“... As the thumping footsteps fade from warehouse 13 towards the gate, Alice takes cautious steps inside with laboured breaths. She did her best to contain her horror and breath as she inhaled the putrid smell of the blood that stained the warehouse’s walls. To induce horror into Alice’s raging heart, chains start clinking from the ceiling as if holding something heavy. As Alice rose from her crouching stance and walked anxiously towards the sound of the chains, she felt something viscous dripping on her shoulders. A petrified Alice finds Lara and Rebecca hanging from their ceiling as their spleens spill onto the meathook that holds their empty cadavers. Shocked as she is already, the diesel generator to her left switches on by itself. To her far right, Alice hears nails scratching onto the concrete floor. Alice starts shivering as Jason walks into the warehouse, eerily whispering “Oh Alice! Where are you?”
Overview
Stories like Alice’s floating around the internet mean only one thing: It’s Halloween week, the time for chainsaws, clowns, tricks, and treats! Mako studio set to develop a 3D concept art of a storyboard of its creation to illustrate the core of the Halloween spirit, bringing tricks to the visual treat. “The Halloween Surprise” is a piece that is both an art tribute and a showcasing of the studio’s artistic prowess.
Now that the stage is set to discuss this timed magnum opus, let’s dress up for the night of the Wights!
The Halloween Surprise: An indomitable illustration
The core of the artwork lies in the tone of fear and surrealism that it paints in a connoisseur’s heart. The raw terror encapsulated in an esoteric palette of red, blue, and green depicts an already unfolding disaster, as the predator lurks in the shadows of the haunted warehouse, calmly bearing his fangs for the next victim.
From conceptualisation, storyboarding, preliminary illustration, blocking-out, and sculpting to the texturing process, every pixel of the image has been carefully curated by the studio’s expert artists to emboss a concrete impression of the emotions behind it. The diabolical breath of life that the designers have offered to the Halloween surprise lies in the ingenious lighting and post-processing methods handled by them. This part proved to be specifically laborious, fit to be called a proper resurrection.
Mako traces its Halloween references to popular films and games such as “The Last of Us,” “The Walking Dead,” and “I Am Legend.” These references are starkly evident in minute aspects of the piece, like the emergency light’s red shade, the tarpaulin sheet on the side of the doorway, and the “cadaver chandeliers” (that’s how our designers perceive Jason calling them :p). The colours were picked to put the connoisseur in Alice’s shoes for a quick second, triggering an adrenaline rush. Most ideas underlying the final rendition of the Halloween surprise find themselves as ones that sprung up from consistent brainstorming sessions, which are a mandatory ritual for the creative heads of the studio.
The designers were eventually taken aback as Asmodeus gradually enthroned himself atop the heart of the Halloween Surprise, with each extensive detail shed on it. The art is proof that the Devil is in the details, and here, he scratches his bat on the concrete floor as he calls out Alice’s name across Warehouse 13.
Cracking the carnage open: The Business Value of The Halloween surprise
Art is an interesting mode of expression that is capable of triggering a variety of emotions within the perceiver. That said, 3D art serves a greater purpose of pioneering the future with its versatility. While the environmental elements of the Halloween surprise come together as a single element to ratify Halloween’s sinister spirit, they are useful in diverse avenues as individual assets that need not necessarily portray horror. For example, the rusty iron chains holding the cadaver chandelier could potentially hold an actual chandelier in a 3D illustrated church under diligent texturing and incorporation into another artwork. Such is the blessing that a 3D asset’s versatility offers to artists.
Every element on the face of the Halloween surprise holds the potential to be part of any medium, like movies, games, and illustrations that pose a different context. These assets could even comfortably sit within a VR environment as key elements within an immersive reality. Facilities like these transcend the Halloween surprise beyond an ingenious artwork; they make it a treasure trove for 3D artists who are in dire need of someone to shoulder their workload.
