Logline
A frazzled film student's burnout takes physical form, and threatens more than just her ability to finish her thesis film.
Thesis
Many students believe their unhealthy habits help them finish their work, but eventually they will lead to burnout, and the work will suffer for it.
Proposal
A 6 minute 2D animated short made in Adobe Animate with a strong emphasis on cinematography to improve boarding skills, and sound design to improve filmmaking skills.
Inspiration
I knew from the start that I wanted to do something horror related because I think it's a hard genre to get right, and because horror is such an underutilized genre in animation. After watching a lot of horror movies, I realized that my favorite subgenres was slashers and giallos (which are basically just Italian slashers but with more neon lighting.)
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The main tropes I wanted to draw from these in my short were having good lighting, a strong female protagonist, and a scary monster antagonist.
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Drawing from slashers also affected the score a lot, I really wanted just the music itself to instill a sense of dread, but also for it to sound like it would fit in a movie from the 70's.
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Story
Originally the story was about a student working on their film from home, and the monster was a big fiery beast.
Eventually the story changed so that the protagonist is working at school and the monster became more of a burnt, bubbling corpse of the protagonist.
Storyboard Animatic
Characters
Props
Color Keys
Backgrounds
To make doing backgrounds easier, I made a 3D model of the set so that I could screenshot and draw over the models later.
Animation
I played around with possibly animating in Blender, but just due to my familiarity with the program, I ended up animating in Adobe Animate and doing compositing in Adobe After Effects.
Shot Progression
Final Thoughts
This is the 4th film I've made during my time at CIA, and I've learned so much about filmmaking and about myself throughout these past 4 years. This film is a culmination of all the mistakes and successes I had made on previous films, and I can't wait to create more short (and maybe feature) films in the future.
Thank you for watching!