In the video for Mishkin’s A Good Day To Die, the Grim Reaper goes about his business on the orders of the grumpy Butter God – and then loses it completely and decides to get rid of anyone he doesn’t care for – which is pretty much everybody…

This eyewateringly violent yet highly enjoyable epic of destruction and mayhem is the work of just two people – director Ben Daure and illustrator and co-director Tom Box. And it took them eight months, working mostly in After Effects and Photoshop, to make it – that’s working virtually every night after their day jobs.

When you see it, you’ll be surprised it didn’t take them longer…

Mishkin
A Good Day To Die
Director: Ben Daure
Illustrator & Collaborative Director — Tom Box
Editor & VFX: Ben Daure
Prod co: Grape Productions

Ben Daure on making the video for Mishkin’s A Good Day To Die

“What started out as a simple idea quickly turned into the single most colossal project we had ever taken on. Many of the shots were scaled up and up during the original draft, and for the majority we had absolutely no idea how to achieve the look we wanted. It was only through completing the first half of the animation that we realised how to achieve what we didn’t think was possible.

“About halfway through I had to switch to a more powerful computer (when the 3D stuff starts to crop in) as one of the shots was going to take three days to render – and then a later shot was going to take 10 days!

“This is because the whole thing was build within After Effects, which probably wasn’t really meant for this type for video. So when 900 stupidly high resolution 3D buildings are in one scene before the actual build everything tends to die a bit.

“It was done on both a Mac and a PC but I had to switch to the Mac as the computer simply didn’t have enough ram and couldn’t handle it. Any fan boys of Apple out there who are all smug now can go to hell because the Mac crashed about 400% more than the PC and had infinitely more problems, even though it was three times as powerful. Fuck Apple!”