We've started our work from the poster design and the style development. We focused on two characters - the Freak and the Coin itself. Showing those two "oddities" in one image was the main idea, merging them - a challenge. To avoid a creepy photomanipulation look we made a step into painting techniques and making everything more unified. A handcrafted brush strokes and painting-like lightning create an odd image that viewers see different before and after watching the movie. 

Poster:

Later on, we crafted the animation - the idea was simple - to make a nice film ending and connecting live action with painted poster style. The way we could handle this was 3d NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering) techniques combined with hand - frame by frame - painting. We generated 3d animation with lightning similar to old fashion paintings, crazy lens and oil-paint colours. The strokes were mostly 3d planes - with texture of real strokes. Size, colour and angle - were connected to a few attributes such as the camera distance, the angle between objects and the bird, the amount of sun on the surfaces and many, many more. We developed a semi-random function to make everything look disordered. However, we had to overpaint parts of the image - to avoid the procedural look. 

Animation still frames: