Zaffi and her zoo to life and we hope that there will be a full series in the future!
Credits:
Producer/Director: Sophie Deen
Producer, Rendering and Compositing: Jon Rennie
Animation Director: Zoran Jankovic
Production Coordinator: Chris Wright
Concept Design, Storyboard and 2D Sequences: Tom Lucas
CG Build: Kim McCarthy
CG Rigging and Layout: Josh Doyle
Animation: Sehyun Cho, Aneurin Vaughan, Luiz Kowalski
Animation: Theory Studios
Additional 2D Animation: Sintija Surubkina