The Thing In My Pipes – COMPLETED VIDEO

The Thing In My Pipes – Editing

Okay, so the last hurdle of this project, editing.

I separated each scene of the Animation into different photoshop files and folders to save myself the horrible fate of having probably thousands of layers in a single file.

I then exported each of the scenes into GIF files, which I then imported into Premiere Pro.  But not everything was that simple.  In the Photoshop timeline, I had taken great care to set each frame’s duration to make the animation play out as I intended, but when I exported it to a GIF file, the duration of each frame was lost and each frame became the same duration, and very fast, so fast, in fact, that a lot of the frames were lost.  I tried playing my animation in the Photoshop timeline and recording my screen, but I couldn’t get the screen recording software to work.  I tried rendering the animation as an mp4 file, but after over an hour of waiting on attempts, for about a 5-second video, I realised that it wasn’t happening.

For some reason, all of the gifs had exported and become gifs that I can play on my computer, on WordPress, and everything looks fine, and I can export them into Premiere Pro, and everything is reasonably fine, except for the driving gif that, for a reason that I can’t figure out, doesn’t register on Premiere Pro as a gif, and is just a single image.  All of the options are, as far as I can see, exactly the same.  I’ve exported it about a dozen times, thinking that it must have just been a fluke or a glitch, but no.  I can’t figure out why this is happening.  Here’s what it looks like in Premiere Pro.  the purple bits are the gifs that work, and the pink one is the driving one that isn’t working.

I can’t find any way of just exporting the whole frame animation as a png or jpeg sequence, is that too much to ask Photoshop?!?!

I thought of screenshotting all of the hundreds and hundreds of frames and then importing them into Premiere Pro as an image sequence, which would turn them into a video, but then I realised that due to screenshotting being done by hand, the shots wouldn’t all be exactly the same size and would, therefore, cut off some of the image, which I imagined would make for a very jerky video once imported to Premiere Pro.  So, as of the time of writing this, I’m not sure what to do, to be honest.  I probably should have just used Adobe Animate to make the whole thing, but oh well, it’s done now. 

Oh yes!!  I think I’ve solved it!  I was looking through the render video settings and I found a setting called photoshop image sequence, which is exactly what I’ve been wanting!  I’ve never seen anything more beautiful.

I take that statement back, this next image has trumped it.

I made an image sequence of the driving since, which is 42 frames long.  For some reason, however, it only exported 33, and the frames themselves had lost the right aspect ratio, so everything is squished and blurry.

Maybe I need to play around with the image sequence render settings.

I think I’ve found one of the problems.  I set the size to this.

Whereas I think it needs to be this.

I’m also going to change the framerate from 24fps to 10fps to see if that makes a difference to the loss of frames.

Weirdly, setting it to 10 frames per second was even worse, I now only have 13 of the original 42 frames.  And it’s still just as blurry, but at least it’s not squished now.

I found this website https://ezgif.com/gif-to-mp4 which allows one to convert gif files to mp4 files.  I did this with the driving scene, and it seems to work!  Finally something that actually works!!!  But it still doesn’t fix the problem of the video being the wrong speed.

My faboulous friend Louise told me about some screen recording software called OBS Studio https://obsproject.com/

Using this, I was able to record my screen when watching my animations play in the photoshop timeline and it worked!!  I’m so happy right now.  Here are my screen recording files.

This is what they look like in the premire pro timeline.  It’s such a beautiful sight to see.  It’s almost 4 minutes long.

When I recorded my screen, it wasn’t in completly full screen so it looks like this.

So I clicked this, which allows me to reposition the video.

Then I spent a long time going through the video and adding sounds and voice lines and what not.  I got all of the sounds and music from https://freesound.org/

This is what the timeline of the completed animation looks like in Premiere Pro.

AND ITS DONE!!  MY FMP IS FINALLY COMPLETE!!!!

I’m so pleased to have finished it that I’ll make a blog post dedicated to the video itself.

The Thing In My Pipes – Animating/Drawing

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’m going to rotoscope the whole animation in pixel art.  I’m going to be using Photoshop for this process.  I’m going to follow the shots is drew out in the animatic.

I need to figure out what resolution I’m going to be working in.  It needs to have the same ratio as 1920×1080 to make it fit for viewing online.  Here’s a link to a table of ratios that I’m going to use to help me with this.  https://pacoup.com/2011/06/12/list-of-true-169-resolutions/

I found this tutorial on how to rotoscope in Photoshop. https://theblog.adobe.com/moving-art-how-to-create-a-rotoscope-animation-in-photoshop-cc/

Hi, this paragraph is written by me from the future of when I wrote this part of the blog post.  I just came back to say that although my original plan was to rotoscope everything in pixel art, it turns out that it would have been extremely time consuming and I was short on time, so I ditched the rotoscoping idea.

I found this picture that I’m going to use as a reference photo for the office shots.

Whilst drawing it, I couldn’t decide how to colour the walls and ceiling, so I used this photo for reference.

Because I have a lot to animate in a short amount of time because I’m terrible at time management, I’m going to animate it in 6 frames per second.  Here’s an example of the differences between different fps.  https://vimeo.com/134619393

Here’s the office that I drew.

It took a while for me to understand how animating in photoshop works, but I’m a lot more confident now with the basics.  Next, I drew the close up of Sandra.  In my attempt to make her look attractive and vaguely resemble the concept art I’d made, I somehow forgot how humans look and made this.

Someone made the accurate point that she looks like Dory’s dad from Finding Nemo.

For my second attempt, I cut the nose back a little too much.

Third time lucky, I spent some more time on her and actually made her resemble a human being.  Here’s the finished image.

Onto the next shot.  I’ve decided to skip the shots of him walking out of work and getting in his car to save time.  For the driving scene, I want to make a parallax effect.  Parallax animation is where objects in the background move at varying speeds to replicate scale and distance.  The background objects also have varying opacity, depending on how far away they’re supposed to look to be.  This is an example of what I mean.

first of all, though, I need to draw the car.  I want it to be a really old and cheap car so that it is clear to the audience that he’s not living an exactly luxurious life.  This is the reference photo I used of a 1983 Peugeot 205.b

I used this drawing I found on google for reference when making the buildings.

Here’s what I made.  I used the tween tool to make the movement.

Okay, so the next scene is Brian climbing up the external fire escape of his apartment building.  This is the reference photo I used.

This is what I made.

To animate Brian walking up the steps I was going to use some of Muybridge’s photography for reference, but I decided that since Brian’s sprite is only 3×10 pixels, it was going to be very hard to convey the detailed animation of a human walk cycle.

I did try to, however, but it was way too hard and time-consuming to continue, and just looked bad in general.  This is the Muybridge’s photo that I was using when doing the abandoned walk cycle.

Whilst writing this, I realised that I had accidentally miscoloured one single pixel of childhood Brian’s hair.  I have now fixed that.

The next thing I did worthy of documenting was animating the run cycle of Brian and his childhood friend Charlie who will later become the monster, running through the woods.  This takes place in a flashback.  I didn’t use a reference, as I’m reasonably confident in making a very basic run cycle after doing some of the Game Story Development project work.  The run cycle is 6 frames long, but I just copied and reversed the order of the 3 frames below to make a full cycle.

For the next shot, I wanted to draw a natural forming lake surrounded by trees.  On my first attempt, I tried to draw it without reference, but the perspective just didn’t look right, and it just generally looked bad.

Brian’s hair in this picture is yellow, that’s because I originally made his childhood hair blonde, thinking that his chair probably started out light in his early years and the older he got the darker it got.  I thought it would be more realistic, seeing as that’s what happened with my hair in real life.  But, after showing the sequence to a couple friends, they were like “what, why did his hair change??”  So I changed it to the same colour as it is when he’s an adult to clear the confusion.

This is the reference photo that I used for my second attempt.

