The festival is the 24th-29th of September 2020 and films will be streamed to a registered Zoom audience. I may also be there in a window for a post screening Q&A live in ZOOM. The link about will have all the pertinent information if I miss posting anything here.
After about two years of preparation and animation my animated "The Cask of Amontillado" is finished. Mike Luce is the voice of Montresor and Michael Z. Keamy is Fortunato. I tried to be the voice of Montresor at first but I was beyond terrible and Mike Luce kindly redid that audio for me. I went with human like animal characters this time instead of cartoon humans. I thought it might work better and give me more options with the animation plus added some symbolism.
I used Cinema 4D as I am not ready for something like this in Blender yet. It was edited in Final Cut X and I did not use After effects for the compositing but used Apple's underrated and often ignored Motion software instead and it worked out great. The animation still has some issues I am having trouble with, such as decent walk cycles and some of the movements were not as smooth as I would have liked but overallI am very happy with the results. Nothing is ever perfect, is it? The settings were a long haul to make as the upper and lower catacombs are huge and cavernous and lit by torches. The sound was a little more complex as I had to record a bunch of foley and sound effects to flesh out the sound and add more atmosphere and detail to the short.
During the final edit, I noticed a bunch of things I had somehow missed, one was the wrong source files were used for a sequence which made the image looked pixelated and another was a terrible clicking noise during a dialog scene I can't believe I had not heard during the editing process. My excuse is that the noise here is non stop between the construction and the fact I am not in glorious isolation but home with my spouse which does not give me the solitude I need to work efficiently. Constant distraction is death to a project like this so I am glad I was able to get it done and be happy with the end result.
I have two posters ready in case I decide to enter it in some festivals. I have had the luck to be in one or another over the last 6 years so having promotional stuff ready is a fun way to tie up a project in a nice bow.
If you like the animation, tell me! Like it on Youtube and pass it around so maybe it can get some attention and love!
Sets for this were made over a year ago and some of dialog was recorded last November. Then I prioritized making "28 Young Men" and "25 years Later". I did the voice of Montresor but it was pretty terrible so I asked Mike Luce to re-do it and he graciously agreed.
Unlike my last 9 gothic horror animations, I decided to shake things up and go with animal characters instead of human. I think this will work better and as I got a little better making these types of characters the last couple of years it made the rigging and texturing go easier and work nicer. That said, I keep finding little corrections to make in the final models each clip so by the end, they should be perfect!
The image is of Fortunato, who will not end well in this story. The other, Montresor, is a raven based character. The setting is very dark and sombre so I added a coloured fill light to each character to keep them visible and colour coded those lights to match their roles in the story. Fortunato is warm light and Montresor is a cool blue.
