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Red or blue?- Creating a horror animatic

11th April 2021 by Jahiem Walker | 0 comments

The objective this time was to produce a 30 second scary video, proving that you understood the things we had been learning about. I chose to do an animatic, as it was the most efficient way for me to work. I briefly considered a live action film, but I don’t really have any equipment that would make that work.

Again, it took me a whole week to come up with a spooky story, as i’m not good at making up scary things and I don’t watch any horror at all. I already knew that an unsuspecting, ordinary victim made things scarier for me, so I knew i wanted to go with that. My first idea was to have a dystopian world where everyone was forced to act happy, but dystopias aren’t really scary in my opinion, it’s more like it’s own genre. I also didn’t want to go with the whole contrasting happy imagery with a dark theme idea again, so I decided to drop this idea.

Within my generation process for this idea, I remembered this video that I watched once about a pop app. K-pop is one of my interests, so I watched this video just for fun in my free time, but it ended up inspiring my project. To summarise the video, There was once an app called MyDol, which allowed people to ‘talk’ to Korean idols. In reality, the messages were just auto generated by an AI, which responded in accordance to the types of things it had learned from conversations with you. The app started off pretty innocently, but eventually the AI started sending very scary and unusual messages to people. Some even report the AI telling them their own addresses and personal information. I find the idea of AI kind of creepy within itself; to me, it’s like a puppet performing with no puppeteer behind it. You’re interacting with someone who doesn’t actually exist or have a from. Is it self aware? are it’s responses planned? it’s pretty scary to me.

From this video, i knew that i wanted to work with some kind of an anonymous being that interacted with people through technology. I thought it would be really scary to have a being with no clear origin and questionable objectives; there isn’t a way to get through to a creature like this because we don’t know why it’s acting the way it does.

I came across this hideous video that I couldn’t sit through, and as of now I’m having a hard time even looking at the thumbnail while typing this. There’s nothing inherently scary about this, but I just hate things like it so much. It’s some kind of a robot singing with an auto generated voice; it’s completely robotic and very uncanny. It reminded me of some of the discussions we had in our lessons, and I tried getting to the bottom of what made it freak me out so much, as it could be included in my own animatic. I think what I hate about it is that it’s like it’s alive but not living; it’s moving and singing, but it lacks a lot of things that make it feel natural. I didn’t really want to work with a concept like this for my animatic, but I included the video in part because it perfectly displays why AI lives are creepy to me, and also in part because I didn’t want to have to experience this terror alone.

I came up with a story for my animatic, and I liked it so it’s what I went with. A boy would receive a text from an unknown source, asking him a simple question; Red or blue? the boy is doomed upon receiving the text, because with whichever answer he chooses, he’ll be murdered in a way that will present the colour; either strangled until he’s blue or beaten until he bleeds red. He answers the question, and when he does, all technology in his house suddenly gets corrupted. A shadowy and anonymous figure presents itself from his television, and strangles him.

I like this idea because it raises a lot of questions; how many people have fallen victim to this text? where does the creature come from? what is it? it seems like it could be an opening scene for a horror movie. I wanted to include a lot of details, such as a segment on the news of a string of young people being found choked and beaten, and the monster having some kind of a checklist for it’s victims, but I only had 30 seconds so I had to keep it brief. I also considered having the victim’s faces appear on the monster after it had killed them, but I think I couldn’t have conveyed this clearly enough to the audience with the given amount of time, so I didn’t include it.

Here was my finished product. I opted for a simple art style so that I was able to draw a lot quickly. For the sound track, I tried to keep it mostly ambient and silent, with the louder sounds coming in later as the monster appeared. I used a repeated glitching sound, to emphasize that every electronic in the house had malfunctioned upon the monster’s appearance. I gave the monster a childish voice, using voice clips from a character in a Zelda game, as i felt that this disconnect made him a little more disturbing; he was like a playful child, seemingly killing people for fun.

Overall, I think I was successful in this animatic. I managed to stay more on task, and I like how it looked. I have yet to see how other people react to it, but that will indicate to me if the story is clear enough to viewers. I think as an improvement I could’ve worked on the timings a little better, as I think maybe the texts go by a little quickly.

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