/NOW
02
Debaixo do asfalto
Format
Short film / animation
Role
Writing, direction, production design, sound
Project
Brazilian myths, back in the places that buried them.
A series of short films that bring Brazil’s little-known myths into the present day. In the first, Os Olhos (The Eyes), the heir to a family estate in Mato Grosso tells a state inspector he saw nothing of the fire that burned its protected forest, and then the animals that died in it start turning up whole, with their eyes gone.
Debaixo do asfalto means “beneath the asphalt.” Modern Brazil was poured over very old ground, and each film is a myth coming back up through it. In 'Os Olhos' it’s the Boitatá, the fire serpent of Brazilian legend that ate the eyes of the dead and filled with their light.
Details
The look mixes three materials. The people and animals are painted clay, the land is photographic, and the sky and horizon are a woodcut print in the style of cordel, the folk pamphlets sold in Brazilian markets. The print belongs to the myth: below the horizon the world stays photographic, and carving only appears on things the serpent has touched.
I made the whole film as stills first. Every character, prop and sky has its own set of reference images, so a face or the dusk sky holds from one shot to the next, and every frame was checked for continuity at full resolution and fixed by hand where it drifted. Then the stills were animated one clip at a time, with the video model chosen for each shot. The weak point was the clay: the characters’ painted surface changed from one clip to the next. So the characters are moving into Blender, starting with one pilot shot, where they can move like stop-motion puppets while the camera, smoke and dust stay smooth.
Workflow
Story development, shot lists and prompts: Claude
Stills: GPT Image 2.5, Nano Banana Pro
Video: Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.0, Veo 3.1
Platforms: Higgsfield, Google Flow
Compositing and fixes: Photoshop
Upscaling: Topaz Video
3D: Blender, with Claude Code