We were commissioned by Netflix between 2021 and 2023 to ‘build the world’ and ‘develop the look’ of their soon-to-be-released film ‘Prince of Port Au Prince’. We created a series of artworks that helped win the bid for the initial film commission and continued our collaboration during the film’s pre-production with a series of intense look development workshops, creating hundreds of concepts for the feature. Factory Fifteen director Kibwe Tavares directed the feature, while CCO Paul Nicholls led the lookdev.

We created four key pieces of art to accompany a film treatment pitched to Netflix back in 2021. The vibrant art helped win the bid and alluded to a novel approach to the film look, which was expanded upon in the pre-production.

We started off with an extended research phase, looking into Haiti in the 80’s. Key landmarks, understanding the extent to the French colonization on the architecture, and what it was like to live there. We then filtered this research through the eyes of an optimistic 8-year-old dreamer. We proposed a colourful, bold, painterly look that broke the traditional production mold, painting flat assets and assembling in 3D. The result was a dynamic set of spaces that we’re fully explorable in 3d but maintained a high craft-painted look without laboursome frame-by-frame paintovers.

We built New York with the same technique, painting and designing assets in a raw painterly way. This created an even more interesting friction of defined form with the straight lines of New York architecture as the subject matter. The perspectives we wanted to represent was from a kid who only ever seen New York in postcards, combining Times Square, with Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, and other iconic landmarks, into one fantastically massive view of the city, looking up.

Key to the story is the Port Au Prince graveyard, a home of Vodue spirits and a place of transition for our main character. We continued our painterly workflow, this time using VR to craft a flat brush style 3D tree with Vodue ornamentations.

So much of the story is based in Vodue magic and using music to elevate your surroundings and even transition between realities. Our final area of lookdev was to concept different forms of magic and portals between environments.