What I would like to do in my final major project is an urban legend (or creepypasta) theme short film. The main idea of this film is to tell an abnormal or horror story. It is quite different to other horror topics like zombies or ghost. The film base on some ideas from Control, SCP (Secure,Contain,Protect), The Backrooms or The Thing.
The project name is Channel-7:
Channel-7 is a short horror animation in which the protagonist who is working overtime experiences hallucinations after watching the non-existent Channel-7 on TV. This somehow triggers an abnormal behavior in him, eventually, leading to tragedy.
After I finished the script of animation. I started to draw the storyboard and design shots. The whole animation has about 40 shots at first and finally added to about 55 shots.
I then started to prepare for assets and character. I firstly find a free male base character on website and reshape his head in Zbrush to get the result that I want. I then find clothes in character creator 4, which is quite suitable for my character.
I then used Substance Painter and Mari to paint skin textures of this character. I spent most of the time making diffuse texture, normal and SSS textures because these textures will significantly affect the quality of character rendering. Especially the SSS ( sub-surface scattering) texture, which judges the texture of human bone and skin.
Then I started modeling and texturing scenes in my animation. Totally I need four scenes: working room, livingroom, corridor and printing room. Since these rooms requires a lot of furnitures and props. I modeled part of it, others are found on the internet, all the models are free. After that I textured them in Substance Painter.
After that I turned to do animation. The animation contains camera animation, props animation and character animation. Camera animations and prop animations are quite easy. I have already set up the rig and controlers on these props so that I just need to do some simple animations. However, character animations can be a big task, which not only has body animations but also facial performance. I tried to finish about 2-3 shots everyday so that I can have enough time to do VFX parts and compositions. I also applied the knowledge of facial expressions in my research into my performance animation.
Then I started to make VFX shots. There are several shots that requires VFX: two blood shots and one explosion & RBD shot. I used Houdini to finish these shots. Since the number of VFX shots is limited, it only took me a week to finish.
After I finished VFX shots I started compositing some of rendered shots. I build up a compositing templete in Nuke so that I don’t need to redo the same thing again and again. I used z depth channel and motionvector channel to add depth of field and motionblur on shots. I also exported each light layer individually so that I can change each light information in Nuke.
I also start to edit the videos after I composited them in Nuke. This time I use Premiere Pro to edit these shots. I did a rough editing at first, then I polished the editing and add sound effects and music into it. The sound editing significantly increased the whole quality of the animation.
During the production of this project, I met some problems and realized the limitation of my hardware. However, I overcame these problems and successfully finished the whole animation. I think the camera design and the storytelling still has some problem. I would like to fix them, but the time is to limited since I also spend sometime to prepare for job interviews and tests. I tried my best to make this horror animation. Overall, it look great.
I almost finished all the works in the beginning of this week. I just need to check all things again and fix some bugs in them.
I redo some of the compositing stuff this week. When I was doing the editing stuff, some new ideas came out of my mind. I thought it would be great if I could add them into the shots. For example, in shot 44, I firstly want the character to open his eyes to see part of the creature and then the shot suddenly turns to black. I then think maybe I can add a creature hand into that shots. At first the hand is out of the camera and comes across the camera at the end of the shot. Therefore, I add the creature hand into the scene and animated it.
I also repolished part of the editing. I add color adjustment fx on part of the shots to make them looks better. I inspired by the film Matrix,, which uses green filter to separate virtual world and reality. Therefore, I add green filter on shots that the character is in hallucination.
I finished the compositing section this week. Nothing fancy there.
This week I trying to add music into it. As we all know, music is an important feature in horror films and horror games. Good music design and sound design can effectively increase the immersion and atmosphere. Therefore, I did another research on the internet to look for free horror music. Unfortunately I can only find part of sound that fits my animation, so I have to buy some of high quality horror music online. Thanks for the audio resources from Boom Library and Triune Digital, I find a large number of great cinematic horror sound for my animations.
There are several types of music sound that I used for the horror animation: Hit sound, Stinger sound and Rise sound, which are normally used in films and games. Each sound has its unique functions. Some of them creates tense atmosphere, others creates shock effects. It took me some time to finish the music editing, and the final result is great.
This week I continue to do the compositing stuff. With the set of compositing templete in Nuke, I can easily finish each shot in a short time. However, I need to finish about 40 to 50 shots’ compositing, which still take days to finish.
Since I used render layers in some shots, I need to merge them together in Nuke, which takes some time to finish. Also, I need to animate some of the lighting animations in Nuke, so I write some expressions to animate some attributes like gamma or gain. I also add vignette, glow and grains on each shot to create a sense of cinematic. The overall compositing process is quite easy to be finished.
I also start to edit the videos after I composited them in Nuke. This time I use Premiere Pro to edit these shots. At first I did a rough editing for the all shots. After that I realize that the rhythm has some problem, since the length of some shots is too short. Therefore, I firstly turn to Nuke to retime some shots and export them again, which solved some of the problem. However, part of shots is not suitable to be retimed, so I have to add more shots between them to make the editing looks more natural.
I also add some typing effects in After effect. It is quite easy to be finished by using expressions and some simple animations.
After the video editing is finished, I started to add sound effects into it. I write a list of sound effects that I need. For example, human breathe sound, light flickering sound, TV sound, etc. After that I turned to youtube and other websites to search for free sound effect. Fortunately, I successfully found a large number of high quality sound effects that I need, and they are all free. This process took me plenty of time, but the result is quite satisfying. When I added these sounds into the video, everything becomes better.
Next week I will still keep working on the editing and trying to add music into it.
