Animation Review: Dark Noir

Dark Noir

Dark Noir, a co-created animated short film by Rafael Grampá, Absolut and Facebook fans worldwide.
The ambitious challenge invited people around the world to unleash their imaginations and transform their ideas into an animated film. During a live interactive three-week period, on Facebook/Absolut, Grampá encouraged consumers to take part and influence the action and storyline as he wrote it. To help him transform his 2D characters and script into 3D, Grampá teamed up with Red Knuckles animation studio.

Grampá, Rick Thiele and Mario Ucci and their team of animators then transformed the crowd-sourced suggestions into an animated short film which premiered at MADE Berlin March 2014.

The animation starts of like that of it's namesake, like a Noir film. Vincent Black, the protagonist tells the viewer his world's setting in a chiaroscuro lighting that is a film noir characteristic. His job is also a Private Investigator, a job that was relegated to the anti-hero of film noir films. The story's plot begin with an investigation that leads to the middle man and ultimately, the femme fatale which also happens to be the antagonist. Ultimately the case is solved in a nice plot twist that makes it the man who asked for his help is revealed to be the father and the femme fatale was his mother. 

An interesting thing that I found was that the animation used both 3D animation in conjunction with 2D animation.The 3D animatuon was what everyone in the world saw with the 2D as the inhabitants of the 'Daemon' world where the few can see nicely bringing in the two animations in a way that fitted the story and the set-up.