007
The Grim Weeper
Created by
Sailesh Gopalan
Assisted by
Preetham Gunalan
“The Grim Weeper only makes friends for life.”
Creator's Note:
The idea of a ‘sad little grim reaper that inadvertently kills everyone it tries to befriend’ just seemed like such a fun concept to animate. I enjoy my fair share of dark humour but haven’t had the chance to work in the genre much, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity! This experiment was built to cater to our respective interests; mine being character animation and direction, and fx animation for Preetham, and the sequence was planned with the song already selected - “You Will Never See Me Coming” by NEFFEX. The music determined the actions and the pacing to a large extent, and one of our biggest challenges was to fit these scenes into the tempo of the song. Visually, we used a lot of references, like Gravity Falls for character design and style, and the IZZO commercial by The Line and specific scenes from Ghost in the Shell and Kizumonogatari as our fx references. Since neither of us is a background painter, Preetham suggested we use royalty free photographs as the backgrounds for these shots.
There’s an ineffable joy to collaborating with another animator, more so when you have similar tastes in both art and humour. These shots were easy to conceptualise and the work split was simple because we decided from the very beginning that we just do what we’re good at and enjoy every second of it.
I handled all the character related animation and sought Preetham’s help with the blood and fire fx, which I knew he’d do a killer job of (pun intended, of course).