Ereignis Visual Development

So firstly, I think I should say that the original version of the script was actually, not a script at all, but a novel written when I was mid-high school. I was struggling immensely with depression (though I didn’t know it at the time), and looking back, it seems almost painfully obvious that the concept of a doppelganger (and specifically, the kind that replaces you in your own life) is a big ‘ol, hamfisted metaphor for depression. 

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that everyone (depressed or not) has had a point in their life when they felt unhappy with who and where they were. Sometimes it feels like that unhappiness is built into your very character and that you’ll never be able to be happy or satisfied. Wouldn’t it be better if there could just be another version of you that’s confident and happy and excels at everything you hate about yourself? Wouldn’t it be fucking terrifying if you had to come face to face with that person? Could you stand up to them and honestly say that you think you’re better equipped for handling your life? Wouldn’t it just be so easy to see yourself- everything you ever wanted to be, doing everything you ever wanted to do (and with confidence and style to boot)- and give up your life to them? After all, they can clearly do better than whatever you’ve done (or rather, not done) with your pathetic life.

Now, of course, this is all in retrospect- as I’ve grown, my understanding both of myself and of my illness has matured as well. Rather than sort of uncritically regurgitating these feelings, I’ve chosen now to interrogate the nature of these feelings and posit an argument outside the experience itself  (i.e. why is this such a universal feeling? what causes us to simultaneously reject ourselves while fantasizing about an “ideal” self? can an idealized self and actual self ever be reconciled? or were they ever separate to begin with? etc. i don’t want to get too deep into the philosophical aspect right now). 

Similarly, I’m now able to verbalize (and thus deconstruct) a lot of the things I experienced, but couldn’t give name to as a teen- namely, my complicated relationship with my body. As mentioned before, I struggled with (and still do) depression, but that was only a drop in a sea of bullshit. I also have anxiety which revolved almost entirely around my body (its delicacy, vulnerability, etc.), an eating disorder, dissociative/paranoid/delusional symptoms (undiagnosed, so I’d rather describe symptoms than give a label), chronic physical illnesses, and gender dysphoria. All this just to say that my relationship with my body has always been... strained, to say the least... and I believe this is one of the most significant driving forces behind this script.

I’ve warned for body horror in the description and although it’s yet to really become apparent, this story is just as much about the horror and fear surrounding one’s body as it is about dissatisfaction with one’s life/self, and I choose to explore this in graphic (and symbolic) detail. Bodies mutate and degrade while others are literally built organ-by-organ- there’s vivisection and dismemberment, monsters and stolen body parts galore! I could even argue that  the story is in many ways a pastiche of the modern guro community (which is both a nod towards the massive influence it has had on my artwork in general as well as rhetorical device), but I don’t want to imply that it’s mere reference for reference or aesthetic sake. 

The use of specific forms of body horror is very personal to me, but more than that, I think something can be said for the way it’s used in guro. No one’s really taken the time to properly theorize and deconstruct the modern guro movement (which i believe to be significantly and dramatically different from the original ero guro movement), but just from a quick glance it’s apparent that most guro artists are young, trans and gender-variant people, many with mental illnesses, many the victims of abuse or trauma, and almost all with complex relations to their bodies. Whether they’re aware of it or not, they (we) are exploring very complex and nuanced conceptions of the body and the human experience through a surprisingly coherent set of motifs and themes- and I think this is an area worth just as much respect and discussion as any other modern art movement.

Finally, I think it’s worth mentioning that the first draft of this script was written for a class on dreams & consciousness (specifically, an independent study on “dream states & consciousness in film” for my motion pictures theory major). This is the third major thematic category (though it overlaps heavily with the aforementioned concepts) that encompasses what constitutes both the substance and style of this project. I was both watching a lot of films and reading a metric fuckton of philosophical/scientific works on the subject, and I think it really helped formulate a lot of the concepts I play around with in the script and (more importantly) give coherency to my thoughts. Writing or making artwork about dreams & consciousness is extremely difficult to do while retaining any sort of logic or coherency (e.g. watch any amateur- and shit, even many hollywood- films exploring dreams and try to make sense of them. At best, they’ll be “weird for weird’s sake”- as if oneiric = absurdist- and at worst, they’ll be absolutely incomprehensible and forgettable). I personally (though I wouldn’t presume to prescribe this methodology for anyone else) found that organizing my thoughts within a framework of theory and philosophy allowed me the freedom to open up and explore things more intuitively (might seem counter-intuitive, but I’m so obsessively Logical that the only way I can relax enough to do anything instinctively is if I already have the over-thinking part done and taken care of), making this one of the most personal and emotionally-engaging works I’ve done to date.

Anyways, that’s all I’m going to talk about for now. I want to talk about the philosophical implications of the themes, narrative, and (obviously) title of the script, however, this is so complex and will definitely be even wordier than this, so I’ll save that for another post. Let’s just say I was reading a lot of existential and phenomenological philosophers (esp. Heidegger and Deleuze), so it’ll be a little challenging to talk about in any sort of accessible way lol 

OK so to be honest, I really don’t like this, but I’m uploading it anyways 1. so I have at least one of the concept pieces on here and 2. so I can talk about Jherek Bischoff’s album art.

