Remaking Midnight Mass - Monsignor Pruitt

I honestly started off wanting to make a quick character likeness sculpt of Monsignor Pruitt to paint over for a Midnight Mass painting. That said, I'm not surprised that it quickly blew up into a way grander scope that you see here with a full animation across multiple scenes; because I can't help myself.

With every milestone reached, I got more interested in pushing things further. More fine details sculpted in Zbrush led to wanting a killer costume using Marvelous Designer. Achieving some nice texture results in Substance Painter made me want to push fur/hair sim to round out surfacing accuracy in Blender. When Pruitt looked good in rest pose, I wanted to rig and pose the character. Honestly, it could have just stopped there with the character looking nice and emotive, sitting dramatically in that folding chair. That's not what happened though.

I got so inspired from the first pose that I storyboarded out a full sequence with more shots across different scenes. So then I built those new sets out and lit them, adding effects like candle flame flickering, and moving tree shadows just outside the windows of the church that now existed. New, blood-soaked materials had to be made for Pruitt to match the newly assembled kitchen as well.

In for a penny, so I rendered everything out in Blender, putting everything together in DaVinci Resolve. Immediately, I though why not also produce the sound? With sound in place, why not learn to make music and add that too? A few nights later and I think I had what you see here. If you're still here with me; you probably understand my process of sticking through with things... because you just can't help it. Got to see things through to the end.