Project Summary:
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.