THE STORY

Count Your Blessings is a CG animated short comedy about a tiny grim reaper fulfilling his task of executing targets on his ever-growing kill list. The task seems simple enough until one target, Joe, earns the blessing of an Angel much to Reaper's surprise. Angel, assigned to protect Joe for the duration of the blessing, taunts Reaper as he follows Joe down the street. 

Unimpressed and slightly annoyed, Reaper presses his magical death button despite Angel’s presence. What follows is an increasingly chaotic flurry of assassination attempts and miracle saves. The duo becomes more and more focused on beating each other rather than the target Joe, who wanders away on his own. In the midst of the pandemonium, Reaper tosses his button at Angel in an act of frustration, activating the Death button. Angel, too focused on Reaper to pay attention to Joe, does not realize the speeding car coming straight for Joe. The story ends as the duo stare dumbfounded at a perished Joe, whose soul quietly floats into the sky. Angel is sent back to heaven, and Reaper gleefully crosses another victim off the list.

Count Your Blessings is a short comedy covering the topic of inevitable death in a fun and lighthearted way, while paying homage to the slapstick comedy style like Tom and Jerry. We aimed for an art style similar to the movie Into the Spiderverse and the Netflix series Arcane, emulating a hand painted art style in the 3D medium. All of our textures from environment to characters are 100 percent hand drawn, and we have gone to great lengths of trial and error in look development to create a style we are satisfied with. The environments feature over 20 unique building models along with streets and other assets, all of which is textured in a painterly style using hand drawn texture grunges projected on top. This project has been a labor of love since the idea was first conceived in Fall 2021, and the team has worked hard the past half year to make it come to life.

One goal we all had going into this project was that we truly wanted to make people laugh or make our audience smile through a humorous story. Animation is so unique in the way that strong messages and emotions are presented in visual storytelling and we wanted to focus on creating the feelings that many animated tv shows and movies gave us in our childhood- joy.