I’m happy to share with you tall the work I created for secretlevelonprime and amazonmgmstudios for the short film Sifu: It Takes a Life, directed by Laszlo Ruska at Digic Pictures in Hungary, under the direction of the_blur_studio. Sifu is a stylized French video game created by Sloclap in 2022. As a lead art director, I was primarily responsible for developing the look of the project and adapting the game to animation, creating concept art, character designs, style guides, paintovers, and more, from start to finish.

It was a very challenging project, as Digic, known for its incredible work in hyper-realistic projects, had never done a project this stylized. There were many ups and downs along the way to achieve this result, but I’m quite happy with how it turned out. It could have been worse, it could have been better, but overall, it was a fascinating human experience.

I would like to thank Zsofia Bobaly first for her patience and incredible work, Laszlo Ruska, the director, György Horváth, the CG Supervisor, Barna Zsolt Szoke, my co-art director, and Daniel Molnar and all the rest of the team. A big thanks also to Xavi Minguell Solanes, a very talented artist who helped paint some key art with me, and special thanks to Alex Toth, the LookDev/Lighting/Rendering/Compositing artist, for his amazing work and his master kung fu compositing skills !

Special thanks to my fantastic background art team: Eric Cousin and Olivier May, as well as the incredible work of Martin Mara and Istvan Vastag and their team, who handled shot preparation and camera mapping, and to Andrea for coordinating everything. Another special thanks to my bro Alvise Zennaro for his outstanding work in character design.

Finally, thank you to the Blur team, as well as Alexey Andreev and Jerome Denjean for trusting me with this project.