Animation

"The Mansion" Animation Project

Animation Project Statement

            For our project, we decided to take on a Halloween style short movie with a horror theme. The story is about a thief on the run from the law on a Halloween night, which stumbles across a house that appears to be having a party going on inside. As he approaches the house, a pumpkin sitting on the porch begins to talk to the thief, trying to tell him not to go inside, that the house is a trap and that their was no escape once you had entered. Ignoring the pumpkin, the thief enters anyway and finds an upstairs room with what appears to be a casket. Looking into the casket, he discovers a skeleton inside, which suddenly becomes alive and stands up out of the casket. Frightened by all this, the thief mistakenly falls out the top window and dies from the fall. Then, shortly after, a ghost in the form of the thief’s mask rises from the body and re-enters the house. As it turns out, the party is composed of dead people and ghosts of people who had entered the house before, and where now enslaved to the party of the dead.

            The reason we choose this theme is because we are pretty close to Halloween and the start of the holiday season, so a horror/Halloween theme was something we really wanted to do. Though the animation itself is not exactly a thriller, we wanted to focus on the story and buildup to the climax, being the part where the thief dies and comes back to life. We wanted to create that eerie feeling of suspense, making you question what will happen inside the house and why the pumpkin warned the thief of the evil lurking within the house. The suspense, buildup, climax, and ending were made to exemplify the horror theme and I think that this project does a good job of doing that.

            One thing that we did with this project was kept the characters very simplified, and went for a lot of dark colors in the scenes to add to that horror theme for the story. This also went into the character and prop designs, which were designed around the horror theme as well. When we animated the scenes, we tried to hone in on the suspense with the kinds of angles and perspectives that we used, which was also supplemented by the sounds and the character movements. The project itself had to have some form of gore in the death scene to express that horror feeling even more. Really we tried to make all the different elements that make up the story and the animation really express the horror genre, which is pretty difficult, but a fun challenge. A lot went into character and scene design, which seemed to be the bare majority of the work, and of course the animation process was what really tied it all together to complete the project.

Zach: Concept man, artist statement, background design, slides 1-8, and credits
Jackie: Storyboards, character and some background design, slides 9-16, and menu screen

Concept Map

Animation Storyboards

Fish Movement

Pacman

Basketball

Bird Catching Fish

Bone Tool: Dance