The Unpettables is a series of shorts about a group of misfit friends, who go about their daily lives in a pet shop. Congregating daily in the final offers sale window of a down-at-heel pet shop: Frog, Lizard, Hamster, Chinch & Doctor Bunzo live out their lives together, like so many other housemates, inmates and classmates, shooting the breeze, taking the mick, exploring their psyches and working on their first hit single. Un-predictable, un-palettable, and downright un-turnoffable, The Unpettables’ hilarious existence is as surprising to each other as it is to their audience. Tune in and freak out. Then buy a flea collar!

The Unpettables emerged from our in-house R&D function to respond to the industry-wide demand for high volume, short-form animated content for Youtube. It is a sitcom with a cast of characters, built within the Unity game engine. Characters perform/are puppetted in real-time, by improv comedians, with a live lip sync function. Wearing head mics and using game controllers, they improvise episodes based on a loosely plotted structure. Cameras within Unity capture the action and a post production edit chops all the best bits together. Voila! Short-form serialised content in multiple formats, quickly, easily & cheaply created, then uploaded to Youtube. The episodes feature local improv comedy circuit talents, The Noise Next Door.

Since we produced this first series of pilot content using our low-cost animation pipeline, Animoco, we've been able to develop the system further, with the help of a grant from Creative England. We now have a number of new examples of content we have generated with the system - do get in touch to see more!