Memoirs: City Street

Childhood Flashback

A Previs composite created for my ongoing pulp series , depicting a pivotal flashback scene from the life of The Shadow Demon, the Chessmaster. As a boy, he walks the city streets flanked by his father and grandfather — two towering, enigmatic figures whose influence would shape everything he would become. Rendered as near-silhouettes, they loom large the way formative memories do: powerful, faceless, and impossible to escape.

Scene: Compositing:

The background was built in Maya and rendered with Arnold, then painted over and composited in After Effects to achieve a stylized anime aesthetic. The goal was to evoke the heightened, dreamlike quality of a childhood memory — warm golden light, a burning sunset sky, and architecture that feels just slightly larger than life.

Characters And Animation:

Characters were illustrated in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, then animated in After Effects. My usual workflow relies on Photoshop and After Effects for 2D animation, I used for this Previs to handle the image sequence for character animation before compositing.