"No Man's Land / Sort" Part 2 (Texturing)

This is some of my work on the animation short called "Sort" (meaning black in danish) or "No Man's Land" in english. I worked as the lead designer, afterwards I did the textures, the matte paintings and finally I did did the 2D compositing.

"No Man's Land / Sort" - Part 2 (Texturing)

“No Man's Land” is a danish animation short from The National Danish Film School released in 2014.

I worked as the lead designer, afterwards I did the textures, the matte paintings and finally I did the 2D compositing.

"Even in the darkest hours,
men will recognize love."

During WW1 a part of Denmark was occupied by the german empire and therefore a lot of danes from these areas were enrolled in the german army.We follow two young men from one of these “Danish Companies” while they are being ordered to capture and hold a forward machine gun entrenchment. During three hard and testing days the two young men grow fond of each other.

The design for this movie was to be very dark, skewed version of reality inspired by the sculptural artist and painters of the late 1900 century. We wanted our characters to feel dissolved and destroyed by the horrors and surroundings of WW1 trench warfare. The style should look nothing like any 3D movie and we used a lot of effort to let the environments and characters feel very tactile and real like something that would't oppose the period of that time. The same principles were added to the camera and the animation. We used motion capture for the body movements and animation for the hands, facial expression and adjusting the quite distorted motion cap material. The DP framed the actors while they performed and we assigned her movements and framing to the mocap material.