Hurikán, which won the Audience Award at Annecy, is among the most audacious shorts on the Oscar shortlist. Adapted from a comic book character with a pig’s head by Czech filmmaker Jan Saska, the black-and-white, hand-drawn short offers a wild, noirish romp through Prague’s urban Žižkov district. It’s about an alcoholic who tries to save his favorite beer stand to impress the sultry barmaid. He puts up with crooks and cops and an assortment of other lowlifes in a violent and absurd series of mishaps.

Why a pig’s head? “The first comic was made during a workshop, and I was quite in a hurry because it was one week and I didn’t have a story,” said Saska. “I started building the story concept from the environment of beer kiosks and fast foods because I was fresh from working on a construction site as a summer job. I fell in love with the aesthetic and I wanted  to put in a character that would blend in, and I came up with the idea of putting a big head on him, and it was a rather intuitive choice like a visual shortcut. Not very deep, but it turned out well, and I wanted to build my short around this character.”

Saska was inspired by Japanese animation of the ’80s and ’90s, but also tapped into noir, which not only fit the gritty environment but also allowed for striking visuals, such as flickering police car lights casting strange shadows at night when chasing the protagonist.

But it all started with a mysterious beer shortage in the city. “We realized during the writing of the script that the beer is some kind of gasoline needed for the wheels of the story to start moving, so it was fun.We attended a story lab under the mentoring of Mike Cachuela, a storyboard artist from Pixar, and we learned about the three-act structure with 15 concrete milestones and that became the template for our story. He becomes an accidental hero, who wants to save the town, and addiction is his character flaw.”

In terms of the production, Saska had a core team of five (with lots of additional help) and strove for a realistic style of animation. But because he had a problem with spatial imagination, he relied on digital assistance. That’s where 3D tools came in for maintaining the right volumes and perspectives.

“We started with storyboard and we shot video reference and then did 3D blocking as a starting point, with three or five poses,” he explained. “This was imported in TVPaint. That was basically our workflow. We also wanted to leave enough space for 2D animators. There was one point when we’d turn off the 3D references on purpose not to be distracted by the 3D anymore, to open our mind for 2D animation from this point on.”

The begnning of the short, meanwhile, is noteworthy for its freeze on a shot from the climax as the camera does a 360 around the characters. “I was a bit afraid about these moments in advance if I would be able to execute them right, especially when there is a cut,” Saska said. “You start taking a breath in one shot and then you continue through another shot, and usually it means that each of those shots is made by someone else. So to keep the energy consistent across the editing process, it was a bit challenging. At the same time, I realized that those moments when we managed to express emotion was always a challenge because I was aiming for low-key acting with some level of exaggeration.”