OUT, DAMNED SPOT!
Animated Documentary
The topic of haemophobia is rich in fascinating concepts and I felt that the subject was ripe for a documentary.
I spent a lot of time doing pre-production visual research. I didn’t want the film to be a ‘standard’ explainer film, using stock footage to illustrate the message. I wanted the documentary to have a specific, well-conceived style, and to use visual metaphors rather than more obvious imagery.
I spent a lot of time doing pre-production visual research. I didn’t want the film to be a ‘standard’ explainer film, using stock footage to illustrate the message. I wanted the documentary to have a specific, well-conceived style, and to use visual metaphors rather than more obvious imagery.
I was inspired by black and white cinema, particularly the other-worldly sets of silent German Expressionism such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and the Dutch angles of Film Noir. I felt that this traditional horror film aesthetic would work for a documentary dealing with fear. At the same time as I was realising this, I was drawn to the typography used in cheap 80s paperback horror books and slasher films; bold typefaces, often rounded serifs, rendered in vivid colours and taking up half the jacket of many of these books.
The animation was created almost thoroughly in Cinema4D and I built all the 3D models from scratch. After Effects supplemented the 3D animation, refining the greyscale colour scheme and adding extra depth of field and motion blur to some scenes.
The titles and red graphics were also pure After Effects, added afterwards. I chose Hawthorn for the primary title font due to the fact that it perfectly emulated the horror aesthetic I was going for. Verlag is the secondary typeface since it would work at smaller sizes, and complimented Hawthorn with its clean forms. The original silent movie titles would have been painted by hand and they often have a slight wiggle to them. Therefore, I roughened the edges of my titles, and set this to change slightly every frame. I also set the type to wiggle its position by 0.8 of a pixel for every frame. These combined effects gave the handmade feel that early cinema titles have, and ensured that the type blended with the animated imagery.
The titles and red graphics were also pure After Effects, added afterwards. I chose Hawthorn for the primary title font due to the fact that it perfectly emulated the horror aesthetic I was going for. Verlag is the secondary typeface since it would work at smaller sizes, and complimented Hawthorn with its clean forms. The original silent movie titles would have been painted by hand and they often have a slight wiggle to them. Therefore, I roughened the edges of my titles, and set this to change slightly every frame. I also set the type to wiggle its position by 0.8 of a pixel for every frame. These combined effects gave the handmade feel that early cinema titles have, and ensured that the type blended with the animated imagery.
The film footage I incorporated into the piece all came from films in the public domain. I wanted to include these as a direct link to the horror films I was referencing throughout and the cinema projection style worked well with the high contrast aesthetic I worked to achieve.
