Hospital Room

Considering different aesthetics for the hospital room set:



The lighting is defiantly going to be what sets the mood in the final film, cold, dark and eerie.

My character is humanoid but not human, meaning that the 'real' world in the film is not necessarily the same as our own so there could be a lot of experimentation in the environment. Still, being that this is the only location of its kind I think a traditional approach would work best to draw a distinction between the two realities and make the shift to alternate world more impacting.

Got a few more bits still to make but I think it's coming along quite nicely:

The bed was kind of tricky to design, I wanted there to be a bare skeletal kind of look to it. The framing is actually an old TV aerial, the head and foot boards drawer handles and the springs a fish net glove.

Plot Development (Finally)

Been doing a lot of design stuff lately and it's starting to feel a little aimless. I've really just needed to get actual story down to a concrete form to keep a sense of direction. I'm still not 100% happy with all of this, I like the start but the ending feels a little lackluster at the moment.

Beat Script

-Character lies alone in hospital room. There are dead flowers at their bed side table.

-Darkness begins seeping through the walls, tentacles engulf the scene until they wrap around the bed, dragging the protagonist into blackness where darkness tears out their soul.

-Character awakes to find themselves in a strange landscape covered in giant black thorn like plants which wrap around themselves over and over. Feeling the emptiness inside themselves they begin to wander through this new world.

-Eventually the character comes across a set of footprints which they begin to follow.

-In a clearing stands another creature, similar to themselves with their back turned. As the protagonist approaches, this creature turns around, revealing that it is in fact faceless. It points up a hill to a nearby well.

-The main character approaches the well, looking into their own reflection to see a bright light and he voices of spirits callng out. The protagonist climbs in.

-Underwater, they swim to the surface finding themselves at the edge of a long river with mist rising from the water. They climb aboard a nearby raft and begin paddling.

-Eventually they come to a cove with a chest. Opening the chest releases the soul which is now reunited with the protagonist.

-The darkness doesn't take kindly to this defiance and purses the fleeing character.

-The sound of static, a beating heart and screams are set to a rapid montage interspersed by the protagonist being torn apart. This sequence comes to a sudden end, returning to the hospital room where all that is shown are the flowers at the bed side table which are no longer dead, but now fully alive.

Storyboards

These are some storyboards I drew up, they are quite rough and were more intended as a way for me to sort out my ideas than to act as a comprehensive guide to how it's all going to be shot.

The ending hasn't been drawn up yet but will be added soon. Just thinking of the best way to do it.

A New Character

I started working on a new character, this one is slightly smaller than the last one which will make set construction easier and users thinner wire which should make movement a lot smoother. Also experimenting with different kinds of heads, despite my fascinations with the Kuleshov Effect, I have to say that facial features seem to express a lot more emotion. I suppose the same philosophy can still be applied but it might require a bit more effort in terms of animation.

Overall this is very similar to the last character, just refined in structure and design. (Also looks less alien like than the old one which is something I wasn't really going for anyway.)

Plant Life

I've been thinking about what he 'other' world in the film should look like and the first thing that has come to mind is the foliage and plant life. This is because such features can be highly defining and be used to create a sense of fantasy which is believable in the context of the films environment as well as being fairly straight forward to construct.

A visual theme present in a lot of my art is the Burtonesque type of structures, a motif I would like to carry forward into this animation. The main consideration which has to be made is the transition into 3d space, for inspiration on this aspect I looked to the New Zealand native fern which bears a similar resemblance.

A fern and a drawing demonstrating the intended style of the other world's 'trees'

So far attempts at this recreation have been highly successful. I've been using the same method as I employed for my character with the use of masked wire covered in clay to make a bendable and stable model. So far I've made several of these but in the actual film I plan to make use of green screening to impose multiple layers over the top of one another which would give the illusion of depth as well as allowing the layout of the landscape to be manipulated in post production for fullest effect.

A similar style will be used on the 'darkness' throughout the film with this sort of structure being anthropomorphised into a bodiless tentacle of expressionless, yet harmfully obvious intent against the protagonist.

Creating The Character

Today I made my first prototype of a character based upon my earlier concepts. I used 16G galvanised wire for the body and 18G for the arms and fingers. This is thicker than I found a lot of people have recommended but works fine in this situation as it meant I didn't have to twist it around itself.

Epoxy was used to join the different sections of wire with modeling clay to flesh out the skin (quite conveniently both of these are a very similar colour). Masking tape was wrapped around the raw wire to add muscle and stop the clay being cut through. I looked into using foam to achieve this same effect but for the size and structure of my armature the tape by itself seems to work fine.

The head at the moment is just a clay ball, I'm still thinking of a way to do a sewn shut mouth like in my concepts.

I'm pretty pleased with this result especially as a first attempt. As far as actually animating this character is concerned, I think the fingers would benefit from thinner wire and perhaps longer legs would work better proportionally. The next step will be do add finer details and clothing along with a way to tie it down to the set.

The Kuleshov Effect

While reading an essay I came across an interesting reference to a Russian film maker named Lev Kuleshov who became known for his experimentation with montage and editing.

