The world of Innistrad harbours many horrors and dangers. Not least, the ravenous werewolves who terrify the young inhabitants of the ‘Heron’s Grace’ orphanage. However we are not entirely sure who is scarier, the monsters beyond the gates or the monstrous Jerren who rules the halls and grounds of the orphanage with little mercy. As the film progresses we feel great sympathy for put-upon orphan Tim who we follow through various trials and tribulations. The film lets the audience ultimately side with the werewolves and embrace the idea of transforming and transcending. 

We worked with Wizards of the Coast on their script development and the translation of script onto screen. Crafting storyboards, animatics and previs to hone the staging, pacing and duration, and to make this mini horror movie pitch perfect. All the characters were performed by actors in motion capture, save the werewolves who were keyframe animated. Particular attention was paid to the facial performances of the characters, which carry a level of nuance which sells their plight and intention. 

Everything in the film was designed and originated by the team at Axis, except the design of Jerren. This is a collaborative process with Wizards of the Coast, to define and refine how the characters in the world of Innistrad are portrayed in bold and striking ways that speak to a wider audience, as well as those already deeply invested in existing Magic: The Gathering lore. Jerren’s character existed as still artwork in card artwork, but needed to be fully brought to life in the film. We made him as loathsome an antagonist as possible, so that the audience would savour his last grisly moments by the end of the film. The score for the film was composed by Gordy Haab and performed with a full orchestra.

The team employed naturally muted cinematic lighting to keep with the gothic theme, the gothic architecture of the orphanage building and overhanging feeling of foreboding of the orchard feed into the gloomy atmosphere of the piece.

The trailer performed incredibly well. They had strong metrics and strong sentiment. For viewership, 19M views, high like-to-dislike ratio, it also hit YouTubes trending page and spawned memes within gaming communities with people making bespoke reaction videos to the trailer.  It had press pick-up from major publications and it increased product sentiment among fans. Anecdotally, we got 100’s of comments pouring in about how they wished they would have an entire series of this trailer or it was the only ad they’ve actually watched.