Royal Blood / Out of the Black

The narrative is centred upon a fantastical world of graphic cartoon violence, as a service-station heist takes a bizarre turn. An Easter bunny disguised alien leads a posse of holiday costumed creatures consisting of a snowman, a pumpkin, an ice cream cone and a walking heart into a blood-pumping, body slamming, head exploding showdown with the cops.

Flame Artists Judy Roberts and Andy Copping with Colourist Julien Biard helped integrate the animated scenes with the live-action in what proved to be a highly complex post job.

Julien comments: 'Having worked with David on the last Beagle Street campaign, I was really excited about working with him on this project. David is based in LA and he couldn’t be in the grading suite with me so we used a remote grading system, where I’m grading in London and David is at another facility in LA. It’s great because both suites are linked up by an almost instantaneous feed so he could see every adjustment of the grade in real time, despite the 5000 miles separating us!'

David Wilson commented on our input, 'The result lived up to my dreams. I dreamed BIG on this one!'

Judy explains 'A smashed up helicopter, cars and a dead body, were all added to the clean plate using hand textured CGI renders, and various supplied photographic elements. The lighting proved to be the most challenging to achieve as the sources of light are coming from very particular angles here. So when painting the light had to be perfectly in place to look realistic, which is something that wasn’t easy to get from the stills.'

Another key job for us was to engineer movement in the car crash at the beginning. On the shoot the actor was running and jumping onto a stationary car for evident safety reasons. Our job was to build the car crash out of various plates to make it seem like the car was moving at speed.

And of course as if it was not gory enough already there were also a few shots, which needed extra blood passes, composited by Andy Copping in Flame who says 'The big one was of the rabbit slumped at the petrol pump. We enhanced all of the blood around him to match it up with the brilliant last bit of animation'.

'The film is incredibly unique in its style and it’s been a real labour of love for the Director David. It’s really personal to him, as he animates himself'.