Author: Layton

First, I focused on a moodboard to show overall feeling and colour. I gravitated toward a green palette, as I like how ti looks when it’s dark, as opposed to a dark blue or neutral-black. I liked the look of dim light sources coupled with green, constricting walls. Constricting corridors are a staple of horror games, which is where i draw a lot of inspiration from.

Next, I ‘zoomed’ in and looked at primarlily photos of corridors and the horror games I wanted to take inspiration from (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Alan Wake 2). I wish I had worked out how to add a touch of bright red, as the contrast between red and green has a nice effect. I decided to go for a sewer-type of background, somewhere without doors or windows, to lean into the claustrophobic feeling.

Though I really enjoy the atmosphere of the Resident Evil corridor, I preferred the green lighting of the Alan Wake game, as it gave everything a sickly, unnatrual feel. Alan Wake 2 also deals with feelings of isolation and being on the fringes of society, while Resident Evil focused more on danger, which I wasn’t really looking for. The Resident Evil screenshot shoes the classic over the shoulder shot used in games thta I used as inspiration in my first scene.

I decided to move away from images and games and look at tv. I decided to focus on the episode ‘ Time Heist’ of Doctor Who, as the premise of the episode deals with being trapped, and had a lot of dramatic lighting moments. While the corridor is wider than the one I was going for, I paid attention to the colourful lighting used in the episode. I also used the overhead lighting as inspiration for the two light strips in my 3D background.

I decided to make my background in 3D, as you can import the camera tracking directly into the program instead of setting it up in Nuke. I decided this was better for my workflow, and gave me more control over the customisation of the enviornment. I opted to look at tutorials about corridors and made three versions of the scene with various walls removed, so I could import them into Nuke depending on what was needed. The corridor used in the tracking shot has it’s wall removed.

The second background is a cropped version of the first

Sound Clip Transcript:

XSheet

Analysis:
The words we chose were: star, electrify, fall, devour, and pity. We decided to take ‘fall’ as a fall of pride, such as in the phrase ‘pride comes before a fall’. From that we had the idea that the main character (Leora) would be quite arrogant, attempting to catch a star for their cape only for it to ‘devour’ them in a myriad of colours. We took the word ‘pity’ to signify the interpretation that the events of the movie are quite unfortunate- As Leora disappears after the star engulfs them. However this could also be interpreted as Leora themselves becoming one of the stars they desired so much. We left the story vague (but not too vague) so it could apply to a lot of different interpretations, but aimed to make the tone bittersweet either way.

Process:
My role was to do the timings for the animation, the lineart, and the editing. For the timings I used ToonBoom Harmony. I decided to do the project in 24fps as not only is that the standard for animation, but also to allow for more smooth movements when animating on ones. Usually I animate at 12fps so this was something new for me. I realised that when moment happened fast, having a clear idea and path for the movement was more important than small details and logistics. For example in the second last scene where the hair was flowing I focused more on the movement being exaggerated and clear, rather than focusing on how consistent small strands of hair were throughout the scene, as it went by rather quickly and an audience would be focusing on the bigger picture rather than the smaller details, something that is easy to forget when watching an animation loop back numerous times.

I also focused on that with the second part of the last explosion. The ‘sparks’ are meant to fly wildly, and I realised that focusing too much on the in-betweens ‘making sense’ rather than the effect of the overall movement made the sparks look underwhelming and less chaotic, which was the opposite of the effect we wanted. I went over and redid the frames and focused less on the in-betweens and more of the overall effect of the movement in order to achieve the animation shown in the short film. I let the frames last shorter than they did for the first explosion to show that this one went by faster and was more powerful and hard to follow.

The lineart was straightforward however I have some regrets. If we had more time I would have maybe liked to be more experimental with the lineart, as I used a brush with no pressure (mimicking the adobe animate pencil tool, which was the animation program I used before) for simplicity. I would have liked to take more advantage of the bitmap properties that ToonBoom has. A problem we encountered was that ToonBoom would not export the lineart as transparent (as the colouring was done on Procreate) so the lineart had to be exported on a white background which was then deleted by putting it on a multiply layer, though this made it longer to colour. A problem I had was following the reference/turnaround accurately, meaning that I had to do a few corrections and redo a few frames so that they could look their best for the final product and to ensure that I was on model.

I had some trouble initially with the explosion animation however this was solved by watching and analysing many other animations with explosions and sfx. I wanted it to look exaggerated like the ones I analysed. Maybe the next time I will use more glow and effect layers to really emphasise the explosion so it looks closer to the examples that I liked.

I kept the editing minimal, adding some glow to the shooting stars and a few subtle zooms/pans. If we had more time I would have liked to add some sound effects to the stars falling, though the simple music was well received I think some subtle sparkle sound effects would have helped and not have been too distracting from the narrative. I would have also liked to make the final scene match more the style of the animation and be neater however I would keep the fading effect the same. I would have liked to push myself more on the composition as well and maybe have added some animation (such as a line boil or the fluttering of their ribbon.)