Daniel Kabanov
Visual Development Portfolio
violent on a case by case Basis
'Violent on a Case by Case basis' Is a Noir retelling of the Pandoras Box Myth set in 1923 prohibition Chicago.
It was decided really early on in the process to use a very limited pallete of blacks and whites, with a bright Magenta added for for contrast and for supernatural elements. It also halped to hark back to the Noir genre and the time period the story takes place in.
It also worked well for the enviorments! Early 1920s night time photography was incredibly high contrast. This got reflected in the way I rendered backgrounds. In my head the entire story is set at night.
Violent on a Case by Case Basis has a lot of characters, but I think the one who I had the most fun with was Pandora herself! First generation Chinese immigrant Xiaodan "Cathy" Xin-Yi!
Cathy is a play on the trope of a character with a suitcase chained to their wrist. That case being Pandoras box. I thought it would be fun to have a character with more agency in this scenario, a character whos says "No, I will fix this." She is very no nonesense and to the point.
A little storyboard character test.
Finally every grimey dark noir story needs a poster! I jumped a few decades ahead and took inspiration from mafia movie posters of the 1940's. I mix of poster 'I' and 'G' were picked! The case in the sunglasses worked well both compositionally and thematically.
Overall I'm very proud of the work I did in the roughly two month peroid I was given to work on this little world building project! The shorter deadline for the deliverable created a lot of fun limitation caused inovation such as using blender blockouts and limited palette.