This is my drawing.  I really tried to make it interesting to look at, layering the trees, grass and lake with different shades to make it more realistic and pretty.  I also added some rocks on the path.

To animate the splash caused by Brian throwing Charlie into the lake, I used this gif as a reference.

This is the animation that I made.

After the splash I animated some bubbles, to represent Charlie’s last breaths bubbling up to the surface.  Later on, when Charlie is talking to Brian through the toilet, I animated air bubbles popping in the toilet, I wanted these two scenes to be connected to each other through the bubbles.

At some points during this animation, like any scene outdoors during nighttime, and the following scene. after I had drawn out the shot, I had covered the drawing in a black, dark blue, or dark purple flat colour, then reduced the opacity, so that the overall brightness of the shot was lowered, to resemble either a night scene or a room without a light on.  Here’s an example of when I used this method – it’s a shot of Brian who has just woken up to the flashback-turned dream from his childhood.

The next noteworthy thing I did is drawing Brian’s bathroom.  To help me visualise how I imagined the bathroom when writing the story, I drew a top-down layout in my sketchbook.

Before starting on my animation, I was planning to make 3D environments of the scenes I’d described in the short story, so I had started by making the shape of the room in Autodesk Maya.

For drawing the perspective of the bathroom, I used this picture as a reference.

I tried drawing a bath, but I felt like it made the image too cluttered, so I removed it.  I was thinking “who has a bathroom with a toilet and a sink but no shower or bath??”  But this isn’t real life so it doesn’t need to be realistic to that degree.  This is the bathroom design that I went with.  I was going to make the walls and floor tiled, but the white was just too visually overpowering.

I used this reference image for the toilet.  I originally drew it with the lid closed, as it is in this picture, but then realised that in a moment Brian is going to be peering into the toilet, and I didn’t want to have to animate him lifting up the toilet lid, so I redrew it with the lid open.

This is the reference photo that I used for the toilet from the front view.

This is my drawing.  It didn’t originally have the flush pointing out to the left, but I went back to it later and changed it to this because when he flushes the toilet, I needed the flush to be a straight line for animation ease.

Throughout the animation, I had to draw the toilet from several different perspectives, so I made a colour palette for ease of use for myself when drawing them.  I positioned the colours in order of shade for the single reason that it looks nice.

For the next shot where Brian is looking into the toilet, I was finding it hard to get the proportions right for his face when seen from below, so I used this reference photo.

This is my drawing.

To animate Brian looking in the toilet, I used the tween tool once again.

Throughout the animation, Brian’s face changes a lot depending on which angle it is at because my pixel art skills are far from desirable, and I find it very hard to keep the proportions consistent, so when you watch it, whoever you are, you’ll need to deal with that.  Sorry.

This is the reference photo I used for Brian looking into the toilet.

This is my drawing.  I worked hard to make the shape of the bowl and pit of water (whatever that’s called) the right shape.

Next, I had to draw Brian holding a banana, so I found this reference photo for help.

This is my drawing.  Looking at it now, the banana looks a bit small in comparison to Brian’s head, but I’m writing this after I’ve made the whole thing, and I’m so burnt out, I don’t think I could manage to alter anything now.

I used this reference image when I drew the close up of the toiler flush which I Brain pulls down.

This is my art.  To make the sides the same shape, I drew out a shape that I liked, then copied, pasted it, (which made a new layer) and flipped it horizontally, then combined the new layer with the original layer and tada!!

Next, to draw the shot where Brian is hearing the ringing for the first time, I used this photo as a reference.

And this is my drawing.

To draw Brian’s eyes in obvious distress in a cartoon style, I used the “more than” and “less than” symbols on my keyboard for reference.  These things:  > <

Next up, I had originally planned to animate Brian throwing in lots of meat into the toilet, but I couldn’t face individually drawing out lots of different types of raw meat, so I compromised on a single chicken leg.  This is the reference photo I used.

This is my drawing.  I made a chequered pattern to imitate the bumpy texture of chicken skin.

Next up, I drew the shot where Brian wakes up from his blackout in his office, looking at his computer.  I wanted to make it clear that Brian’s life and workplace are cheap and shabby, so I made everyone in the office have an old fashioned CRT monitor.  I gave Brian’s monitor the classic old Windows desktop background.  I made the keyboard and mouse black and more modern looking to make the computer setup seem weird and haphazardly put together, with no colour scheme, to indicate the lack of effort put into making the office space look nice for its employees.  When designing the keyboard I looked at my own which is black, with white letters, and tried to make it have a realistic layout of the keys.

This is the reference photo I used for the CRT monitor.

This is the reference photo I used for the desktop background.

And this is the whole image put together.  I’m pretty happy with it.  I’m especially happy that I was able to represent the classic desktop background in such a small amount of pixels, and for it to be instantly recognisable.

Next, I drew Brian looking unshaven with messy hair, and I made his face slightly paler than his normal face colour which I have used for the whole animation up to this point, to allude to the fact that he’s slowly getting more unhinged and therefore his self-care is none-existant on this day.

Okay, so the next thing I made that I have anything interesting to say about it is Brian waiting for Sandra in his car which is parked in an empty car park.  I used this photo as a reference for the front of the car.  It is the exact same model of car as the reference photo I used for the driving scene.

This is the reference photo I used for the parking lot itself.

And this is everything put together.  I didn’t draw any other cars in the car park because I wanted the focus to be on Brian and his car, and I also didn’t want the image to be too overcrowded.  His licence plate had originally had a swear word I love, but I figured I didn’t want to piss off anyone marking my animation, so I changed it to instead read L D O, which stands for Little Dark One, which is an alias that I use online.

Next, I drew the car interior from behind Brian’s head.  This is the reference picture I used.

This is my drawing.

Whilst writing this, I realised that when I was animating this, I  had planned to have Brian’s head start out on the left of the car, and end up on the right, but I had forgotten to make it start at the left, therefore the positioning of his head from the front view and him from inside the car are the opposite and therefore make no sense, so I have now just gone back and changed that.

Next up, I drew Sandra’s car.  I’m very proud of myself because I didn’t use a reference photo for any of the car, I did it all from imagination, based off of my experience of drawing Brian’s car from the driving scene.  The two cars definitely share some similarities because of this, but I’m still happy, and I think it looks pretty damn sweet.

Next up, I drew the boot of Brian’s car with Sandra stuffed in it.  The proportions are a bit wack, but eh, It looks somewhat okay.  This is the reference photo I used.

And this is my drawing.  Poor Sandra.

Next, I drew Sandra tied up to a chair.  This is the reference photo I used for the said chair.

This is my drawing.

I drew Sandra without any reference, and the quality of her anatomy shows me that I’m gradually getting more skilled at pixel art, which makes me feel happy inside.

In this shot, I  made Brian’s face even paler than before and increased the severity of the bags under his eyes to show that he is kind of losing it at this point.

Next on the long, long but almost finished list is Brian lying bloodied and unconscious on the floor after murdering Sandra.  Here’s the reference photo I used for the various pools of blood situated around him.

And here’s my artwork.  for the blood on Brian’s clothing, I lightened the shade slightly, to make it appear as if it’s been there for some time and has had time to sink into the material.

I’m very happy with the drawing I made of Sandra’s mangled corpse.  Although it is horrifying and disgusting, I’m proud of how realistic and genuinely disturbing it looks.  Ironically I had so much fun drawing it.  There’s just something satisfying about drawing messed up things, it’s kind of therapeutic in a way.

When Charlie is rising out of the toilet, I after I designed him, I duplicated him, flipped him, covered every inch of his body with a flat black, and lowered the opacity dramatically, then used the tween tool to make the shadow rise up Brian’s form.  I used this same technique in Brian’s childhood flashback earlier in the animation when Charlier approached Brian by the pool.  I did this to link the two scenes and to foreshadow.

