I’m a bit late on the blogging for this project, but here I’ll document the process of our first task, creating a scary 6 frame storyboard. We were supposed to make a ghost story, but I went slightly off task admittedly and just went for something with an overall spooky atmosphere.

To be frank, I hate horror and everything scary, so this task was challenging to me. My art style is practically the opposite of scary and I don’t have much experience with how to frighten an audience, since I go to great lengths to avoid anything even remotely disturbing. It took me quite a while to figure out how I would make something creepy, but after some quick research, I was able to produce something I’m somewhat proud of as a starting point.

Firstly, I thought back on a documentary we had to watch about the movie ‘the shining’. I was able to get through this documentary, and there were some pretty interesting ideas explored in it. although I did find some of the ideas to be very out there and far fetched. What I got from the documentary was that the things that made the shining scary were the subtle details and attention to detail, more so than the actual scary shots. There were a lot of subtle details added to create tension, such as very early foreshadowing, the use of different shots and sounds and subtle hints to more sinister themes such as the mistreatment of native Americans. I found this much to be interesting, as usually if I was thinking to scare someone, I’d go for something loud, flashy and visually disturbing. This documentary taught me that sometimes slowly hinting at disturbing themes can be more effective than revealing everything right away.

Next, I thought to myself about what scares me. In short practically everything scares me, but I’m more scared of things that are realistic and could happen to anyone. These things scare me because the victims are often just ordinary people that I can see bits of myself in; completely innocent and unsuspecting civillians who are dragged into dark situations, broken down and never given a happy ending or a way out. Things like this disturb me because they could truly happen to anyone. At this point, I knew I wanted to do something with an air of realism to it; something shocking, but still somewhat possible.

The biggest problem I faced was with the art. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t draw anything that looked scary or sinister. However, I started to think that I could use this to my advantage; if the whole thing looks cute, the scare will be all the more disturbing and unsuspecting. A disconnect between the visuals and the scenario could be what helped my piece to stand out. I looked online for things that kind of blended more childish and cute imagery with scary themes, and I found two things;

Now, I was ready to create my storyboard. I decided that I’d add sound to it and make it into a video, as I wanted to put in a lot of effort for this piece and get my brain used to creating something disturbing. I knew right away that i wanted to include an innocent victim, and I chose an animal. People always talk about being the most sad when pets die in horror movies, and I feel that’s because the animals are just there doing nothing, they don’t get themselves into these situations and so it’s horrible when we see bad things happening to them. Humans make decisions for them, so it’s sad when these decisions lead to their demise. I chose to use cats, as a lot of people love them and have experience with them, so it adds an air of reality to the whole thing.

For the story, I wanted to have a person take in missing cats and give them seemingly good lives. However, the person actually kills the cats and steals their eyes for an unknown reason. For the whole thing, the story would go smoothly and cutely, but at the end you’d find out what the person’s real intentions were. I originally had the main character planned to just be an average person, but I changed it to a child because it added another layer of creepiness to the piece; why would a child want to kill cats? why would such a young mind already be corrupted, why does she even know about the concept of murder? I also chose to picture no other humans, to make it look like the cat only had the option to go with the child, so it trusted her. I wrote a poem for the dialogue, to give it a children’s book vibe.

All in all, I feel this was a good start to creating something spooky. It was my first time doing it, and I feel I was successfully able to throw in enough curve balls to shock the audience in the end. I tried including a slightly disturbing atmosphere from the very start, with the absence of any other characters and the realistic backgrounds in comparison to the cartoon characters. To criticise myself, I went a bit off task, and i didn’t really talk about anything supernatural. Next time, i’ll try to stick to the task at hand more.