005
Papercut
Created by
Preetham Gunalan
Assisted by
Derek Domnic Dsouza
"38 murders. I'd say she's nothing special. One of many serial killers, right?
But it's different for our Inspector. Even with his record, with his incredible success, she's the one that got away. She's the only one that actually beat him.
So on the weekends, when we're out celebrating his victories, he locks himself up in that room. Still looking.
It's been ten years since her last kill but he's still in there, hoping that she'd been kind enough to drop him just one hint."
Creator's Note:
This experiment was done at a really quick pace, from ideation to completion in just three days! The piece was conceived fully playing into Derek’s and my strengths. The result is a rough, loose, energetic output that uses blender for structure, lighting, and camera and digitally-drawn assets for texture and style.
One of the starting inspirations for this style was the iconic parchment Vulture from 'Across the Spider-Verse’. We learnt a lot through trial and error on this, and have figured out quite an interesting workflow.
This project had a clear workflow that incorporated 2D and 3D seamlessly without blocking each other. In 2D, we developed four designs for the background walls in a robustly textured style, with a lot of scratchy strokes and stray lines. Each wall had several layers of designs that could be placed on top of one another in 3D. The character himself was rotoscoped on top of a 3D mannequin, allowing for a very loose style of rendering that still held form because of the 3D base.
In 3D, we set up a square room and posed a mannequin and placed in its final location. We projected the wall textures on to the walls of the room. The cameras trajectory and the position of the walls posed a problem, but we developed a quick fix for this by turning the walls off when the cameras path collided with them. We literally had to break the fourth wall!