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.

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.