Two Arm Bandit

Viktor was the happiest forklift driver he knew until the day he was sacked after an accident at work. In order not to disappoint his girlfriend Sabrina, who works in a gambling hall, Viktor decides to pretend a normal working life for her. When one day the electricity is cut off because of unpaid bills, the two see only one solution - to steal a slot machine.

This title design (3 min.) for a fictional action-comedy movie was created within six months as part of my study course "Film & Animation". The production team consisted of three people. The art style was heavily inspired by the early video game era and features a unique mixture of 2D and 3D pixel art. To complement the movie's somber atmosphere, we adopted a more subdued color palette for all assets.

After creating the 2D characters in Photoshop, I started modeling all the characters and props in 3D using MagicaVoxel. Rigging in Maya wasn't easy as I wanted to keep the choppy animation style of old 8-bit games. We rendered the almost 3000 frames using a multi-machine setup in RenderMan. Final compositing was done in After Effects and Premiere.

The 3D model of Viktor's forklift