The Sandman

A Dream Of A Thousand Cats | Making Of

“We worked closely with director Hisko Hulsing to get the right level of detail in the cats’ fur, eyes and facial features. As all our renders would be treated in a painterly way by the team at Submarine, the goal for us was to create the photo-real domestic cats from the comic, but then stylise the assets for optimised rotoscoping. We opted for a style of animation that didn’t break the rules of what real cats would or could do, for a more serious and gritty tone from the original comic. We collected and studied hours of domestic cat footage to achieve a performance quality that suited that tone, often going down YouTube rabbit holes!

It’s been incredible to see the response to this sequence, cat owners have been saying that their cats have been glued to the screen whilst the performances play out, so we must have done something right!”

Tim Van Hussen, Animation Supervisor.