Okay, finally we’ve reached the last shot!!

Originally, in the short story, I wrote that charlie had used all of the meat he had been fed to use as a part of his body so that he would be a terrifying, Frankenstein’s monster mishmash of parts of Sandra, parts of his old childhood body, and the pieces of raw meat that Brian had fed Charlie earlier on in the animation.  I played around for about an hour by combining different bits of meat with A blob that was supposed to represent charlie’s supposedly terrifying body, but nothing really worked or inspired me.  So I began erasing everything I had made.  When almost all of his original design had been erased, I stopped and looked and the thing, snake-like body that remained, and realised that I could work with that.

I added some of charlie’s ginger hair, but subdued the colour somewhat, seeing as he has been submerged in water for the better part of 20 years.  In a previous project, I had drawn a ton of dead artists and had made their eyes big black pits with a small white eye in the middle, so I decided to give charlie this to add an extra level of creep to his face.  In the same project, I gave Umberto Boccioni, one of the many artists I drew, a long, toothy smile that stretched up to his ear.  I used the same idea for Charlie’s mouth, but didn’t include any teeth, and put smeared blood around his mouth, which was from his last, very recent meal.

I then gave charlie some fancy long claws, cause why not.  Looking back on this design now, I realise that it was subconsciously, heavily inspired by a video I’d watched about a month back on how to draw a cursed image.

This is the design from that video.

And this is my final design for charlie.

It’s crazy to me to see how much things we see can affect the things that we make, even when we don’t realise it at the time.

And that’s it!  All of the animating and drawing is complete!  I’m so proud of myself for making so much in so little time.  It took me a week to do the whole thing, but it feels like I’ve been doing it for months.  Weird.  Look at my next blog post for the editing and general post-production process!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Thing In My Pipes – Character Concept Art

I was going through the typical design process for the protagonist that I called Brian because as I was making the storyboards I was listening to the podcast Leighton Night, and the co-host is called Brian Wecht.

I got to the legs and realised that I don’t actually understand human anatomy and how to represent it in pixel art.

I then found this article which explains how to draw anatomy in pixel art.  This method requires way more pixels than I was using.  This website actually looks really useful for learning the techniques I will need for making this animation.

https://www.slynyrd.com/blog/2019/5/21/pixelblog-17-human-anatomy

I’m still gonna stick to the general design of Brian, but I’m going to try to redesign him by repurposing the human anatomy figure that this article shows.

So here are screenshots of me following the above gif.

Now that I have my basic human model, I’m going to customise him as Brian.

When writing the short story that this animation is based on, I imagined Brian as that guy from the popular thumbs up gif, so I’m going to use that as a general reference when designing him.

I want Brian to look like a very regular office worker and kind of bedraggled.  I’m using this image as a guide for his shirt.

Here’s Brian in a shirt.  I was going to add all of the little white lines on the shirt, but then I remembered that I’m going to be animating this, so as simple a design as possible is favourable.

Trousers reference.

And then this is Brian in all his glory.

Seeing as I’m just copying the example in the gif and I’m not actually making my own body from the ground up, I realised that there’s no need to copy the skeleton and muscles, I can just copy the body and save a whole lot of time and effort, so that’s what I did.

For her features and clothes, in the story, I described her as having long black as night hair, red lips and golden green eyes.  I also imagined her having a red shirt and blue jeans.  I used this image as reference for her hair, although it is a different colour.

This is the reference image I used for her shirt.

This is the reference image I used for her trousers.

Here’s Sandra in all of her glory.

 

 

The Thing In My Pipes – Animatic

For the Muybridge animation, I made last year I made an animatic where I animated the movements I drew out in the storyboard, but as I’m stuck at home, I don’t have access to adobe after effects, so I will have to make do with just showing each static storyboard.

I had to go onto each scanned storyboard and individually screenshot all of the 93 shots.  Here is a selection of them in my Onedrive.

I imported all of those files into Lightworks, which is a free video editing program I use.  I then cut up the single video that Lightworks automatically put all the images into, so that I can see where each shot starts and stops, then I put the shots into a pattern I learned from Lewis, my film class teacher taught me.  This method of organising video and audio makes it easier to differentiate shot from shot, instead of it just being one long line.

After much stress, I understood that Lightworks isn’t as good as I thought it was, and is very stressful trying to edit in the way I want to edit, so I’m ditching it and started a free trial on Premiere Pro.

Here’s the Premiere Pro pattern of video clips.

I go on to https://freesound.org  which is my go-to place for free sounds to use in my projects.

I got my friend Alex to voice act Charlie, which is the name I gave to the thing in the toilet.

Here’s what it looks like in Premiere Pro.

After a full day of downloading dozens of sounds on freesound I’ve finally finished it!!  Yay!  (go to the top for the finished video).

 

 

The Thing In My Pipes – Storyboards

So now I’ve written the story, I’m going to make an animation out of it.  I love making pixel art, so I’ve had the idea to make the animation with pixel art.  I found a bunch of pixel art animation short films.  Here’s one of them.

I think pixel art animations add a real special touch to stories.  I also found this video which explains how to make pixel art rotoscope animations, which I haven’t thought of before.

 

So the first task is to start visualising the story into storyboards.

Before I started I drew a basic idea for the layout of the bathroom, but as I went through the storyboarding process, I changed the placement of the mirror and sink.

So storyboarding took me a couple of days, and I drew a total of 93 shots on 16 A4 pages of storyboards.  Phew.

The next step is to make an animatic to see how the shots fit together in a cinematic narrative, and will also allow me to more easily cut bits out to lower the shot count, which will, in turn, give me fewer drawings and animations to make and so the project will take me less time to complete because 93 shots is a lot of work.

Go read my next blog post for some animatic development and babbling.

The Thing In My Pipes

I pick up my briefcase and stand up from my depressingly squeaky swivel chair.  I look out over the stationary sea of beige cubicles and try to catch Sandra’s golden-green eyes, but I soon realise that she is making an obvious attempt to ignore me.  I think about how she had had a very different attitude towards me at last week’s office party, but then again, alcohol does temporary wonders for one’s inhibitions.

I walk out of the soulless, ugly office block that I call work, the building’s grimy glass door screeching open.  I reach my old red Austin Allegro, awkwardly parked in the cracked, neglected car park.  The pensioner of a car jolts into life and trundles home.

I walk up the outside, skeletal stairwell running up the spine of the grim grey apartment complex, illuminated by the polluted twilight.  The higher I climb up the building’s exoskeleton, the quieter the sounds of the frantic city’s bustle become, and the louder my thoughts grow.

I think back to the relatively carefree days of my childhood when I and my friends would play in the woods near my old town.  How we would invent fantastical stories where we would be the heroes and the fools, the villains and the damsels.  My mind leads me by the hand, back through the vista of years to that long-gone day, frivolled away in the lush, bronze autumn woodland, that I can never forget.

My miniature bare feet pounded across the rotting expanse of nature’s floor, their rhythmic thumping filling my head.  The sound of rushing footsteps was accompanied by another pair of running feet coming up close behind my own.  The two panting boys ran out into a small clearing with a modest pond lying in the centre like an open wound.  I was so exhausted that I knew that I would fall victim to my pursuer if I did not come up with a heroic plan to save the day.  I turned to face my enemy, eye to eye, boy to boy, friend to friend.  The young boy before me bore a scratched, dirtied white mask with a crude angry face clumsily scribbled upon it in red marker.  The boy grasped a flimsy stick in his sweaty palm.

“Stay back Villain!”

The Hero took a step back, towards the pond.

“I’m going to kill you, Hero!”

The Hero stepped back again, evermore closer to the pond.

“I’m going to end your evilness and you’ll never kill anyone ever again!”

