Video of the Day | Kay Hilman’s NOXIOUS

Kay Hilman’s graduate film project Noxious gives us a powerful visual tone poem about how the industrialized human society falls to a new world order: a powerful new force originating from the plant world. This is nature reclaiming the world from humans, taken to its logical and creative extreme.

Obviously heavily influenced by the work of Jean Gerrard (Moebius),Hilman uses Blender to create a world in despair, where the natural world has finally had enough and is aggressively taking the world back from the humans who have given it such poor stewardship. The result is an amazing progression to the reveal of a brand new dominant life form.

The film was created over nearly a year’s hard work and sleepless nights, starting in mid-2023. The film was submitted to film festivals before its release to the public.

Throughout the entirety of the production process, the artist has been teasing the upcoming cinematic, providing regular updates and showcasing glimpses of it with short behind-the-scenes demos. The entire project has been brought to life using Blender, its Geometry Nodes toolset, and Grease Pencil tool, as well as After Effects, which was used for compositing.

From the artist himself, Kay Hilman:

“After sitting on this film for nearly two years, I am incredibly proud to finally share my 2024 HKU graduation film, NOXIOUS.

Creating this short was an intense journey of exploring the boundaries between technical artistry, custom workflows, and cinematic storytelling within Blender. For a long time, the pressure of releasing it held me back, but looking back at what I accomplished, together with help from other artists, in such a short production window, this film deserves to be seen.

A massive thank you to Mikael Umarov for the incredible music and sound design, and to everyone who helped bring this vision to life.