Roommate Wanted - Dead or Alive

'Roommate Wanted - Dead or Alive' is yet another graduation film from the venerable students of The Animation Workshop. The short opens with Adam, a financially-strapped medical student posting a desperately-worded roommate opening online.

Within minutes (as is the typical case for cartoons), Adam is greeted by Zack, the one and only response to his posting. Little did Adam suspect however that his plea for a roommate regardless of whether they possessed a pulse or not would yield a result for the latter. Can these two strangers manage to make it out together, and maybe even become friends along the way?

The Odd Couple

There's a lot to love about this short. What sets "Roommate Wanted" apart from the rest of the graduation films I've seen come out of the Workshop lately is that it is a purely physical, clay-mation puppet production as opposed to the 2D-3D animations we've seen up until this point.



It certainly wears its influences on its sleeve, with the exaggerated pantomimic gestures typically associated with Wallace and Gromite coupled with an over-the-top Vincent Price-esque narration rhyming throughout the short. I absolutely adore the intricate touches of detail,  the crooked xylophone-like grating of the radiator, the faded postcard stickers and leather of Zack's suitcase.
The slapstick tone of Composer Mathias Winum's score certainly is reminiscent of Frederic Bayco's iconic work. Check out more of the team's production work on their student Tumblr.