“The Hero”, as I called myself, took one final step back, grabbed the Villain by the shoulders, and in one swift movement, we spun around and I pushed him into the deep lake.  A surprised yelp escaped the boy’s suddenly scared mouth, as his flailing body crashed into the lake’s peaceful skin.  The boy’s form quickly disappeared from view, and the lake regained its peaceful status once more.

I stood next to the river laughing my last laugh of childhood innocence, but my high pitched giggles started to quieten down as I began to notice that I was laughing alone, as my best friend, who was known to the rest of the world as Charlie, had not yet resurfaced.  A violent cascade of bubbles erupted out from the murky depths of the below, and then all was silent forevermore.

I gasp and look around suddenly, finding myself lying in my bed in the present day, a furiously cold sweat dripping down every inch of my trembling form.  I lean over the bedside table, the duvet clinging to my wet chest.  The glowing phone shines with 2:25am plastered over it.  I lift myself out of the bed’s comforting, warm embrace.

I reach out into the darkness and grab hold of the cheap plastic light switch that hangs helplessly from the ceiling.  I yank it and am instantly blinded momentarily as the fluorescent bulb flickers into life.  I wander over to the sink which lies beneath a wide mirror, my feet stinging slightly as they move over the cold tiled floor.  I turn on the blue-capped tap and cup my hands underneath the flowing silver.  A deep puddle quickly forms, so I lift it up and splash it against my face, both grounding and refreshing me at the same time.  I wash my face, rubbing away the slimy sweat and salty tears.  I straighten my back and stare at myself in the accusing mirror.

I look at my hairy chest breathing its rapid breaths, at my eyes glistening with hints of new tears, at my short brown, dripping wet hair, at the grainy dark brown stubble that must have begun sprouting whilst I slept.  I look at the man who had bottled up all of his guilty grief from all those years ago.  It had been twenty years ago today since his death, which explained why all the memories had flooded back to me all of a sudden.

I had never told a soul the truth about what had actually happened to Charlie, for fear that my younger self would get in trouble, and as the hours, days, months and years built up, it became increasingly harder to imagine ever confessing to anyone.  Not even his parents ever knew the true fate of their son.  I shake my head suddenly as if doing so could rid me of my painful thoughts.  I hastily wipe the fresh tears from my eyes, breathe in deeply, filling my lungs, then exhale slowly and compose myself.

I silence that remorseful voice in my psyche, as I had done hundreds of times before, turn off the chiding bathroom light and start striding purposefully back to bed, when I hear a quiet sound from behind me.  I turn my head, curious, to look back at the bathroom behind me.  After not hearing anything for about fifty loud beats of my heart, I am about to turn away again when I hear it a second time.  I peer into the domestic darkness and slowly walk back into my bathroom to locate the source of the sound.  It sounds like the whispers of a ghastly ill creature.  I turn the light back on and hear it a third time.  I instantly realise that for a reason that I couldn’t begin to fathom, it’s emanating from the toilet.  I feel a quizzical expression spread across my face as I peer over the bowl of the toilet, to see a horde of bubbles quickly rising up to the skin of the water’s surface.

As they pop out into the stale bathroom air, I hear the barely audible noise that sounds like a soft gust of wind mixed with nails being dragged across a chalkboard.  The sound hauntingly forms the words:

“So… hungry…”

Seeing as a toilet seems to be talking to me, I don’t quite believe what I have just witnessed, so I kneel in front of it, waiting for any kind of confirmation that I have just experienced some sort of late-night hallucination.  But sure enough, to my dismay, my eyes watch a new group of bubbles swim up and the quiet sound that’s barely louder than a rat’s whisper seems to form the words:

“Please…”

I nervously try to swallow some saliva, but my mouth is bone dry.  I lower my head slightly over the bowl and, feeling like a complete madman, I croak:

“Is someone down there?”

Almost immediately I spy the air bubbles rising up to speak the words:

“Haven’t… eaten… for… so… long…”

Assuming that I’m not going completely insane and that this is actually happening, I ask the mysterious source of the bubbles:

“Are you okay?  Do you need help?”

“Food…”

Realising that whoever was down there probably wasn’t there by choice, and seeing as they didn’t seem to be able to reply to me coherently, I decide that they were delirious and in need of urgent help.

I grab hold of the cold porcelain sink and haul myself up to my bare feet and pad over to the door.  Now in the bedroom once again, I pick up my phone off of the bedside table.

I walk into the kitchen and wake up my phone from its electronic slumber.  A happy picture of Sandra I found on her Instagram illuminates my face from my phone’s lock screen, which reads 2:34am.  I unlock it, go to the calls app, tap in 999 and hit call.  I’m starting to wonder how long I’ll have to wait when I’m greeted by a tired young woman’s voice; she yawns weakly before she speaks.

“999, what’s your emergency?”

“Hi, I think there’s someone stuck in the pipes under my flat; I don’t know how they got there, but I think they need urgent help.”  I proceed to recall my address to her from memory.

“Sir, what makes you think that there’s someone in your pipes?”

“As crazy as this sounds, they’ve been talking to me through my toilet, they were begging me for food.”

A frustrated sigh flows out of my phone.

“Sir, have you taken any recreational substances recently?”

“Are you fucking shitting me right now?!  I’m telling you that someone’s damn life might be in danger, and you’re accusing me of taking drugs?!  Just send someone here as quickly as possible, for God’s sake!”

“Sir, please calm down.  I’d recommend that you stop taking whatever it is that you took and get some rest.”

“Fucking typical, you know, you people are everything that’s wrong with this damn country.”

I end the call, angrily flinging my phone away from me in utter disgust.  It smacks against the soft fabric of the sofa with a dull thud.

I pick up a banana and head back to the bathroom.  I sit down next to the toilet once again.

“I’m back, I tried to get help but the police are incompetent.”

“Hungry…”

“Fine, I don’t know how else to help you, so I brought some food for you.  How do I give it to you?”

“Flush…”

I peel the banana, tear a large chunk off and drop it into the toilet.  I press one half of the shiny metal oval flusher that resembles the ying-yang symbol.  The lump of potassium is whisked away by the miniature waterfall, being dragged down into the murky depths of the pipes.

After a long moment, the clump of banana bobs back up to the surface, hanging helplessly by the skin of the water.  The banana has half a dozen small grooves etched into its exterior as if a small creature has lightly bitten it.  I peer closer and realise that a small yellowed tooth is lodged into one of the grooves, a thick wisp of grey matter attached to it that looks like some long-dead gum.  The banana is pushed aside by a stream of bubbles.

“Meat…”

My heart starts thumping in my chest as I come to the realisation that the bearer of the tooth can’t have been in the realm of the living for some years, let alone alive tonight.  I start talking loudly into the still water.

“Okay, who the fuck are you?  What kind of sick, twisted prank are you playing at?  Because the police will be here soon and they might want to damn well know why someone has climbed into my pipes, with what looks like a dead child’s tooth!”

“Have… forgotten… already…?”

“What the hell are you on about!?

“Murd… murderer…”

The word seems to float out of the toilet and dance around my head, ricochetting from ear to ear, gradually eating away at my mind, until it slowly morphs into an unbearably shrill whine that makes me forget everything else.

I cry out, covering my ears, trying to block out the sound, but it makes no difference.  I cast my eyes downwards and see a consistent stream of bubbles, and below the unbearably loud sound, my pain-filled ears barely pick up the single repeating, raspy request.

“Meat… meat… meat…”

I stand up suddenly and career out of the bathroom.  As I run to the kitchen, I think no thoughts and hear no sound other than that of the high-pitched deafening drone.  I run into the kitchen, throw open the fridge door, and frantically rummage around for anything that could come under the protein-infused umbrella of meat.  I hurry back to the bathroom and deposit the exploits of my short expedition onto the white gleaming tiles.

I tear open a packet of cooked sliced chicken and flush the meaty slivers down.  As I’m about to open another packet, the ringing becomes indescribably worse.  The weak, raspy voice that normally accompanies the bubbles is replaced by a fierce, demanding snarl.

