- vex -

Using Adobe Animation I added all the necessary layers and the audio-file to then create this video of my sister saying: " I am not an Animal, I am a Bird. KAKAWWW KAKAWWW" in german.

the paper drawn ones

The finalisation of the paper puppet.

I gave it some finer definition with colouring pencils and then assembled it all together with glue. H

I first made a digital plan on how I wanted it to look vaguely and specifically to get all the layers I needed visualised

I then cut all the shapes out of paper. For the eyes and nose I decided to use foam instead to give it some more texture and also to help with the 3D effect.

Another way I used to create a 3D effect/depth was to add foam pieces in between the layers to create a height difference.

Adjusted the hallway to look more like the alienlike one our group agreed on

The initial house design was done by one of my team members and I simply translated their sketch into how it would have looked in the pixelated style

and here is the final result of the rotoscope attempt. I will probably edit the background to be more like how our group discussed it and agreed on it.

As the game itself includes rotoscoping, we tried it out for ourselves, taking a recording of ourself which then later would be Mary limping/walking across the alien's hallway. Then, with the help of an online video-to-image extractor, I animated it frame by frame, image by image, to get the rough yet rather fluent animation

While the initial design of our alien was made by another teammate I quickly grasped a good sense of its shape and silhouette and got tasked to do some more character sketches of it, similar to a character sheet.

At first, I mainly focused on its silhouette of sorts colouring it fully out and only left a blank spot for where its nucleus/eye/circle would be as it was one of keydesigns that stood out as very important to me.

I then tried to get a better grasp of it in different angles and also how its tentacles could be used for example to gran, attack or even indicate how it is feeling.

When seeing how much I can play with it's head I did struggle with certain angles and got recommended to make a clay head so I could turn it and move it to see it from any angle I needed

We have agreed for the spaceship parts of the story we would lean into the art style of the Faith game. With black backgrounds and an emphasis on shapes and bright colours in a rather pixel-like style.

The game itself does a lot rotoscoping for its cutscenes and such, which creates a very strong and interesting visual fitting for the horror genre. The strong visual also helps to make up for our otherwise rather simple story.

I did a couple of the sheep with the design from my previous post and of Mary, aswell as the alien, trying to define its shape in the third one, filling it completely out and erasing a bit to define its design a bit more.

Monday was practically a getting more concepts and designs down. I mainly focused on the mutated lamb/sheep. Going for a rather unsettling uncanny kind of look while also playing around with different sheep types.

My two main inspiration and ideas for the design were a) wet sheep, drenched wool that looks like it is hanging of it, perhaps making the wool itself seem drip like. b) the zombie sheep from the movie "Black Sheep"

This weekend, I have decided to watch a horror movie as I am personally not well versed in horror movies and such. So on recommendation of the teacher, I started my horror adventure with the horror comedy "The Cabin in the Woods," which is pretty much a horror movie that describes a lot of the stereotypes in horror movies. So a lot one would expect to happen did happen and did so at times in comedic ways. It definitely brought me closer to the general plot of a slasher movie and it's typical tropes.

Did it change my mind about horror? Not really, but I admit that for what it is it was a good movie. A lot of the often unreasonable things got explained in some ways and brought some small twists with it.

General Vex Horror Movie Judgement: Was worth the watch, so no regrets, but it did cause me to squirm a few times. Nothing too extreme as well.

Following my Horror adventure I by accident ended up watching a Musical, namely "The guy who didn't like musicals" , a horror comedy musical, on YouTube by Team StarKids.

It is part of their and the first of their production, the Hatchetfield series with lyrics and music by Jeff Blim. The musical itself takes loose inspiration of the 1956 horror film; Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And has definitely key components of the horror genre, supernatural event (the meteor) causes a sort of small apocalypse (musical singing alien zombies) with a small cast trying to survive/get out of the situation, oh and theatre comedic violence, a lot of it.

Personally, I enjoyed this way more than the previous movie (likely cause I am a musical enthusiast and can't handle real-life depictions of too mucho violence) and for multiple reasons not only was the plot funny and intriguing and th3 songs well written but I think the presentation of horror in a theatre production just conveys different than a film version.

First of all it is obvious that everything is fake, that is a charm only the theatre, musicals, ballets and operas can offer, you come to watch it knowing it is all in essence "play-pretend", Stage acting is also very much different than movie acting and takes different skills and talents.

Second of all, it uses that exact matter as a way to enhance the scare factor right till the end, we grow attach to the characters and get to see them in different lights and ways even if some of them are self announced jerks. We essentially fever with the cast and right till the end....

(C.W. SPOILERS FOR THE END:

and when the plot twist happens after we thought it was all solved and the great threat was stopped, the musical does one thing, it breaks the fourth wall the "final girl" speaks to the audience, desperate and frightened, why are we clapping why are we cheering , it mixes reality and fiction for a split second, what if the musical itself was just the aliens performing with their endgoal being to slowly take over, but that's also how it ends and we are left to think about it. The musical itself has a fun tone most of the time it being comedic and all but when one lets the entire concept settle in one notices just how frightening such a situation could be, there is a new caused fear in something so typically uplifting and bright ... similar to the attempt of turning clowns and circus themes into scary beings but going too far off to make it scary, the musical simply does what it does and that is be a musical)

And now for my final third point is that horror thrives on music, music causes most of the suspense, the tension, the thrill and every other emotion it manages to emphasise. So making a horror musical in itself is genius and the various ways it conveys the slight horror through music is enlightening. One song especially I think conveys it nicely is the fourth leading into the fifth song in the musical, 'Cup of roasted Coffee' to 'Cup of Poisoned Coffee' and all I can say is to simply go listen to it yourself or even better watch the entire musical.

