Animated Narratives Week 4 | Plot - Eyes

Working from my premise for the week 4 class, “A man can feel eyes watching him even when he is alone.” I decided to create this short animation. 

In groups we had chosen a different premise to explore externalising internal states, but I wanted to try to use a less visually distinct emotion/feeling, paranoia, and represent it in an almost still image/animation. 

This piece takes heavy inspiration from the prolific horror manga artist Junji Ito, who has produced many creepy images throughout his career with only stark black and white, a lot of which physicalises the experiential strangeness of horrorific emotions, like obsession in the Uzumaki series (1998 to 1999) 

This is the second time I have found myself working with a 2-bit palette and the starkness continues to push me to not only consider shape and shading, but how to convey texture and mood through contrast, which I think this piece has benefited greatly from.