“Raw!”

I use the tip of my turquoise toothbrush to stab the taut plastic roof of a packet of raw mince beef.  I pull back the plastic and scoop a moderate pile out with my shaking hand.  I drop the clump of pulverised bovine flesh and flush it into oblivion.

Almost immediately the unbearable ringing noticeably declines in volume and intensity.  The bubbles speak to me in a quieter, more restrained fashion.

“More… more…”

I empty the rest of the mince, throw in slabs of slimy chicken breast, chuck in a whole packet of bacon rashers and drop in several generous cuts of various fish.  The foul-smelling, meaty cocktail with a hint of salmonella rises high above the dull-red water, coloured with animal blood.  I hit the flush.

A heavy sigh of relief escapes my dry lips; the more uncooked, deceased animal muscle that disappears from sight, the quieter the maddening sound becomes.  With every heartbeat, I feel relief flooding into every orifice, my body begins loosening, my normal thoughts returning and my eye-lids rolling down over my eyes like store-front shutters after a long day.

I awake no more than three hours later to the morning sunlight streaming in through the opaque patterned glass window.  I don’t even notice my aching muscles, complaining about having slept on the hard tiled floor, because the ringing is back, and it is worse than ever.

I arrive an hour late to my beige cubicle devoid of anything eyebrow-raising.  A planet of a man that I’m required to refer to as ‘Boss’ shuffles into the view that the entrance to my suffocatingly boring cubicle permits, a displeased expression etched into his unhealthily flabby face.

“So what time do you call this?  You do understand that this is a professional institution, don’t you?  You can’t just turn up whenever you damn well please, there are rules you have to follow goddammit!”

“Right, it won’t happen again.”

“Well, that better be true, otherwise we may have to reconsider the status of your job.”

When he has finally finished spluttering his routine reprimand, he casts a bloodshot eye downwards, his eyebrows furrowing into his fat head.  His cheeks jiggle like jelly as he talks.

“Say, what happened to your hand there?”

I hold up my heavily bandaged right hand, my little finger replaced by a short stump with a crimson stain slowly seeping through the countless layers.

“Oh, this?  It’s nothing really, just a small plumbing accident.”

“Well don’t try using this as an excuse to slack on your work, you’ll be getting no special treatment from me, you hear?  I’ll see you later.”

His stubby legs visibly struggle to support his unfathomable weight as he slowly waddles off to bother more of his cubicle minions.

I stiffen slightly when I hear some very faint ringing, which I know would evolve into an overpowering cacophony before long if left unchecked.

I had made a grim discovery earlier that morning, when the unbearable pulsating sounds had reached their peak and I could not bear to withstand a single second more, for fear that I would lose my mind.  When a frenzied, frantic fumble through the fridge and freezer yielded no raw meat, I had made a most terrible decision.  I had splayed my right hand on the chopping board, grabbed the biggest knife within reach, and before I could rethink it, I brought the blade down into my pinky with a terrible force.  The domestic knife sliced cleanly through flesh and bone.  But I didn’t scream, for the only bodily sensation I experienced was that of the intolerable noise.  I had picked up my dismembered, blood-dripping finger swiftly between my thumb and forefinger, and hurried to the bathroom.  The voice was getting restless.

“Meat… meat… meat…”

I flushed it down the toilet as if it were a piece of trash, and not a part of me that I had always known.  The relief that surged through every part of my body was unlike anything I had ever experienced before; it was a divine, exhilarating ecstasy that somehow sparked a flame of self-forgiveness in my grief-stricken heart.  I had discovered that the relief-fuelled-high of flushing human meat was much greater than that of regular animal meat.

The hustle and bustle of workers going home after a long day of work awakens me from my thoughts.  I look at cheap plastic on the wall, which tells me that it’s six in the evening.  My eye catches sight of a pair of exceedingly familiar, attractive blood-red lips and the long flowing dark-as-night black hair that could belong to no other than Sandra, who I slept with last week and had since been doing her best to avoid me.  I hear the cacodaemonic whispers ringing in my head, and instantly feel my overwhelming self-consciousness and embarrassment drip out of me, much like the blood that had dripped from my finger stump earlier that day.

With entirely new-found confidence, I shoot up out of my depressingly squeaky swivel chair and stride purposefully over to her cubicle.  Having never had the regal permission to view the interior of her cubicle palace, I immediately notice countless photos of Sandra smiling with an incredibly handsome smiling man holding her curvy waist.  In all of the pictures, the two of them were always surrounded by a wall of grinning children, which makes me think about how they look like a small army protecting the king and queen of happiness.

“What do you want?”

“Hey Sandra, I wanted to talk to you about what happened the other night.  It was amazing, and I really like you; I’m not up to anything tonight if you wanted to catch a movie or something.”

“Look, I don’t know what you think happened between us, but it was nothing, it meant nothing and it was a massive mistake that I would rather forget ever happened.  There will never be anything between us so leave me alone, you creep.”

I stare at her cold, unsmiling, elegant face for a long moment before walking away, a sickening resolution hardening somewhere deep within my psyche.  I walk straight out of the building, not bothering to collect my belongings.

I sit behind the wheel of my car, eyes locked onto the office block’s grimy glass doors, the intolerable ringing creeping up to its peak once again, obstructing my normal train of thought, replacing it with a single objective.  It strikes me how hungry that poor thing in my pipes must be by now, how selfish it was of me to come to work and leave it all by itself for the whole day.  I will make it up to it by getting it a very special treat.

The dirty doors jerk open unwillingly and Sandra steps out into the darkening gloom of the neglected parking lot; her footsteps are so delicate that she almost seems to float over to her tastefully colourful car.  I slip silently out of my distasteful lump of rusted metal on wheels and am swallowed by the all-encompassing shadows.   I prowl through the night like a black panther hunting its unsuspecting, oblivious prey.  She unlocks the driver seat’s door and she is just about to climb in when her beautiful face suddenly gets brutally smashed into the top of the car door’s frame, a terrible crunch echoing through the still night air.

Her body instantly goes limp and crumples to the ground in an undignified heap of clothing, black hair and limbs.  I grab hold of Sandra’s immaculate wrists and attempt to pull her towards my car, but I’m confronted by the realisation that unconscious bodies are surprisingly heavy.  I feel my face turn the colour of a fiery sunset as I drag her impeccable form across the grating gravel, which is slowly tearing away at the moisturised skin of her legs.

After what seems like a strength-draining eternity, we reach my car.  I open the boot, and quickly glance around the eerily empty car park for signs of any passers-by.  Wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible, with one final grunt of effort I scoop her up by her torso and unceremoniously dump her body into the cramped space.  I have to bend and twist her into a terribly uncomfortable-looking knot to allow the boot to close.  It locks into place with a satisfying click.  I hurry round into the driver’s seat, slam the door closed, jam the key into the ignition and floor the acceleration.  The car jerks into a rickety trundle and speeds out of the parking lot.  I feel an adrenaline rush surge through me, a biological reward for my cruel act.

The drive home costs me only a fraction of the time that it normally did, for to say that I was speeding would have been a sizeable understatement.  I park by the pavement under the towering assortment of flats that I call home.  I fight the sticky key out of the uncooperative ignition and climb out of my car.  I feel the faint kisses of a light rain peck at my face.

I release the boot lid, and to my relief, Sandra is still very much unconscious, he yellow light of the boot reflecting off of her blood-smeared face; her nose possesses a very unnatural, ugly concave.  Hoping that luck will be on my side and I won’t have the misfortune to bump into one of my many neighbours, I haul Sandra onto my back like some sort of twisted fairytale hero carrying a damsel to safety.  I lock my car and slowly but surely walk into the dingy hallway where a single lightbulb flickers inconsistently.  I hastily poke the plastic call button and wait.  The elevator doors stutter open.

