Zombies Flirting

The idea came to me while watching a scene from Brooklyn 99, where Detective Jake Peralta has a rather unconventional romantic interaction with a forensic doctor. I thought it would be fun to repurpose the audio and completely change the context to animate these zombies in a quirky and entertaining situation.

To iterate quickly, I recorded several video references to explore different ideas and define the acting choices for each character before starting the animation.

I used a pose-to-pose workflow in Maya, focusing on making the key poses clear and expressive before moving on to the breakdowns.

I refined many poses to exaggerate the acting decisions and ensure the movements flowed in appealing arcs while balancing erratic zombie gestures with more humanized ones as the characters interacted.

Working on this shot under the supervision of such an experienced animator as Greg Whittaker (The Wild Robot, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, among others) was a true pleasure for me.

To zombify the characters, I damaged their clothing in Maya and painted textures in Substance 3D Painter, adding scratches, bite marks, and other details to make them look authentic.

The environment evolved from a spooky forest to a post-apocalyptic world, which I built using Kitbash3D assets.

Lighting was key to setting the atmosphere. Inspired by a shot from Hotel Transylvania, I used a bluish palette to create a sense of mystery, with moonlight as the primary source and a warm off-camera light to guide the narrative. Fill lights prevented any areas from being too dark, rim lights emphasized the silhouettes and a volumetric fog shader added depth and separated the planes of the scene.

Finally, I brought everything together and worked on the composition in Nuke.

I added an expression to control the flickering of the lights, which added dynamism to the scene and applied color corrections to balance the cold tones of the environment with the warm accents that guide the viewer’s attention to the characters.

I layered fog to enhance the depth and separation between planes and finalized the scene with details like motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, a subtle vignette, and some grain to add texture and cohesion to the final composition.