Named after the point at which a bee swarm decides where to go next, Quorum is a surreal dance through the hustle of the hive and a case for the wrong turn. The film is a 2026 self-initiated project by Berlin studio CATK (Colors And The Kids), which works across design, motion and music. CATK covered every layer itself, from concept, design and animation to the score.

Quorum opens on a lit stage where a swarm of bees hovers above a city skyline, the urban grid doubling as a hive. The bees carry a familiar obsession with diligence, teamwork and output, along with the bright, breezy promise of productivity. The sculpted towers and perforated blocks read as office buildings and honeycomb at the same time, which is the film's quiet joke about how people organise their working lives.

A steady rhythm builds, borrowing from the waggle dance and the shared hustle of human and insect life. Warm, driving melodies slowly give way to minor keys and dissonance, the quiet friction and fatigue of an everyday grind. With the score made by the same studio as the images, the music carries that change of mood as much as the picture does.

What follows is a surreal dance through the life of a bee, drawn from research into how bees behave when nobody needs them to work. The bees team up to roll a ball, drift off course and bump into things. Movement sharpens into lines, lines map into data, and data dissolves back into bodies, a shift the stills trace from flight paths and drawn studies to an extreme close-up of an eye.

The art direction changes material from scene to scene. Lifelike bees sit beside glossy, toy-like insects, nests are rebuilt as coiled and hollow sculptures, and pollen turns into clouds, cells and splashes of paint. Each set is lit like a product shot in a studio, which keeps the strangeness precise rather than messy.

Then one bee loses its way. In the film the detour is the point, because it is how swarms find a new home. Scouts wander, return and dance until a quorum is reached, and the hive-city transforms as pollen builds up over its blocks.

The full film runs about a minute and a half, and the three excerpts below follow it from the stage to the changed city. They show the swarm over the skyline, the research sequences in between and the pollen-covered city at the end. CATK's own line for the project sums it up: hold onto the glitch in the pattern.