At the start of the project, I’ve partnered up with Andrew and then we’ve picked out five different words from the word cloud that was provided. My words were egg, measles, prayer, ask and poison. Basing off those words, it didn’t give me an ideas that I can make out of the words. However, Andrew’s words had a lot more creativity to work around. His words were devour, evil, prayer, blanket and shadow.
From Andrew’s words, we agree that he has the better group of words and his story concept for our film seemed to prove the idea further. The plot goes with a guy watching TV in his flat when all of a sudden, a power cut happens. Looking up at the ceiling lamp, he notices a wet circle. A drop of blood falls down to transform into a creature. As the guy was shocked, the creature walks out of the flat and walks upstairs to the flat above.
This was the concept we’ve narrowed down his idea too. Originally, it was going to provide a lot more context to the flat that the guy was staying in and having another character being the girlfriend walking out of the flat before the film starts. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fit it these details as we need to have the film sticking around the 20 second mark.
After discussing the idea, we went to work on conceptualising the film. I got to work on the storyboarding whilst Andrew worked on designing the monster. To help fit the 20 second length of the animation, I made sure the storyboard had at least 6 different scenes to base our film.
As an early concept of how the film narrative should go, both me and Andrew were happy with how the storyboard came out. We then given each other roles on who should handle which asset of the animation. My roles were to produce the backgrounds of the animation, the sound design and animating the first half of the film whilst Andrew handled the monster and character design as well as animating the second half of the film.
After a week of us organising and planning our film, we were soon faced problems with personal situations in our lives which affected our motivation to continue working on our film during the Christmas break. Despite us going through our own personal difficulties, when we both spoke to each other through messaging, we knew that this idea of ours had a lot of creative potential to explore and improve upon once we start work on it again when we feel ready to.
As a start to get my motivation back, I’ve begun to draw up the backgrounds for our film in my sketchbook. I did 4 different backgrounds and angles. A front view of the sofa where our character would be sitting with a table next to it (on the table is a picture frame depicting a photo of the guy and his girlfriend as to pay tribute to one of the ideas we couldn’t fit in due to the time limit of the animation), the ceiling with the lamp and circle, a top view of the sofa and a first person perspective view of the guy watching his TV and seeing the creature from his perspective. Creating these backgrounds, the latter was an extra scene that we decided to include as we wanted to show the creature from the front. Andrew also handled this scene in particular as well.
Importing the sketches of backgrounds into Photoshop, I’ve gave everything a black/grey/white colour palette, which is what this animation would mostly be depicted in. Outside of a few details like the circle and the creature which Andrew recommended for those stand out by having a different colour from everything else like red.
Before I got to work on my side of the animation, I wanted to practise the art direction of the animation so my side could flow through into Andrew’s. Since this animation would be in his art preference, I’ve sketched out my attempts of drawing the guy in Andrew’s style. I drew his body, eyes, legs and arms shapes.
Moving on to the animating, when the power goes out, we created a layer, used the paint bucket tool to paint the screen black, and then change the opacity settings to have it as the viewer can still see what’s going on in the animation. The animated blood drop on my side was done in a video layer, a layer in Photoshop’s timeline feature that has each frame done in 1s, allowing me to create a straight ahead animation, which I’ve adjusted to fit with Andrew’s half of the film where he has animated in Toon Boom.
The other inclusion to this animation was sound design which we had to create our own sound as apposed to sounds that can be found on sites such as freesound.com. I had Andrew to assist me in recording the sound effects for the creature’s movement, most of the other sounds I’ve recorded from home such as the TV background noise, the light switching off and blood drop being preformed by me. The funniest experience when it comes to process was when I had to record the sound effect of a splash, it requires a bar of soup and a sink full of water. It was the hardest sound to record as well as I wanted to get the sound exactly right. The only drawback from this was having to clean the water on the floor afterwards. Later on, I’ve imported the sound into Audition where I’ve changed the pitch and stretch as well as cutting down the sound to have it played much more sooner.
The film was edited and complied in After Effects. An extra last addition we made to the film was a grain effect over the film to give a horror film vibe which fits the tone perfectly.
Below is the finished film.
From this collaborative experience, we really enjoyed producing this film through its concept and production. We still would agree that if we were allowed 10 -15 seconds more to our film, it’ll allow us to explore further into the details we originally wanted to include from the beginning of the conceptualisation of this film. Overall and despite the difficulties we have faced, me and Andrew are happy with the film’s outcome and presentation.