Death was at the Rendez-vous

Are you ready to embark on one of the most desaturated adventures of your life?

While trying to find a lost dog, a clumsy detective becomes embroiled in an assassination attempt... of course, nothing goes as planned.

                                                    Teaser

                                                      Movie

Still frames

Shots breakdowns

Shots progress

Making of

                           Challenges

The short aims to be a parody of a classical genre from the 40s: the film noir. It borrows characteristics of a classic film noir and gives them a twist with absurd humor revolving around clichés and portraiture. While the genre itself is dark, the increasingly weird jokes and situations aim to bring a lighter, more modern touch to it !

One of our main challenges during the project was the sheer number characters coupled with the sheer absence of strong riggers in our team. Especially since, for the animation style we were aiming for, we'd need the characters to be pretty flexible. In the end, the issue was worked around by having all human characters share the same body type, using facial features, hair and clothes to make them look like different people. This way, rigging and skinning could be shared between all characters with only minor retakes, making it so we basically had to rig only one human instead of four.

Base body :

Facial's rig :

Blendshapes for the nose and mouth :

Another big challenge was of course the black and white pictures! Having never worked like this before, we had to change the way we went about lighting and texturing in order to make sure it would look good in the final image. Many tests were made to find the right amount of detail in the textures and decide how strong the lighting needed to be in the renders in order to give the compositing team something they could work with to make pretty, coherent images.

                           Characters

Henri (the detective)

The Hitman (the hitman)

Cookie (the dog)

3D Turn part one

Monica (the femme fatale)

Jacob (the husband)

Brutus (the fish)

3D Turn part two

Character's props

                       Environments

The town of San Francisous

MONICA'S AND JACOB'S APPARTMENT

Keyshots

Storyboard

Lumascript

Directed by :

Manon AGUETTAZ : Prod, Rig/Blendshapes, Animation, SetDress

Natacha BERGEZ : Animation, Rig, Modeling/Blendshapes,  Storyboard

Yeshrita GOKOOL : Compositing, Lookdev, Rendering, Modeling

Antoine LEFEBVRE : Modeling, Surfacing, Lookdev, FX/CFX

Vanille MESLIN : Lighting, Compositing, Rendering, Prod

Margot PEREZ : Groom, CFX, Modeling, Surfacing

Viktoriia SHTYKOVA : Modeling/Sculpting, Surfacing, Lighting, Rendering,

Edgard TROUVAY : Animation, Storyboard, Layout 3D, Chara design

Animation Intern's : Alphonse ANNÉE , Jules NOUVELOT-GIRON

Original score by : Aloïs BENOIT

With the voice of : Emmanuelle FAUCHET and Collin HILL

Sound design & Editing : Mickaël MERRHEIM, Théo BOIN, Tristan LE BOZEC

Mixage 5.1 : José VICENTE, Yoann PONCET - Studio des aviateurs

With a little kiss from the Death's team