The Kuleshov Effect refers to a form editing where one picture or sequence would be played multiple times throughout the film with the images in between changing. This creates the illusion that the unchanged image is actually different each time as the audiences perceives it to be different by the affect of what came before.

This is something which interests me as far as the effect itself is concerned as well as the possible implications it could have for my film.

Something I have previously toyed with is the idea of faceless people or creatures. In the context of animation this idea could be highly useful in that if a character had no face, could they still express emotion? A lack of or possibly a minimised amount of facial features would bring the focus to the characters gesture and body language, strengthening an overall sense of kinesthesis and being that my film revolves entirely around a single protagonist, the viewers connection to this character is of great importance to making the film engaging.

Additionally the short film L'Homme Sans Tete comes to mind.

Some Conceptual Stuff

The conceptual aspects of this project will be discussed in full in an essay which will accompany the final film. It is however, highly useful to consider some of these elements at this stage in order to solidify my ideas as well as inject this thought process throughout the development.

Fantasy and escapism are central themes of my film in terms of the plot as well as the very medium of the project creating an on screen reality in itself. Films such as Corpse Bride (2005) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006) are examples which both include alternate worlds. What I like about both of these is the fact that as well as being part of the stories, the other worlds also hold visual and thematic significance.

There is a particularly good essay on the subject which talks a lot about the psychology behind escapism. Even though the character isn't necessarily human, I feel like it is important for them to display human traits and emotions in order to allow the audience to connect with them. The reason for this is that relation to the character will result in a deeper immersion that will allowing the animated space to become a perceived reality of its own.

Of concepts relating directly to animation, two which will play a significant role in my film will be metamorphosis and kinesthesis. Metamorphosis is a central element to the plot since there are many occasions where the environment morphs in different ways while the use of kinesthesis is something I want to keep in mind during the animating of the film to maximise believability and fluidity with the intended effect of an increased engagement with the viewer.

Character Design

I've begun designing my main character, everything is still in the very early stages of development but a few things have been worked out already.

I decided to make him bald, since he is in hospital it defiantly makes him look more sickly and slightly more disturbing. There is also a practicality in that I won't have to worry about animating hair. For the face I don't know what I want to do just yet but the bug-eyed approach has been working quite well so far. Perhaps a completely blank face could also be an interesting possibility...

I like the idea of a 3 fingered claw type approach to the hands. This would be more feasible to animate than a human type configuration as well as providing a more fantastical and unique physicality to the character which is mirrored in the bird like feet.

A lot of these ideas are stemming from my own art which I have done over the years.

Being that the character is meant to be on the edge of death, its deign is intended to look somewhat disturbed and fragile. This aesthetic is also heavily influenced by other artists such as Adam Jones, the guitarist of Tool who also directs a lot of their music videos (who in turn bases many of his ideas of off the Quay Brothers).

Characters from the music videos for Parabola and Schism

Coincidentally I'm also seeing a resemblance to the 1997 Playstation game, Abe's Oddysee.


'Abe' from Abe's Oddysee

Overall, I quite like the style which I've been developing both for the aesthetic value as well as that these designs should be quite easy to create a physical armature from (more on this later).

Transitioning Worlds

The change from 'real' to surreal worlds offers a chance to explore transition throughout animated space. I want to do something more than a basic fade or cut which would be a change far to sudden as well as entirely missing the opportunity to experiment with a sequence with so much potential.

#1 The Room collapses around the bed into darkness, falling away in every direction through a seemingly endless void until the bed itself lands in the new world.

A possible way of doing this could be from an overhead view where as the scene subsides, the camera dolly zooms into the patient lying on the bed. The intended effect of this would be do create a sense of kinesthesia to convey a heightened sensation of falling as well as being an effective way of forerunning the other worldly surrealism to come.

#2 Blackness seeps into the room, through the walls and floor, dripping from the roof, it moves and spreads as if it has a consciousness of its own. Eventually it works its way up the bed enveloping everything until it spreads over the patient.

The think I like about this idea is that the blackness could very be much anthropomorphised in its movements. A tentacle or snake like motion would be an effective approach to this idea. It would be as if the darkness were pulling and manipulating the protagonist away into the other world. This kind of movement would also help form a nightmarish atmosphere and is different than the other ideas in that there is a clearly visible force acting upon the patient against their will where as the other concepts are far more passive.

#3 The room morphs into a new environment, objects change into the new landscape as a gradual progress until the patient finds themselves sitting up in their bed surrounded by a completely different world. The new world would very much grow out of the old one in a Where The Wild Things Are type fashion.

#4 The room itself implodes. Walls close in pushing furniture and objects aside as everything gets crushed into a nothingness out of which the protagonist would likely fall through into empty space.

Influences/ existing media to investigate further:

-The ‘darkness’ in the video games: Shadow Of The Colossus, Ico and Kingdom Hearts.




-Samurai Jack, the intro sequence as he gets sent into another dimension



-Limitless, zooming cinematography in opening credits