Award: Pulled Towards the Sea voted best Horror film in Warped Dimension 5 Festival!

 

Part of the "Another Hole in the Head" San Francisco, "Warped Dimension" is a fun online festival I have been a part of for many years now. It was wonderful be voted for an award! 

If you missed the film, it's on Youtube. Be sure to like and subscribe and all that so more people can see it. 

Animation: Pulled Towards the Sea

I wrote and illustrated a short story before deciding to make this animation and got some feedback on that which helped this be a much better story in the end. The last 2 years have been a horror of dealing with dementia in several close family members and how this terrible disease is very much a monster that takes those we love away in one of the most heart breaking and sorrowful ways. 

Originally this seemed like a good project to do in Blender and start my transition away from Cinema 4D before my old version of that software stops working but I have not been able to  get to a point where I can  understand Blender well enough to do that and getting this done seemed more important than learning something new(ish). 

I decided early on that black and white would be best and I don't regret it. I am an avid photographer who especially loves black and white images and tried to give this a sort of silent film/vintage photography look. I worked for months on the cliff set and small town to get the look I wanted and tried not to overdo it on the details that would never be seen or used. The shot of the walk from the town to the cliffs was the most daunting and took 46 hours to render. I wanted the pace to be slow but I think it doesn't drag on and it has kept the attention the few people who have seen it so far. 

Editing in Final Cut Pro and composting was done with Apple's long neglected but sometimes still updated Motion software which I like working in and doesn't cost me money every month like After Effects would. 

Music and sound effects are by me and I am not expert in either but I hope they work well enough. I am planning to try and get this in some festivals. The "Another Hole in the Head"  in San Francisco has been very good to me over the years and I hope other festivals will pick it up as long as I can find the money to enter a few! 

Personal note:

This is the first gothic animation I have made based on a short story I wrote myself. It is the first animation I have done in over 2 years and is the direct result of why I hadn't produced anything else in all that time. 

As I often state with my projects, Mike Luce was kind enough with all the other things he is doing to make the time to do the voice work and give me feedback. Core4d.com where I have been an active member for many, many years also deserves credit for the encouragement of the gang in the forums there. 

Illustration: 3 new illustrations for my short story

 As usual, as I started this project I was hating how it was coming out but in the end I am pretty happy with the look of these drawings. I wanted a sort of wood carving look like I see in some old books from over 100 years ago. Simple and heavily relying on a white ink on black paper  style. I placed them in the document and I think they look appropriate for the story and I will likely do another similar project at some point. The next step is to make "Pulled Towards the Sea" into a 3 animation that won't be to influenced by these drawings, I would like ti to be it's own thing. 

Drawing in both Procreate and Affinity photo. I actually did some experimenting with AI art and was not surprised how disappointing it was, even for inspiration. I get that it can be fun t tell the computer to make a picture of something using a few words and then seeing what it does but despite what we see online, in reality the AI art is pretty bad. Photoshop has a different way of using it now it seems, where you can iterate sections of an image and keep fine tuning it, even using your own photos as reference so maybe that could be useful. Much more fun and satisfying to do it yourself! 

Short Story Title Illustration: Pulled Towards the Sea 2 versions

 I am working on a multimedia project of sorts. The first part is a short story with a few illustrations. I wanted to try for a look as if ink was scraped off a white board. I used to do this a lot when I was young when I would buy pre-inked boards to work with. I liked the old fashioned "etching look". In addition to the writing and drawing, I have started creating the sets for an animated version. Both are already written out, the script version is simpler and the short story version is a little deeper into the subject. I haven't written an original script from scratch for any of my gothic horror animations so this is a first and personal project. 

The size and format was determined by the page size so it would fit when it finally published maybe months to a year or more from now. I can't decide if the figure is too finely rendered or nicely ambiguous.  think, hope the it is obvious that it is a person in the air. She should be a little smaller but then she would only a white blob.  I have thought of adding a grey tone to the cliffs and the skin on the person but that cancels out the etching look I want. No hurry I guess to decide. 

EDIT: another version.

Adding clouds looked confusing in this style. My friend Keamy wanted me to try it with the figure still on the edge and I added a moon to balance out the composition. I think I like it better. What do I know?