For this week’s premise exercise we were asked to write premises that focused on movement. My contribution to the premise channel was ‘The thing reached out towards her; its multi-segmented limbs creaking as they unfurled, its fingers grasping at the air. She trembled, frozen in terror’. With this premise I was focusing on the idea of bodies moving in unnatural ways, and how this could be used to provoke unease or fear. I ended up not being entirely pleased with this premise because while I thought it was good for exploring character physicality and movement through space pretty well, it didn’t really afford much in terms of the movement of the camera / view, which was a lot of what we talked about during class. But since I still liked the general concept I decided to stick with it.
I was a little unsure of how to approach this exercise, so I went back to the basics we covered in week 1. The location, the characters, and the action. I already had the location established in my mind; a city park, late at night. Something with low lighting conditions, and lots of trees, but that still has wide, orderly paths, and the bright lights and noise and movement of the city streets are relatively close by and accessible. I was imagining something akin to Royal Park in Melbourne; fairly expansive, but still close to major roads.
In terms of characters, I had two. There is the protagonist, who is a young woman, travelling home at night, and then there is ‘the thing’. In her comments on the premise, Kate suggested I consider what ‘the thing’ was; whether it was necessarily a malevolent figure, or if it could be benevolent, or even simply curious about the world. She also asked about the relationship between the two characters, whether the woman had sought ‘the thing’ out, or summoned it, or if she had merely happened upon it.
The question that I was tossing between was whether ‘the thing’ was real or not. Whether the story i wanted to be telling was a supernatural horror one (like my initial references for writing the premise were), or if I wanted to be telling a story about a girl who is so overcome by her fears (of the dark, of being alone at night) that she projects those fears onto her surroundings, and her mind plays tricks on her. I decided on the latter because a story about a girl being attacked and killed by a monster seemed a little too grim.
Having decided this, I then had to settle what it was that the girl actually sees. I was drawn to my use of the word ‘creaking’ to describe the sound of the limbs moving, in my original premise.The word put me in mind of the way that big, heavy tree branches sound when they blow in the wind. So I thought it would make sense for the ‘thing’ to really be a tree, and the movement of the branches in the wind, and a trick of the moonlight, and the girl’s own fears trick her into seeing it as a monster.
With this, I decided to focus on ‘action’ and break down the story into beats, which are as follows…
- Late at night, a young woman gets off a train, and leaves the station, crossing the street to head towards a dimly lit park.
- The woman enters the park, walking quickly.. We see her tighten her grip on her bag.
- There is a sound off the path, into the trees. The girl stops, and peers into the shadows.
- Seeing nothing, she starts to walk again, slightly faster than before.
- She hears the sound again, stops, looks into the trees. Still nothing.
- She hears another sound, behind her this time.
- She whirls around, looking across to the other side of the path.
- A creature looms above her, silhouetted against the moon.
- The thing reached out towards her; its multi-segmented limbs creaking as they unfurled, its fingers grasping at the air. She trembled, frozen in terror
- With a snap the creature starts to lunge forward.The girl screams and runs
- She runs blindly along the path, until she comes to the park entrance, bathed in the yellow light of the streetlamps.
- Breathing heavily, she turns to look back down the path into the park, but nothing moves.
- gripping her keys between her fingers, the girl carefully advances back into the park
- Coming back to where she had seen the creature, she stops.
- A large, particularly gnarled tree stands close to the path, its branches swaying in the wind, creaking as they move.
Having created the outline of the story, I wondered how to further develop it. Having done story thumbnailing/boarding for my previous exercise, I wasn’t keen to repeat it. I decided to create a shot list, so that I could track the movement of the camera/viewer as well as of the movement within the frame, and assign some of the angles / shots / movement techniques we had discussed in class.
My work this week deals with fear of the dark, and of the unknown. I think it’s suited to the medium of animation due to the ability to use animation to exaggerate features, and heighten the emotions that the character is feeling. I also think a much more convincing monster could be created more easily in an animated work, without the need for the extensive practical effects work that would be necessary for a live action scene.
For this week’s exercise, especially when envisioning the creature and writing the initial premise, I was inspired by the work of horror artist Trevor Henderson (website viewable here). Trevor is the creator of several viral horror monsters, such as Sirenhead, and Long Horse. Many of his illustrations are layered onto photographs, and presented as pieces of found photography, and he’s a master at creating unsettling, disturbing images.
In terms of setting, I was also inspired by the Bongcheon-Don Ghost webcomic ( viewable here, CW FOR VISUAL AND AUDIO JUMPSCARES + GORE). The webcomic tells the story of a girl on her way home from school late at night, who comes across the ghost of a woman looking for her baby. The original comic makes use of some coded sound effects and an auto scroll feature, to suddenly animate the still frames of the webcomic to shocking effects.(the remake I linked to seems to recreate these effects using non-looping gifs, still quite effectively). It’s a bit like a webcomic equivalent of a screamer video (like the german K-Fee ‘Ghost Car’ video, seen here), short and shocking, and memorable because of that.
Finally, because I had developed a piece that was about a girl whose fear affected her perception of her environment, a classic reference is the haunted forest scene of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (watchable here). In this scene, just after Snow White has been spared by The Huntsman, she runs terrified through the woods. Due to her state of distress, and her unfamiliarity with her environment, Snow White begins to perceive the trees and their branches as monsters that are reaching out to ensnare her, as well as seeing logs in the river as fearsome crocodiles, and the leaves blowing in the wind as a swarm of bats that surrounds her. This culminated with Snow White being overcome by her fear and fainting.