My heart sinks when I see that the elevator houses an inhabitant.  It’s too late to turn back now that the person has already seen me carrying a visibly hurt, unconscious woman’s body.  I wish that I had just taken the stairs as I step into the hanging metal prison.  I’m at once overpowered by the abominable reek that makes my nose cry out for mercy, and my eyes start watering tears of despair.  I can’t fathom how I’m finding the strength not to puke my guts out as the multi-layered sour stench of stale booze, long-dried piss, a whole body that can’t have touched water for a millennium, and a hint of some diabolical diarrhoea fills my mouth, throat, nostrils and lungs.  The man who looks so dehydrated and shrivelled that he strongly resembles a walking raisin wobbles slightly as he jeers haphazardly.

“Hoo woo hoo crizz’n ight, eh?”

“Mmhmm.”

I quickly press the once-shiny button with an almost-entirely faded 4 printed on it.  The elevator doors rattle as they pull themselves closed, trapping me in with the alcoholic and his unholy stink.  We begin ascending towards the heavens.

“Lad, didai ev-uh tell’uh bout ‘t’ time mi un bonnie ate uh rat?”

A ping reverberates around the lift suddenly, signalling that we had arrived at one of its floors.

“Ah, wheel loo’s l’ ike it’s m’ stop.  Was nice takin’ t’ ya lad.”

The man careers unsteadily out of the lift.  The elevator begins to rise once again and I distinctly hear a loud thud followed by a wheezed alcohol-induced groan.

I sigh with relief as I close the door to my apartment behind me.  I flick on my kitchen light, pull out an ugly wooden chair from my dismal table, and manoeuvre Sandra off of my shoulder and onto the chair.  Her head slumps onto her shoulder.

The unbearable ringing is still screaming in my ears as I bind her limbs to the chair with some belts I have lying around.   I drag the chair into the bathroom, position her to the side of my beloved toilet, and lock the door.  My ears pick up the now-familiar whispering voice; it feels soothing to my sore ears.

Sandra raises her head, her bloodshot eyes looking around in panicked confusion.  Her eyes land on mine and she just stares at me; she is perfectly still except for a single fragile tear rolling down her blood-caked face, progressively turning a light crimson colour the further it travels down her cheek.

“Hi Sandra, I’m sorry to have to do this, as I am really quite fond of you, and I loved the night we shared.  But you were so damn harsh earlier, you really hurt me, Sandra.  For the first time since I was a kid, I have a real friend who cares about me, and I care about them; I want to make them happy.  That’s where you come in, Sandra; my poor friend is trapped down in the pipes under my toilet, and he’s terribly hungry.”

“Meat…”

I kneel next to the toilet affectionately.

“Hey buddy, I’ve brought you a special treat, I hope you like her.”

Sandra watches in obscene horror as her abductor seems to talk to a toilet as if it were sentient.  She groans in pain as she talks.

“You’re fucking crazy!  Let me go, you fucking psychopath!”

“Oh, Sandra, as much as your heart-felt words touch me, I can’t do that, as the ringing is getting unbearable.”

I pick up the large kitchen knife out of the sink, still coated with my blood from earlier that morning, and begin to approach her.  It’s at that point that she starts screaming.

I can’t guess how much time has passed when I have my next cognitive thought; all I know is that the abhorrent ringing in my head has subsided entirely, and my crazed thoughts have returned to normal.  The next thing I notice is that my hands feel abnormally warm and sticky.  I cast my eyes down and see that they are drenched in blood.  I look around at my surroundings in such unthinkable horror that my whole body tightens so much that it seems to shrink in on itself, and I daren’t breathe.

Every inch of my body and clothing is slick with life liquid.  The usually shiny white bathroom floor tiles are covered with writhing veins of blood splattered upon them, the patterned walls hold red raindrops, the sink houses a shallow crimson pool, and the toilet is surrounded by shredded sickening slithers of raw meat.  But none of the horrors of what I have just gazed upon could ever prepare my troubled mind for what I saw next.

An indescribably inhuman, mangled body sits atop the blood-soaked wooden chair, most of the thing’s flesh and muscle has been clumsily sliced off, and the limbs are either terribly damaged, or completely missing.  The chest’s skin has been removed, revealing the ribcage which houses only a hanging heart which has ceased beating forevermore.  Most of the other organs are gone.  My unblinking eyes traverse the nightmarish scene up to the thing’s head, which is more pulverised meat than a face.  It’s skinless, eyeless, noseless, and jawless; the tongue dangles down into the open-air sadly.  I notice the traumatising monstrosity’s blood-matted, long flowing dark-as-night black hair, and I come to the unthinkable realisation that it could be no other than Sandra’s hair.

I suddenly feel vile bile stampeding up my throat, so I instinctively throw myself down in front of the toilet, which turned out to be a horrible mistake.  I’m on the verge of puking my guts out when I make eye contact with a single golden-green eye bobbing upright in the water.  I gaze into its neverending, accusing stare.

A very thin, bony hand with grey bloated skin slowly emerges from the depths of the toilet, its fingers bent and crooked.  It reaches Sandra’s eyeball and snatches it greedily, quickly receding back into the pipes.

I make a pitiful, agonised howling noise because I can’t bear to accept the unspeakable deed that I’ve carried out; I don’t know what to think, feel or do.  I’m losing my mind. I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the suffocatingly warm blood clinging to me.  I wobble to the bathtub and turn on the blue-capped cold tap.  I desperately shove my face under the roaring, ice-cold waterfall, rubbing myself roughly in a panicked effort to clean Sandra’s sticky blood off me.  The blood-infused water pools in the bath.  I stand up and look at the man I’ve become in the mirror.

I notice movement out of the corner of my eye and gaze in a petrified stillness as the withered hand I’d seen in the toilet clutches onto the edge of the toilet bowl, its long black nails screeching on the porcelain.  A second equally withered and disgusting hand latches onto the bowl, but its little finger seems weirdly familiar and remarkably healthy compared to the rest of the hand.  I come to the harrowing realisation that this thing’s little finger had until this morning been my own.  The arms that are draped in loose diaphanous skin shake violently as if struggling to pull up some great weight.  With popping, sloshing and snapping sounds, it slowly climbs up out of the toilet.

My legs give way and I collapse to the ground, as for the first time in almost twenty years I stare upon the scrawny, the severely shrivelled bony face of my first and only childhood best friend, Charlie. Charlie stands unevenly; he is still the size and shape of a young child, but parts of him are terribly malnourished and weak; he seems to be more sagging translucent skin and bone than a proper body. But other parts of him seem to be fresh and full of blood and life; it’s as if parts of his flesh are from different creatures. I recognise the slab of fish that I’d flushed down the toilet yesterday now residing in the side of his foot, the chicken breast in his thigh, the mince poking out from under the skin of his knee and the bacon rashers in his shoulder. His skull is almost entirely visible through the misty transparent skin, which makes Sandra’s piercing golden-green eyeballs, delicate nose, and defined lower jaw contrast even more.

Too weak to make my vocal chords work, I mouth the words “I’m so sorry.”

He takes one heavy, lumbering step towards me, his soggy feet slapping on the bloodied tiles.

“Meat…”

He takes another sickening step. Forcing my voice into action, I croak.

“Charlie, you were like a brother to me, I never wanted to hurt you.”

A furious gurgling sound comes out of his throat and his steps quicken, the space between us growing ever smaller. I begin to cry, the sobs racking my body.

“Please Charlie, don’t do this, I love you, please.”

He looms over me; the reek of blood and rotting meat fills my nostrils. I feel utterly hopeless and unable to move. Charlie bends over, some of his fragile bones snapping, he opens his mismatched jaw full of small yellowed and adult white gleaming teeth. His teeth come down into my arm with surprising strength, snapping my bone in two. I scream in agony as Charlie slowly and methodically devours my body. I don’t even try to stop him, I have no will power left in me.

