Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be talking about my process when deciding on the narrative of my project. This includes the brainstorms I created, as well as my storyboard animatic. I also talk about my inspiration for my narrative, explaining what movie mainly inspired me and why it inspired me. Lastly, I’ll be listing my personal objectives to complete for the upcoming week.
This Week’s Task:
For this week, my goal was to come up with a narrative for this animation. To help me get into the mood, I intentionally watched at least one horror film each evening if I could, analyzing the scenes, seeing if I could implement certain techniques into my animation. In my opinion, two important factors that make a great scene are the camera angle and movement. I made sure I would include my preferable camera movements in my animation. As I could only create an animation with a max duration of 120 seconds, I had to come up with a narrative that gets straight to the point, making sure the beginning, middle, and end have a good amount of time dedicated to them.
So firstly, I went onto Diagrams.net and created three separate brainstorms, one for each beginning, middle, and end. I made sure I had twelve points on each one, allowing me to divide my animation up evenly.
Narrative Brainstorm:
To summarise my narrative, it’s about a young man in his late teenage years who hears unknown noises coming from the downstairs of his house whilst he’s sleeping. He then decides to roam around the house, figuring out where the noise is coming from. During the story, he sees that his little sister has fallen asleep on the living room’s sofa, and has assumed those noises must have come from her as she was the only person downstairs at the time. However, as he makes his way back upstairs, he begins to hear noises coming from upstairs in his room, causing him to be alert. As he makes it back into his room, he hears weeping from underneath his bed and decides to take look. As he kneels down to look, he sees his little sister again but is scared this time. This has caused him to freak out as he’s curious as to how she even got there; however, she whispers to him “There’s something downstairs that looks like me”. As she says this, the bedroom door slams close and causing the young man to turn around in fear. This is where the animation ends, leaving the audience thinking about what happens next…
Storyboard Animatic:
When creating my storyboard, I browsed through Google for multiple facial expressions as that was one aspect I wanted to focus on. I’ve never animated facial expressions before, and they’re importing when comes to horror films as the characters go through a wild mix of emotions. After gathering a few reference images, I then started my storyboard. I drew my storyboard digitally on Adobe Photoshop, using my graphic tablet. I drew a total of 36 scenes, each one representing each point I made in my brainstorms. Once I finished my drawings, I chose to create an animatic so I could get an overall flow of my animation, seeing if each scene goes well together.
Where my inspiration came from:
Even though I was inspired by many Horror projects, most of my inspiration comes from the Paranormal Activity franchise. I’m not sure why, but there’s something about handheld camera movements that freaks me out. Other than the handheld camera movements, the CCTV footage scenes always spooked me as you would always notice something odd in the scene, attracting my attention.
DISCLAIMER – Only watch the below video if you like Horror films as it contains frightening content. However, it’ll show you the sort of lighting I intend to use in my animation.
Environment Inspiration:
As I now have my narrative set in stone, I used my additional time to browse through Google for inspiration on the interior design of caused houses. I focused a lot on the hallway environment as there’s always some sort of creepy hallway in Horror films, and I wanted to know what factors actually make a creepy hallway.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Search for assets to import into Bedroom & Upstairs hallway environments.
- Model Bedroom & Upstairs hallway environment.
- Texture Environments.