I didn’t start listening to Bischoff’s latest album “Cistern” until a couple weeks after I finished this, but I immediately loaded all of the songs onto my playlist for this project because they just fit really well and were all really haunting and great. THEN I noticed the album art (check out all three- for “Cistern”, the EP, and “Cas(s)iopeia”)... it’s uncanny how similar they are and it’s Freaking Me Out a bit. But I’ll just take it as a sign that the album is totally meant to be part of the conceptual soundtrack lol

These were actually specifically for a short I wrote related to the script, so it’s all mundane, “real world” shit, but I could probably squeeze them in to the beginning of the script if I really wanted to use them. And anyways, like I said, it was more to nail down style than actually have a finished, usable background.

I think they’re too “realistic”- I want to push for more stylized/surreal shapes and exaggerate a lot of the forms, but I get so caught up in accurate perspective/shape/size/etc. that I forget to be loose with it. The exception is probably Goro’s house, which actually came out looking decent.

The top pic is various props associated with Sindri and Goro, so I wanted them to be a bit more organic and have more “flow”/stylization, while the bottom pic is all Madir & Co.’s props, which I wanted to be rigid/geometric/”sterile”-feeling (if that makes any sense?). Like, ideally, there would be no straight lines in any of the top props (and especially any of Goro’s things), while all the hospital junk would be nothing but straight lines and sharp edges. 

Madir’s sigil, despite being so tiny and basic, actually took forever to develop (still not totally happy with it). I knew I wanted something evocative of cadeuces because of the original/doppelganger dichotomy, but I’d rather have something where one dominates (consumes?? i played around with ouroboros a bit but nothing looked right) the other in order to suggest Madir’s philosophy. Then there’s the obvious medical cross shape, but I also threw in some rune shapes as well just for my own personal in-jokes, I guess. It’s a really small detail, but I still want it to be important.

So first off, I’m so upset that I rushed this sheet because the poses/expressions are really bad and there’s not nearly as many as I want. Also his color scheme is really wonky right now... The only consolation I have is that I’m going to be drawing him s o  m u c h that it’s sort of irrelevant what’s on this first character sheet lol

As the most visible “antagonist”, I wanted Madir to have that classic, This Is The Villain look (pointed/triangular features, broad shoulders, slightly femme gestures, TEETH), so that’s what I really focused on, design-wise. Some of the things I’m not really happy about are how slim he is (esp. in the shoulders, which I want to be closer to how they are in the bottom left, but also I want him to have that skinny-fat muffin top thing going on, u kno), his outfit (its meh- feels really uninspired), and the detail of his “hair” (drawing a headful of intestines that are simple enough to animate but detailed enough to register as such is Hard lol).

I have really mixed feelings about this sheet because on one hand, I love these three and poured a lot of my own self-perception into each of them, but on the other, this was the sheet I was working on when I had a terrible flare-up/mental breakdown so I just see Pain when I look at it lmao... Anyways, the important takeaway of that is that everyone’s a little stiffer than I’d like because I worked on it so sporadically and when I was able to, it was for very short bursts because my shoulder/arm would be unbearable lol

I wanna take a minute to talk about their mutations a bit, because it’s a pretty important factor. On one hand, they all kind of play with cliche/trope-y things within guro art (multiple eyes, medical equipment, mouths in places they shouldn’t be, mushrooms/fungi, etc.), but they’re more character development than reference. I haven’t talked about it much on here yet, but within the “otherworld” that these three occupy, your sense of identity dissolves and warps over time, so most residents aren’t recognizably human (if they ever were to begin with) and those that are relatively “new” to the world quickly begin mutating as their identity breaks down. 

The mutations aren’t totally random, though. Some are the product of forgetting who you were before, while others are the result of the distorting and degradation of your view of yourself. Since everyone in the “otherworld” is there because they were so unhappy in their lives, their sadness/bitterness/anger/etc. is left to fester and slowly warps their (figurative and literal) view of themselves. And of course, if a body part is removed (as is the case with both Yra’s eye and Sing’s arm), it will never grow back as it was- and thus, injuries speed up the mutation process.

For example, Nareen is, quite literally, rotting from the inside out (subtle, I know) not only because he is so desperate to forget who he is, but also because that’s truly how he sees himself- infected, corrupting, and absolutely worthless. Similarly, Yra feels powerless and voiceless (despite being quite loud all the time, he never feels that he’s actually being heard or that he’s really “saying” anything), so the addition of a mouth is a sort of desperation made physical (though I want to point out, this is completely personal- it’s not like “mouth = x” or something- i have another character with mouth-related mutations which represent an entirely different concept). To be REALLY blatant/cliche, the mouth is sort of an id given a voice lol Finally, Sing’s is again pretty obvious; she feels like a monster- a beastly soldier good for nothing but violence and depravity- so she’s likely destined to some predatory, animalistic form.

But really, coloring Goro was the bane of my existence and I’m still incredibly frustrated with how it turned out. I think it will look better on a background, but the yellow-on-yellow just absolutely loses his face and I can’t figure out a better way to bring it out without wrecking the tones. Anyways, other than the color, he was incredibly fun to draw and the simplicity of the face allowed me to focus more on my arch nemesis: loose fabric.

Overall, I think this sheet is much more “descriptive” than Sindri’s, with consistent proportions and notes for anything that might seem random. I did, however, leave out one of his other disguises, as well as his “true” form, so I’ll have to throw those up here one day (though not as a full character sheet... just a couple sketches, probably). 

I don’t think this design really pushes things in any way- it’s very generic... animated child proportions... As usual, I really need to keep contrast in mind since my tendency is always to sort of smooth everything out, proportion-wise. I’ve never drawn kids/cute things before, though, so that was fun?