Here is my Final Major Project Animation – Theol. And all the blogs recording my work flows.
This is a horror animation which pursues the goal of creating not physiological fear but emotional fear to the audience. Emphasizing the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible things rather than bloodiness and frequent jump scare.
Finally, I rendered all the images and import them to Adobe Premiere Pro for editing. I add sound effects to the video and some transfer shot to the animation. And I add a camera effect to it which I think is pretty cool.
Next shot is the character lying on the bed, breathe smoothly with the camera slowly pushing in. In terms of the lighting of the scene, I only lit it weakly so that the audience could only see the facial expressions of the characters.
At this moment, the one who put down the camera seems walk near the character.
And then the character was shocked. The quilt was pressed down by her hands.
So, I download the model from Sketchfab. I’ll use the part in front of the door and the bed. I replaced the door texture to in line with the corridor scene.
And I pose the key poses of the character. Modified by several versions and get this initial pose.
The camera used Dolly Zoom as a photographic technique to emphasize the hopeless and stressful of the character.
Next is the final shot in the corridor. Shows the character was shocked and quickly get into the room. I want to make sure the hand is on the same page with the speed of opening door. And the point of pushing should keep on one touched place.
The hand actually is harder than I think. Due to the lack of control of IK handles. the hand is hard to maintain one position. But I an satisfied with the final result.
For this shot, I’m planning to shot from the back of the character and shows the lighting in the distance flicked on and off.
locate the eyeline
Next cut I decide to shot it in a balance way. Although balance may lower the feeling of fear. But similar as The Shining, the way of framing in the completely rule of thirds can also cause fear by negative space and lighting.
And I refined some details of the hand and shoulder.
My friend Yuanhang suggests me to change the intensity of lights with tiny different brightness so that the scene will be more realistic. He also suggested me to increase the brightness intensity by stroboscopic, so I switched to two different light flashes about 6 frames apart from each other from 0-700.
For the camera I pushing it in with rotate to create the sense of vertigo.
The speed of the camera was supposed to ease out, but the effect was to see the next frame quickly cut the shot, so I speeded it up.
The study and application of Negative Space
The following is part of my FMP Thesis.
The definition of negative space is the area around and between subjects. In a normal film or photography work, the filmmaker focuses on balancing the space around the character to create a static and formal feeling.
But in the composition of a horror film, the director deliberately destroys the balance of space, reduces the proportion of the role in the scene, and enlarges the proportion of negative space infinitely, making the picture look “awkward, overwhelming, or unstable”, in order to create the feeling of “lost and confined” of the character.
At the same time, this is a point that I considered about all the time when I’m animating. Through creating unknown fear for the audience through negative space, the level of fear will be increased.
In the light setting of the scene, the decay rate of the light is quardratic. At the same time, the exposure of light is reduced by distance.
For the metal can, I want it to hit the ground and bumping for a while. So, I shot a video as reference.
And this is how I animated. In addition to the up and down rotation caused by gravity, the bottle body is also rotated according to reference. After rolling on the ground for a while, the can goes back due to the center of gravity.
This camera angle shows the negative space.
The study and application of Voyeuristic Perspectives
The following is part of my FMP Thesis.
Voyeurism originally refers to the act of snooping and spying on the private affairs of others, in which the person being watched does not know that he is being watched. The concept of voyeuristic perspectives was used extensively in Hitchcock’s films and first appeared in the form of the main perspective function in his film Rear Window.
In the horror film, the camera may apply voyeuristic perspectives from an odd Angle. The frame may be half obscured by an object, or maybe it’s like the angle from a security camera. The camera movement tends to move sideways or forward from the cover, creating a sense of the viewer’s perspective is the same as the unknown thing which is about to attack the character.
By putting the audience in the perspective of a voyeur, the audience will realize that they are not in the same space as the characters that are happening, which also makes the audience realize that there is no way to prevent what is going on in the distance.
And I incorporated this concept into my animation by the monitoring perspective. And the Under bed perspective in scene 3.
For the inside shot, I’m going to give a medium close up to the character. And I also want the whole black scene takes for a while before the audience aware what was happening.
Actually, I really like the render result of this part.
I changed the focus distance to the character with a 2.5 aperture size in order to help the audience to focus on the character to maintain the tension of nervous. Also I tilt the camera for 4.2 in X axis to perform a angle of looking up.
For the can material, I wanted to use a metallic reflective color, but at the same time not so reflective of all the light, which is what I finally settled on.
And here is the view from Arnold rendering. The reflection on the can show the view of protagonist, which I think is pretty cool.
