Dji. Death Sails

Film By Dmitri Voloshin

Dji is a terribly unlucky death who doesn’t seem good at his job. This time he has to take the soul of a pirate stuck in the middle of the ocean, but that is easier said than done

Well, you can’t just breathe a sigh of relief when you finish a project. Especially if you work in an animation studio. As soon as we finished the first animated film, we immediately started working on the second one. But we had to start it from scratch.

At first, we had to find the right setting that would make it clear that death should appear right there and then. So, we chose the ocean after a shipwreck as the setting. As our Dji can’t swim yet, he walks on water.

We drew inspiration from movies, videos, books on the history of pirates. The preparation was very extensive.

So, we have an ocean, a small raft floating amid the wreckage, a pirate dying of thirst (there must have been at least one survivor) and a chest of gold, which is completely useless in the present circumstances.

Here we go!

And here we come.

The first problem. Where should we set the camera? Give us at least one landmark! The only guiding marks that we could use were the sun and objects floating in the water. But while working on the storyboard, we faced another problem – how to create the correct movement of the camera in the shot with Dji running on the water so as not to disorientate the viewers? We changed the shot thousands of times, but finally we chose the variant that worked best for us.