Description:

This short animated film aims to combine the cinematic form and art style of manga to showcase a 2.5D comic book world, bringing the audience a fresh experience of ‘watching’ a manga. My interests are in creating the texture of hatching and screentone, for a martial arts sequence (animation). There are two types of animation in the short film: martial arts-style actions and combat are 3D animation; manga elements (such as speed lines, smears and onomatopoeia) are made in 2D. The film tells the story of a female thief that steals an artefact in a temple, but is prevented by a guardian which leads to fierce fighting. This conflict causes the world around them to collapse, revealing to them they are characters within a manga.
A research question for this project was, “How can you create a 3D animated short film which explores mixed media approaches to aesthetics, animation and cinematography?” This led to the Manga aesthetic of the animation, mixed with the anime animation style and the martial arts from Wuxia films.
The visual style was created with Blender shaders, while all the 2D animation techniques were added afterwards, drawn on by hand. A lot of simulation and compositing also went into the post-production process.