Week One:
Things To Consider:
Intro:
Project Name: Scary Hallway (WIP)
What is it: An eerie hallway inside an abandoned building.
Narrative:
Story: A person trapped inside a building trying to escape through a possible exit down a scary hallway.
Theme:
Pinterest Board: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/maldonadoiii/fmp-moodboard/
A haunted place, where the floorboards creep, the walls whisper to you, the wallpaper decays and there’s a feeling that someone is near you, ready to pounce. (Inspiration, Resident Evil VII, Silent Hills P.T, The Nun, Insidious)
Mechanic:
First-person adventure (we see through the character’s eyes – we are the camera).
The main focus would be the props and interaction with the environment that creates an ambiance that can immerse the viewer, feeling as if they’re a part of the adventure.
Moving objects, sound design, and invisible characters are key to the animation.
What’s Next:
Building a temp scene that can make the idea into something more realistic, allowing us to work upon the scene adding horror. Bringing the narrative to life through props, camera and lighting will be the primary part after building upon research and analysis into environmental design and character.
Video References:
Week Two:
- Upon graduation, I would like to focus on either environmental design, character design, or 3D cinematography & composition.
- I will need to attain directing skills to understand screen composition for cinematography, as well as explore the notion of human movement in its primitive and detailed forms.
- I would like to showcase my FMP as a cinematic film, as I would like to get into either digital film or game cinematics as an industry.
- It would be greatly important to connect the thesis to my practical work as it would show I have strong rooted fundamentals of how screenplay works in general. It would also help show that I understand the choices I make as a film creator, allowing my animation and thesis to support each other for evidence.
- My thesis research would like to be closely related to my practical element, as I would like a piece of work that could be comparable in a visual as well as written form, explaining itself through its own work.
Week Three:
Starting the animation project
After identifying I wanted some form of hallway-related project and experience, I focused primarily on the Silent Hills P.T Hallway. Because the video game no longer exists, it’s quite hard to open the game and take screenshots myself, so I had to find existing gameplay to screenshot from.
The hallway in the game is a simple design and would be easy to replicate as it is just a few rectangles that have been modified.
However, the details such as picture frames, light reflection, the damaged wallpapers, and the litter along the floor are what help sell the hallway as eerie.
The experience of the Silent Hills P.T game is all in first-person to help that emersion, so I wanted to imitate this feeling also being in first-person. However, when we play a game in first-person, we have full control, which is that added sense of realism, but when watching an animation, we have no control of anything.
I started to do some “research” by watching these three films to see how I can slowly become immersed in these unique genres of film. I learned that a lot of the time characters would talk to the cameraman who would usually either not reply verbally or minimally, so it feels as if it is the audience that they are talking to directly, as well as sound dynamics.
There were a lot more things that I picked up from watching these films, but those were the two points I wanted to focus on since I didn’t have much time and it was a short animation needed.
Week Four:
The Backrooms
The Backrooms is an urban legend, myth, and creepypasta that eventually became a video game. The legend was describing an endless maze of office rooms, with the smell of wet carpets, a monochromatic tone of yellow, and that office fluorescent light buzzing you would hear at a desk. A simple thing like an endless office somehow became quite scary, and it’s another example of how first-person direction can easily help set the tone of the animations.
I especially enjoy the simplicity in design and also the grainy imagery which heightens the depth of the experience foretold.
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I am starting off by using an image plane to re-create the P.T hallway so that it’s almost an identical match and can help identify the dimensions needed to ensure that everything is realistic and accurate.
Week Five:
Lighting
Now that I had a quick rough creation of the infamous P.T Hallway, I wanted to work with lighting, as that was going to be the key development of the entire scene. I was unsure what kind of lighting to go far with; Dark, hazy, or bright, as there are so many approaches to this project.
I decided to experiment and play with a few of these ideas and created some sample lighting that I could save for whichever I decided to go with later.
I enjoyed playing with lighting, as it was a fun way to see the simple environment I created turn into something more than I expected. I even began adding textures to the walls and floor to help make the scene more realistic.
However, I came to the conclusion I didn’t like the hallway being as realistic as P.T and I wanted it to have its own personality and character. So I took the experience of the Backrooms’ simplicity of basic colors and decided to remove the wallpapers and wood texture and instead add a grey matt shader.
I did come into the problem that brighter colors such as a grey washed out white would reflect a lot more, even if the roughness was set to a higher amount, so I had a choice to either change my colors/texture or work with the reflective walls to help create a new dynamic.
With this in mind, I began extending the hallway in preparation for my animation and also so that the light had more walls to bounce off of. This would be the final block-out of my hallway and hopefully, the last my lighting needed, which meant the rest of my work can now be towards animation.