The final thought that my brain would ever process is that of a hope that no one else ever finds Charlie lurking in their pipes.

FMP Project Proposal

Project-Proposal-form_COMPLETED

Final major project story development

So the very start of my thought process for my final major project started when I was reading a book called How To Stop Time by Matt Haig.

There was a scene where the main character’s mum was accused and prosecuted of being a witch in the Salem witch trials.  During my trip to the science museum, natural history museum and the V&A I didn’t find anything that really inspired me.  I knew that I wanted to do something dark and creepy for my FMP, but nothing I saw really jumped out at me.  That was until I was wandering around the V&A and I found a painting that reminded me of that scene from the book I mentioned above, where a man accuses a mum of being a witch.  The painting was hung quite high up on the wall, so the photo I took of it is quite blurry.

Le Malade Imaginaire (1843) – Leslie, Charles Robert.

I then started researching Salem witch trials.  I had a couple ideas about making an animation about the injustice and emotional turmoil of the trials, but I didn’t feel very inspired by that idea.

I did however like the idea of exploring a character’s inner turmoil and mental health through an animation, and I remembered the art of Shawn Coss.

I like the idea of making a live-action film but with animation added in post-production.  If I were to go with the theme of inner turmoil and mental health then it would be cool to use an art style similar to Shawn Coss’s.

He draws how it feels to have certain mental health conditions.  His art is very dark and creepy, depicting these sufferers as ghoulish beings who appear to be in great pain and anguish.

and what’s cool about them is that people who actually have these conditions say that these drawings accurately depict how they feel, and help them to describe their emotions to others.  I’ve heard of therapists hanging them up on their walls because of how accurate and therapeutic they are for their patients.

I watched this video about a show made with live-action film and animation.

I found this animation on youtube that has an art style I really like and is just generally unsettling and creepy.  I think it deals with depression, but it’s very hard to tell seeing as it’s just so damn weird.

After watching that, this was recommended to me by Youtube.

I liked this animation, although it was so messed up.  I was reading the comments and found one talking about the original story that the animation was based on.

This ending is even more messed up, but still pretty cool.  It reminded me of creepypasta stories and seeing how this animation is based on a pre-existing story, I had the idea that it might be cool to do an animation of a creepypasta.  For anyone who doesn’t know, a creepypasta is defined by Wikipedia as:

“horror-related legends or images that have been copied and pasted around the Internet. These Internet entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories intended to scare readers. They include gruesome tales of murder, suicide, and otherworldly occurrences.”

Probably the most famous creepypasta is Slenderman, which has had multiple games and even a feature film made of it.

Because I’ve never really been into creepypastas because I’ve always been too scared to read them, I know about almost none of them, so I read this article to educate myself.

https://mashable.com/article/creepypastas/?europe=true

Some of the creepypastas that sounded interesting were; “The Russian Sleep Experiment”, “Persuaded”, “Psychosis” and “Gateway of the Mind”.  I’m gonna go read these for inspiration.

I read them, and they were very good and entertaining, but no ideas formulated out of them.

A couple nights ago I was lying in bed trying to think of an idea for a creepypasta story that would encompass some of my fears.  I thought that being alone in the dark late at night would be the perfect time to think up something scary to spook me.  I want to create something with the aim not to spook other people, but to spook me, as I think by doing that I will create something more authentic.

A lot of my ideas for projects come to me at night when I’m on the cusp of sleep and am almost dreaming.  and so I came up with the idea of an apocalypse where demon-like creatures with black bodies and bright eyes live in shadows and darkness, and would horribly kill anyone who found themselves in a shadow.

I think that this idea of having killer shadows would work pretty well in a story, as in this guide to writing creepypastas I read, it states that a good creepypasta starts in the life of a normal person, living a normal life so that readers can find it easier to imagine themselves as the main character so that when shit starts to hit the fan, it has a greater effect on them.  And what’s more ordinary than a simple shadow?

https://www.deviantart.com/komradapex/art/Some-Do-s-And-Don-ts-When-Writing-a-Creepypasta-471145019

A very irrational fear I sometimes have is of a form with appearing out of a space that I cannot see in the darkness like as I’m lying in bed, I sometimes imagine some kind of monster’s head coming into my line of sight out of a space that the bed blocks from my field of vision.  It sounds like a childish monster-under-the-bed fear, but my imagination goes into overdrive in the dark so I can’t help it.

The horror images that tend to frighten me the most are ones where a creepy being has big staring eyes and is directly staring out of the image so that it feels like it’s looking at me.  So I felt like combining the monster-under-the-bed fear and the big staring eyes fear into a horror cocktail of a story would be ideal.  This story idea would also give me the freedom to create some creepy art with a variety of different ghoulish creatures.

When I started thinking of what some of the creatures could look like, the design of the villain from the cartoon series “Over The Garden Wall” popped into my head.

I could also take inspiration from some of the art of Shawn Coss that I talked about earlier.

This idea was definitely inspired by the Doctor Who episode “Silence in the Library” where there are these creatures called “Vashta Nerada” that appear as shadows to hunt.  One character is attacked by them, which strip her flesh clean to the bone instantly.  This Doctor Who episode haunted my little brain when I was a kid.

I want to know if anyone else has thought of this idea for a creepypasta, so I’m going to go do some research.

I watched a video where it was talking about the fear of the dark, which is called Nyctophobia.  I thought that this would make a great name for my story idea.  I googled the name and it turns out that someone has already written a story called nyctophobia about a dark demonic creature that lives in shadows.  https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Nyctophobia

This annoyed me because although it is almost impossible to think up an entirely new idea, I want my idea to be as unique as possible.  So I’m going to try to think of something new.

I was thinking about story ideas late at night last night and I thought of some kind of creature that lives on the inside of your eyelids or a creature that lives in people’s eyes and when it has gathered enough strength they sprout legs out of the eyeball and climb out of the person’s eye sockets.  The idea of eyeless people walking around scares me, so I guess that that’s a good start.  I found this story someone has written in reference to the eyelid idea.   https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Eyelid_Man

A lot of effective creepypasta stories seem to take a normal scenario and put something unsettling in, like Slenderman.  The whole thing started with someone making some black and white pictures of children playing in the woods or in playgrounds, with an unsettling tall white figure in the background.

A truly great horror story is one that makes you think that the monster could be real, and make you feel an ounce of danger, even though rationally you know that it’s just a story and you’re completely safe, but there’s always that thought of “what if” that keeps you unsettled.

I watched this really interesting video.

In it, she talks about the “uncanny valley” which is when we see something that is familiar, but something is off about it, like maybe an android that looks like a human but is not quite human, somethings off.  Stories that use the uncanny valley well give the reader a sense of unease.

I watched this video and learnt that effective horror films need to have scenes that build up tension and then release it with a jumpscare.  two examples that it uses in the video are two scenes with a clown from different movies.  One of them has only a couple seconds of build-up. with some pointless mini scares, like a toy spinning, then it shows the main jumpscare with the clown.  It is scary, but it is nowhere near as effective as the other one, where there are a good 30 seconds of tension build-up where the character is looking at the lifeless clown, whilst getting more and more freaked out.  Then just when the tension reaches so high that you feel like you can’t take it anymore, the jumpscare happens.  The effectiveness of the 2nd one is much greater than the 1st.

I also learnt that when there is a monster or dangerous being in a horror film, it can be good to have a shot showing the victim from the monster’s point of view, as it can make the person look small and powerless.

Another thing to consider that it mentions is that a lot of effective horror movies invade places where people feel safe, like someone’s home, someone’s hallway, even someone’s bath.  This strips the audience of the security that they feel within their own homes and can make the horror more impactful for them; especially because it gives their paranoid imagination the possibility that a monster or ghoulish being could appear in their supposedly safe spaces at any time.

