A movie built by hand and heart
Blood & Clay is a 25-minute animated short – a dark and emotionally charged tale set in the rain-drenched harbor of 1908 Hamburg. Blending handcrafted miniature sets with expressive CGI characters, the film creates a hauntingly tactile world that frames a story of loss, vengeance, and fragile hope.
At the heart of the story is Lizbeth, a legless orphan enslaved by the cruel circus director Kosswick. Night after night, she is forced to repair his monstrous golem – a creature made of enchanted clay. When she discovers the secret of its animation and escapes with the help of the Wolfboy, tragedy strikes. Lizbeth returns, seeking vengeance, and what follows is an escalation of grief, guilt and vengeance.
A Hybrid Artform
Blood & Clay is an independently developed animated film conceived as both a self-contained work and the starting point for a broader story world. Its hybrid approach – combining hand-crafted miniatures with CGI – allows the project to scale into future formats and collaborations.
Blood & Clay combines the analog and the digital. Real, hand-built miniatures – sculpted with care and scanned via photogrammetry – become the stage for CG creatures like the Wolfboy, a tragic werewolf figure; the Harpy, a Chimera and the Golem.
The result is a distinctive aesthetic: somewhere between stop-motion and digital animation – drawing on mythic figures and timeless motifs, but bending them into something intimate, emotional, and resonating.
The artists behind
MARTIN RAHMLOW
Martin is an independent filmmaker with a lifelong background in animation, CGI, and visual development.
ONNI POHL
Onni is the technical animation lead and developer of the QO facial animation system, an innovative tool enabling fast and expressive facial performance.
ALBERT RADL
Albert is a veteran stop-motion filmmaker, set designer and miniature builder.
We are a passionate team of independent artists, locateded all over the globe.
Talents from different continents are contributing their amazing work to Blood&Clay.
If you want to become part of the team, please let us know!
Get on board!
In the epilogue of the short, Lizbeth is called for help by the voice of the Wolfboy — trapped in a ghostly limbo. This is the initial spark for Lizbeth’s story to grow: this time in an animated feature film. Can Lizbeth rescue the Wolfboy from the land of the dead?
In this follow-up story, we leap forward to 1915, where Europe is in the grip of the First World War. Warlocks on both sides of the conflict — a Viennese occultist and a British spiritualist — seek to harness the same magical clay that brought the golem to life. Their goal: raise armies of unstoppable soldiers. Lizbeth, now a fugitive, holds the key. As her past comes back to haunt her — including the resurrected Kosswick and Wolfboy — she must choose between hiding or rising to prevent a supernatural catastrophe.
This extended universe is rich with potential — both visually and narratively. But it all begins with the short film: a concentrated emotional core from which everything else grows.
We envision Blood & Clay as the seed of something bigger: a feature film or mini-series rooted in myth, drama and mystery. The short lays the emotional foundation — future chapters would deepen the world, expand the lore, and follow Lizbeth into the haunted trenches of World War I, where warlocks raise supernatural armies.
We are not aiming solely at the short film festival circuit. With anthology formats on the rise — and streaming platforms showing increasing interest in dark, unconventional stories with strong artistic identities — we believe Blood & Clay could resonate far beyond its runtime.
Whether as a standalone short, a pilot episode, or the a chapter in a anthology, the project stands out through its visual language, emotional gravity, and storytelling ambition.
We’re looking to connect with co-producers, broadcasters, and like-minded creatives who see the potential in this world and want to help shape where it goes next.
Contribute to Blood&Clay
We’re looking for people in the following fields (everything is remote.)
- Pipeline TD: We use Prism as our pipeline tool and render our Maya animations (with Yeti for grooming) in Arnold. We’re about to switch to Unreal Engine. Help us to make this process as smooth and efficient as possible.
- Technical Director: Not a dedicated Pipeline TD but still technically minded? A generalist TD? We’d love to hear from you too.
- Animators: We’re looking for Maya animators, especially those with strong acting skills – people who can bring our characters to life as believable, emotional beings that move the audience’s hearts.
If you’re talent is more action-related? We have some awesome fight-scenes, too. - Unreal (technical) artists: Know your way around Unreal Engine inside and out? Please get in touch! We’re particularly interested in people experienced with:
◦ Rendering: Lumen, Raytracing, MRC.
◦ Shading: The original shading was done for Arnold.
◦ VFX: Our highlights – we’ve got a lovely destruction shot and some real gritty gore effects! A crowd of spectators needs also be taken care of. - Production coordinators: You don’t need Shotgun to stay on track? You’re a natural organizer who loves working with a diverse, international team? You know how to keep everyone motivated while maintaining the right tone? Perfect – that’s exactly what we need. We’re a team of volunteers, so keeping the spirit up and the production flowing is key.