Schirkoa is a beautifully crafted 14-minute CG-animated short film that has been making the rounds this year. Set in a dystopian city, the short features “bagheads and other unimportant creatures,” according to India-based writer and director Ishan Shukla, who has been working on the project off-and-on in his spare time since 2010.

Here’s the official synopsis: “In the city of Bagheads, a senate member faces a tough choice between political career, brothels and love for a mysterious woman. A choice that will transform his life and the city in unimaginable ways.”

Check out the film trailer in the player below:

Actual production started in April 2013, and the film started its festival run in July, picking up an Oscar-qualifying win at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival in September. An official selection at numerous festivals including Anima Mundi Brazil, SPARK Animation, KLIK! Amsterdam, the Oaxaca Film Festival and SIGGRAPH Asia, Schirkoa has also won at least 10 awards to date, including from the Los Angeles CineFest, the Sydney International Film Festival, and the TMC London Film Festival.

Funded by Shukla’s personal savings, Schirkoa was created in Autodesk Maya and Adobe CC, and rendered in the exciting GPU renderer Redshift. With still roughly nine months to go on its festival run, Schirkoa will be released on Vimeo in 2017.

In the meantime, Shukla has released a series of WIP videos, which chart the course of the film’s design development and production process:

A selection of behind-the-scenes images is shown below, and you can read more about Shukla’s process in his thread in the AWN Forum.

Source: Ishan Shukla