Supertato Wrap Party, She Drew That & Annecy: The Latest From The Zoo #2

Fairtrade Fortnight

Back in March we celebrated #FairtradeFortnight with a coffee morning in the studio. The coffee morning consisted of tasty fairtrade treats, including a crate-load of PROPER popcorn from our friends at Blue Zoo and delicious homemade banana bread made by James Mann. It’s safe to say we were all stuffed by the end of the day and we were definitely fully stocked on popcorn for the next few weeks…

Goodbye soup, hello sandwiches!

After 13 fantastic homemade soups whipped up by our generous crew, we switched back to sandwiches back in March - but this time with a twist! From French, Mediterranean to a good old fashioned Ploughman’s platter, each Thursday we’ve been making our way through a range of sandwich themes to keep the studio lunches interesting and to avoid decision fatigue (because why have 1 type of cheese when you can have all 3?)

Earth Day Raffle

We celebrated Earth Day with a Zoom raffle hosted by the Green Team. Prizes consisted of Tonies chocolate, The book of David Attenborough’s Wild Isles and a £50 voucher for Food For Friends restaurant in Brighton. Massive congratulations to all of our winners! All proceeds went to WWF.

She Drew That

Back in April, She Drew That hosted their first Brighton session at the studio. She Drew That is a community of women, transgender and non-binary people in animation. Their aim is to develop skills for freelancers, connect people with the industry and host monthly workshops with inspirational speakers. Big thank you to Leanne Rule for her brilliant talk about her career as a 3D animation and illustrator. We aim to host more SDT sessions so keep your eyes peeled for the next one!

Potato... Wrap!

4000 comped scenes, 1878 backgrounds, 424 props and a whopping 10 types of spoon later…production for Supertato series 1 is complete! A giant thank you goes out to our incredibly talented team for all their hard work over the past year and a half and for making Supertato the hilariously action-packed, vibrant and FUN show that it is. We could not be more pleased with the response from kids and parents alike! To celebrate, we threw a wrap party at The Joker in Brighton which featured Supertato themed cutouts, character cupcakes, crew tote bags and a whole lot of delicious food from Lost Boys Chicken.

It really was a night to remember - congratulations to everyone involved!

Goodbye Nat!

Back in June we said goodbye to Nat who left the company after 11 years! Nat has been an amazing asset to our team, from joining Plug-in Media fresh out of University as a Junior Artist, to going onto be our Brilliant Art director, responsible for the look and design of Tee and Mo, Supertato and more. He’ll be very missed by us all, but we wish him the very best for his new chapter!

To send Nat off in style, we headed down to the beach to play volleyball at Yellowave, followed by a BBQ grill at Bison Beach Bar. It was great to be joined by some familiar Blue Zoo faces too!

Annecy

In June, Dom and Juliet flew out to France for the International Animation Film Festival in Annecy, for the first time under Brighton Zoo. It was a jam packed and exciting few days, with lots of interesting conversation and new partnerships emerged.

CMC

We travelled up north to Sheffield at the start of July to attend the Children’s Media Conference who are celebrating their 20th birthday this year. We had a brilliant time and it was great to meet so many new faces and catch up with old friends across the industry. We also produced two live sessions for the conference: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (produced by our Production Assistant Rachel Adderley), a dragons den style pitching session to find the next big children’s TV idea and Stream if you want to go FASTer (exec produced by our Managing director Juliet Tzabar), A valuable discussion on how to maximise revenues on new AVOD and FAST platforms.