TREPANATION
Run time: 7 minutes
Synopsis:
There is a hole in the floor. What was once familiar is now unrecognizable. All previous desires are overshadowed by the need to disappear completely.
I had two primary technical goals of this project.
The first goal was to create a fully animated human character with an expressive moving face. I had never done this before in my previous work, and I felt like the lack of relatable human characters was severely holding back my ability to effectively tell stories with any kind of emotional impact. So I made this the top priority during the early stages of development. My first few attempts at creating the character had pretty nightmarish results. Characters had unsettling faces, and the rigs I had built to animate them with barely worked. The modeling, rigging, and animating of these characters was a process that I ended up restarting multiple times. But with each attempt I learned more about what I was doing, and eventually the characters reached a level of quality that I was comfortable with.
The second goal was to use animation, shot composition, and careful timing to show a very clear sequence of events. It was very important to me that each shot lead into the next one in a very logical way. My previous work was more abstract and experimental. This way of working is fun but it can make the final product feel disjointed and amateurish. I really wanted to prove that I could create a clear sense of pacing that felt more professional. Most of this was done by carefully planning out each shot with storyboards and making myself stick to that storyboard as closely as possible.
Aside from a few specific sounds that I recorded myself, most of the sound was repurposed clips that I downloaded from freesound.com. Other than that, everything was built from scratch by me.
Deleted Scenes
This video below was originally planned to be a scene in Trepanation, but as the script changed over time, it became clear that this scene didn't fit with the rest of the story anymore. I felt like it worked pretty well as it's own self-contained experience though, so now it's just called "Pool".