From my albeit limited experience of consuming horror entertainment, one of the things that scare me the most is the fear of the unknown.  H.P. Lovecraft, one of the best horror writer’s to ever live once said: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”.  Although this quote takes on new meaning in light of the fact that Lovecraft was apparently a huge xenophobe, I completely agree with this idea in horror.

Take the film A Quiet Place, it is masterful at building up tension, as because the monsters can only navigate the world and hunt by hearing sounds, the survivors need to be as quiet as possible, so it creates an almost unbearable tension with how quiet and devoid of music and foley sounds it is.  What also adds to this tension is that up until about halfway through the movie you don’t see the monster; it is this fear of the unknown that makes it all the scarier.  But when the monster was shown, in my personal opinion, the scare factor of the monster instantly disappeared, as I now knew what it looked like, and it almost felt less dangerous.

I watched this video.  It states that this fear of the unknown, this fear that you know something is there, but you can’t see it or describe it, is called “dread”.  It also states that this dread is the most effective form of horror, as opposed to the two other types of horror it talks about, “terror” and “horror”.  Terror refers to when you see the monster or the killer, and horror is in this context when you see the gruesome, gory aftermath of the attack.  With the story that I write and film, I want to instil a strong sense of dread, as opposed to terror or horror.

As I watch these videos on effective horror storytelling, it’s becoming clear to me that I need to understand some of the psychology of horror, and why it makes us scared, so I’m going to research that.

I watched this video.  One of the things that I learnt from it is that things that are taken out of their place and put somewhere they don’t belong can suddenly become eerie.  The example it uses is a clown in a circus or a birthday party is innocent and not necessarily scary, but a clown at 11pm at night standing in your back garden holding a cleaver and staring at you is definitely scary.  It does not belong there, the normal is juxtaposed with the abnormal.

My friend Dia told me that a lot of phobias that people have are instilled in childhood, like clowns, spiders, snakes, the dark, etc.

I watched this video.

 

30/3/20

I’m now going to start writing the date every time I add to this, so that it is more like a diary, and gives a better sense of the timescale of this project, and also my terrible time management.  I haven’t done any college work for about a week, because last week London went into lockdown because of COVID-19, and I’ve been finding it very hard to motivate myself to do anything, but I’m trying to now.

I was still exploring the idea of writing a story where demonic creatures hide in the dark when I went to the toilet one night and suddenly had a really weird new idea for a story.  A little bit of pretext for it; that night I’d just watched “The Platform”, which was a bizarre and horrific horror film that involved a whole lot of cannibalism and gory body horror.

I’d also been (and still am) reading Junji Ito’s incredibly weird manga “Uzumaki”, where one of the characters in the first chapter gets completely and utterly obsessed with spirals, and said obsession ultimately leads to his extremely weird death.

So I thought of the really weird story idea of a man who gets obsessed with flushing things down the toilet for no discernable reason, and this obsession eventually leads him to run out of money, because of obscene water bills and spending his last pennies on more objects to flush.  At this point, he’d get desperate, kill and dismember his wife, and flush her too.  After he’d killed a couple more people he’d eventually dismember and flush himself too.  He’d then go on to supernaturally haunt toilets, sending people insane and making them do the same twisted acts that he had done.

It’s a really weird and disturbing idea, but so are all good creepypastas.  I mentioned at some point earlier that a good horror plot device is to have the villain infiltrate the protagonist’s home, which is where a lot of people feel most safe, so this could make viewers be reminded of the story when they’re at home and feel scared, which is what any good horror film or story should do.  So whenever readers were in the bathroom, they would be reminded of the idea of an evil, murderous spirit.

I started writing it, and considering I haven’t written a story for a fair few years now, I’m pretty happy with how it’s going.  I’d forgotten just how much I love describing stuff, like, I love stringing together flowery words, in an effort to stylishly give the reader a vivid picture of the world around the protagonist.  H.P. Lovecraft is a writer that I really admire and his descriptions are so delicious that they give me goosebumps.  I think that using flowery words, and finding new ways to weave sentences together make stories way more interesting to read.

For example, I’m sure you’ll agree that this Lovecraft quote “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far” is infinitely better than “We live on a small island that we probably shouldn’t have sailed far from.”  There’s just no comparison between the two.  Anyway, enough babbling about that.

Whilst writing it, I had the idea main character (who I don’t want to give a name so that it will be easier for readers to imagine themselves as him) would have a tragic backstory, where he had accidentally killed his best friend in his childhood and had been living with the terrible guilt ever since.  One night in the bathroom, he would hallucinate hearing his dead friend’s voice coming from the toilet, and would gradually go insane as he flushed things the voice asked for, trying to rid himself of his guilt.  I think that this is a much better plot for the story than not having any reason at all for the sudden insanity, and makes it slightly more believable.

I’ve decided to call the story “Flush”, for obvious reasons.  I did a quick google and couldn’t find any creepypastas that had people furiously flushing things down the toilet, so it’s a relief to finally think of something that’s somewhat original.

I think that I mentioned at some point earlier in this blog post that almost all successful creepypastas come with a very creepy and disturbing picture, so a part of what I want to do when I’ve finished writing this story is to design an intensely creepy image showing the protagonist in the worst state of his guilt-triggered insanity.

At the time of writing this, the progress I’ve made with writing it is that I’ve established the world, set the equilibrium, written the backstory, and he has just heard a voice coming from the toilet for the first time.

 

1/4/20

I haven’t written anything for a couple of days now because I don’t feel very confident with writing dialogue, and am finding it hard to think about how to approach it.  So I’ve been watching some youtube videos on writing dialogue.

This youtube channel is so damn good, it has a ton of useful information and analyses on film making and writing.  In this video, however, the narrator explores one rule of writing good dialogue where instead of the character’s outright saying the subtext, they instead live it out.  What I mean by this is there’s a scene in Tarantino’s film Inglorious Bastards where three spies posing as Italians are trying to infiltrate a nazi party.  They meet the host, and let’s say the host can tell that they’re spies and outright says it; that doesn’t build up tension or make for interesting dialogue.  What actually happens, however, is that the host asks them to introduce themselves, and the spies speak in imperfect Italian, so this indicates to the host that they’re probably spies, so he makes subtle gestures that explains that he’s onto them.  This is much better and more enjoyable than the first scenario.

 

9/4/20

I’ve been writing quite a lot, and I think the end is in sight.  I’ve been trying to make the dialogue as realistic as possible to enhance the readers’ immersion, but I have a sort of tunnel vision and can’t tell whether it’s any good.  After I finish it I will need to edit it to clean it up, and I will get feedback from friends and family on how it can be improved.  Once I’ve made it the best that it can be, I will start developing ideas for the animation/short film and creepy image to accompany it.  So far I’ve written about 2,500 words.  I also don’t want it to be too long, as I’ll probably start to ramble before long.

 

28/4/20

That took me way longer than it should have, but I’ve finally finished writing the story.  It ended up being 5,394 words long.  It got very gory and messed and I’m not sure how I feel about other people reading it, but oh well.  I don’t think it’s even that scary, it’s mostly just disgusting and gory.

I feel like some of the elements don’t even make sense or hang together and that the whole story is just a clump of different ideas swirling around in one big mess.  But I guess that this goes to show that writing takes practice to become good at it.

Up until near the end I’d been writing it in 3rd person in the past tense, but I’ve heard that most of the good creepypastas are written in the 1st person, as that is a lot more immersive, so I converted the entire thing into 1st person, past tense.

I also decided that instead of simply naming the story “Flush” which is a pretty unsuspecting and dull name, calling it “The Thing In My Pipes”.  I think that this is a lot more interesting and creepy.

 

5/5/20

I’ve decided that I’m going to make the story into a pixel art animation, so go look at my next blog posts that I’m going to make for that stuff.