It's A Kattastrophe!

MALARIA tells the story of Fabiano, a young Mercenary who is hired to kill Death. This short film combines Origami, Kirigami, Time lapse, nankin illustration, Comic Books and Western Cinema. My first intention was to submit this project to Django Unchained Emerging Artist contest, but 6 months later we finally finished Malaria. We hope you enjoy it!

Miya traveled to Puerto Rico where she floated 1000 resin and (non-toxic) phosphorescence-coated leaves in a small pond. During the day the phosphorescence collected and absorbed energy from sunlight, giving them a soft, blue glow at night.

• The strings on his hoodie.  As he turns, they move the way you’d expect them to, they look like they have the right weight or something. They fall the right way.  Someone watched people turning around in hoodies and made sure this was right.  A+ on the physics engine and the lighting system in this movie.  
• At the ‘end’ of the loop watch his chest.  He’s breathing.  ”Of course he’s breathing,” you might say.  But he’s breathing.  His chest is expanding, like a real chest, not just from sighing or anything, but from just standing there and being a human.  You don’t even notice it, like you don’t really notice the breathing of yourself, or your friends, or your family, or anyone else.  It’s one of those things that brings subtle life to things and I’m just completely taken over it.
• His ear.  ”But Melissa,” you say again, “It’s a fucking ear.”  Yes.  Yes it is.  It is a stylized ear, but look at the lighting.  It looks like it’s glowing red dully, and that’s not because he’s frosty and people get red on their ears when they’re cold.  It’s because light is going through his ear, and showing the blood in it, and so it looks red.  You never really think about it, but ears are pretty thin, and when the right light is on it  you can sort of see through it.  But only a little.  You can see the insides.  You know what I mean.
• When he’s turning, his right arm is reasonably loose, and you can see the subtle movements from centrifugal forces or whatever, that his arm moves out and then back in again, and his hand moves with it in a way, and it’s adjusting the staff so that it stays on his shoulder instead of just flinging off into the sunset.   And if you look, the staff is making the proper bobbing for balancing, and it’s just like AJDFKSJAFJSDKAJFDA
• His hair.  It moves and bounces just ever so slightly, and it’s so shiny and perfect, and I want it, and ajfDSAJFSAKJFSAJFSajfksxjvkaskreqw /dies
• You can’t see it well in this, but throughout the entire movie when there was a particular closeup of Jack’s eyebrows, I was in love.  Sure, from far away they look like they’re just dark, but up close there are silvery white hairs in his eyebrows.  There are actually a lot of them, but they’re mixed in ever so slightly and it’s giving me an art boner.  I recently had to do a lot of work on hairlines and eyebrows, and you don’t really realize how important highlighting a few hairs here and there makes it so much more realistic than just a dark smear for an eyebrow.  As for why they decided to make his eyebrows dark, it’s because white eyebrows on a very pale person looks very strange and uncomfortable.  It doesn’t show up well on screen, for one, and emotions are shown much easier if the brows contrast with the skin.  The same goes for eyelashes.  Light eyelashes look unsettling, because we’re so used to seeing darker lashes break up the white of the skin and the white of the eye.  (I understand this point is moot with people who aren’t pasty white, but Jack is pasty white.)  From what I’ve seen, facial hair is commonly a little darker than head hair on white folks.  Unless you’re a weird ginger.  But getting back to his eyebrows, it’s fantastic that there’s brown and silver-white in there AND THEY HAVE INDIVIDUAL HAIRS ON HIS FACE
• Also this son of a bitch has remotely realistic fingernails and I was freaking out because nails are terrifying to me.
• The frost details on his hoodie reflect more light than the fabric and it’s SHINY.

Aganetha Dyck is an artist who places sculptures in apiary hives, allowing the bees to create honeycomb to encrust the objects.

Dear ada by Will Ashford