Week Six:
I decided to add a fully loopable hallway by duplicating the hallway so that it aligns perfectly with one another. I don’t think I’d have time to create an animation that could fully utilize this, but I wanted to add this in preparation for any future ideas or changes so that the scene would be ready-made.
I took a body mechanics dummy rig from:
https://anim-matt.gumroad.com/l/hcAMR
I didn’t want to waste time looking for detailed scary rigs, so I wanted to find a quick placeholder for this animation, where I could swap it out with something more advanced over time.
It would help me develop scale, and provide useful timings in the meantime for this animation.
Furthermore, because I wanted this to be a first-person effect, I decided to alter it slightly taking inspiration from The Blair Witch Project and Chronicles, where I would make the camera a video camera from some sort of handheld device, like a phone, which meant changing the resolution and screen-size to match that of a phone – or similar.
Week Seven:
I began animating the walking animation. Although, I do not have a character so animating the camera should be a lot easier, as all you have to worry about are moving the X, Y, and Z axial positions. Even though this is a lot easier, what I could have done was create two “steps”, then an infinite loop cycle of the animation as the camera slides forward. But this created a weird robotic feeling to it and didn’t have any natural movement.
Human movement is not exact, each step and stride has different wobbles, bumps, and lengths, and I think it would be best to take the longer route and animate each and every step, which is very tedious but would provide a better outcome.
Usually, in first-person, we get a glimpse of the character’s hands, sometimes legs, and even the torso at times. This helps create an added level of depth, as you can see limbs that would simulate yours, so what the character sees is actually what you see.
With this in mind, my “shortcut” of turning the first-person idea into a camera perspective helps save this idea, but then I need some added depth such as camera shake and feeling the character walk due to stabilization issues. This means exaggerating my steps to indicate the jump in the camera being held by this imaginary hand.
Week Eight:
I’m almost finished with the animations – more or less finishing touches like making sure my dummy character is in the position I need it to be. Whilst playing the animation over and over, I felt that it wasn’t necessary to swap this out for a scarier – realistic-looking character. The default dummy rig reminded me of a mannequin which in my personal opinion can be scary to some, so I decided to keep it how it was, as the main principle of the animation was not the aesthetics.
The animation is quite rough and raw, but I intend to cut/crop out the final part, so I just wanted a continuous motion, so when I cut the animation, it appears as if it was because something happened. I did not want it to end on a paused still of some kind. Furthermore, I know that I’ll be adding motion blur and pixelation to help achieve a vintage effect in post-editing.
Week Nine:
This week has been nothing but continuous rendering. Using the University computers through VMWare, as well as my own computer to help knock out as many frames as possible. Each frame varied in render time, taking on average about 4-7minutes per frame, which is a cause for concern, as it would leave me with little time for any corrections if any were needed.
Naturally, because I knew I was adding post-pixelization, I knew I didn’t need a high rendering sample rate, as it would be undone in post FX. With this in mind, I made sure to lower the rendering samples even more which provided a natural grainy filter. Also, I added atmospheric volume to help create a bit of mist which the light reflects off creating a strong gleaming eerie hallway.
Week Ten:
I spent this week editing and adding post-fx to lower the quality to make it look like an older video. The difference in the final version from the original render is tremendous. It makes me think I could have lowered the render quality significantly more to save even more time.
The post-fx sound was all from youtube through the collection of these videos:
It took a while to find the correct noises I was looking for and considering I don’t have much experience in sound design, I couldn’t edit the sounds myself to get the perfect sound I wanted. So between a mix of audio blending and overlaying, I was able to get the sounds I wanted
Summary:
Overall, I feel as if I not only rushed my project but went into it with as little planning as needed. I felt that if I took a lot more time to actually plan each and every event, I could have developed something far more coherent and stable. For a simple animation like this, I felt more time went into it than needed, and it could have been made in such a shorter span of time.
However, I did enjoy playing with the environment and messing with the lighting. I was able to learn that a very simple light sketch of a storyboard, is not enough to carry you to the final stretch. Yes, some people can animate on the fly and create wonderful animations, but this project is not like that at all.
I greatly regret not making many iterations of a storyboard, and not creating mock animations. I feel as if my first render is my one and only render when it clearly feels like a first draft.
As for the animation itself, I think I overplayed the number of effects and noise. It takes away from the animation and becomes more distracting than immersive. I wanted something vintage but could have picked a more suitable overlay that doesn’t distract the viewer.
I hope to reflect on these criticisms and create an animation more in-depth with better planning for any future projects.