Now a very efficient way to binge through a lot of horrors and not get spooked with each and every one to the fullest level is actually by not watching them and while I loose the visual I certainly get to see what made certain horror films are what they are with the thanks to the podcast 'Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9' hosted by Jeffrey Cranor and Cecil Baldwin with their entire goal being to make horror films more approachable.

Like myself, one of the hosts, Jeffrey, is also not a big horror fan and finds himself being squirming a lot meanwhile Cecil is a horror movie fan and helps Jeffrey through, watching for each episode a new horror movie and then talking about it, slowly building up to the more intimidating ones.

It definitely gives me a specific insight and at times, definitely a better grasp to certain movies and their aspects and productions which I wouldn't have known if I just watched the movie and who knows perhaps after listening to one of their episodes I shall willingly watch the film for it.

Playing around with alien designs

(Nothing too serious for right now, simply playing around with aliens I have seen throughout life, aka how my own perspective of the term alien has shaped for myself and but also bouncing of the designs that my teammate Gar has done and what I liked, for example I liked that they included in their first alien designs and sketches that the aliens had something like a side hood which reminded me of cobras and their defense mechanism to threaten others. I also plaid around with a sort of wolfish theme as the entire story revolves around Mary trying to get her lamb back and wolves often being the natural antagonist/villain in stories and tales for sheep, it be a nice distraction from the fact that the sheep is turning into more of a monster than the aliens)

Our group was given the option to swap genre from Romance to Horror which they gladly took and rescripted the story to fit the new genre As I was missing for that day I took today to get an exact grasp of the new story and try to help sort things out. There is def still a lot to do but things are moving somewhere at least and that's better than moving nowhere.

Quick Runthrough: Evening on the farm, Mary gets water with her lamb following Night time, indoors - Rests with her lamb, a beam comes up and they get beamed up  wakes up strapped down by metal cuffs to a sort of operation table, using a sharp tool that fortunately lay close to her Mary frees herself She finds a labcoat of sorts that she puts on as extra layer ontop of her nightgown Auditorial darkness - before bumping into the lightswitch revealing a big room full of tanks  Hides behind the Tanks and alien spotting plus vanishing  Following the bleating scene Reunited, hug, sheep is mainly unresponsive yet follows her around  An alarm goes off, follows the flashes   Hinted to sheep abnormal the bow bloody  Runs into an alien in the hallway Escape pod scene, aliens try to pull them out alien arm gets crushed door closed  Catch of breath  Get back to earth  Runs back home and shuts the door  Passes out on bed  Wakes up to sheep abnormal looming over her 

some of the drawings I made while being in the park

The wall featuring already some pages from the kid book and its illustrator I chose for the recreation of some of my drawings

Illustrated by Kristyna Litten, a freelance artist from Yorkshire England. She has drawn for multiple clients already including National Geography, Oxford University Press, Walker Books and even Gucci's children's book has she worked with.

She can be found on either her private blog or ArenaIllustration which also is her agency of sorts or via her email. According to an about me page, she also had a shop, unfortunately, it currently seems to be not selling anything.

Her artstyle seems to involve a mix medium of watercolours and colour pencils of sorts and creates a very textured feel, her use of colours in 'The long way home' has a purple-y colour scheme which connects it all nicely and gives it that cohesiveness.

My two attempts to recreate something in her sort of art style based of my previous drawings. A before and after colour pencils giving it the final touch.

For our pitch we got the nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb, the genre romance and the time period the Space age which ranged from 1957 till present time.

During all of this we looked into the nursery rhyme and found out that it is based on a true story. The original lamb was abandoned by its mother and then raised by Mary creating the tight bond the two had. And Mary did in fact one day take her lamb to school. Whereas the lamb and Mary probably had more of a mother-and-child relationship in real life, I immediately vetoed to myself to have them have something like that and opted rather to the nearest thing connection wise that does not involve family matters aka the child hood friends trope. I did suggest them perhaps having a sort slice of life sort of scenario with the 'Lamb' simply following Mary around. As it did not include much of the specific time frame we got though it was soon shot down and we settled towards something with Nasa and space being involved. We drifted a bit off apparently from the theme romance by trying to juggle a sort of cult like setting with having the lamb be a follower and creating a sort of sacrificial lamb and stark power dynamic which easily shifted into a toxic relationship between the two characters.

But as a romance has to have a happy ending or have the two character be at least happy at the ending together for the time being. Sparking hope for the characters relationship.

I am not too accustomed to editing and I genuinely struggled to figure out what I wanted to do with this one. In the end I kinda just played around with various audios, I hope to get more technical skills with editing software and more of a genuine understanding what is possible what not and how to work it out