#agent deer

ive been working on this animatic for very long. i could say i started may of this year but i also could techincally say i started around april of this year. depends.

another note about the animatic. this is something i know for a fact i've said before, but i definitely included shots that never happened in the show, unlike the party favors one which is basically all referenced. the idea is that show animations, especially recap ones, always seem to use the exact same camera angles and stuff. such that i feel like all animatics where the source material is written rather than visual always have more creative variety. so i wanted to make some stuff up here, i guess sacrificing accuracy for the storytelling. which is my whole MO

the thumbnail is techincally clickbait as it's a captive bolt stunner, something ive associated with lila ever since she was first introduced. it helps that she's first killed in a barn by someone she loved/trusted. i don't know i just really like the imagery of being arguably still alive, just incapacitated and unaware of the fucked up shit that's about to happen to you, done to you by someone who thinks they own you/purchased you, and someone who wants to consume you. maybe metaphorically in this case. and it even could be argued that it's a kindness

hand placements hand placements! diego has his hand on her head making her face the stunner, in the sense that he's the one who makes her really look long and hard at her mother's manipulation and how she herself learned to do it by mimicry. it's important because he presents himself as an actual out to her of her abuse, but only if she sheds her past behavior. he's holding her in place but he's also the one that can drag her out of the way of its path

the hand on the stunner is the handler. pretty self explanatory. she's the one who's going to use lila to her fullest potential and then abandon her. she's aiming it.

the hand on the trigger is either her bio mom or her dad, i didn't make a distinction but i couldn't fit two hands. where they are now (dead) they can't entirely grab the stunner away, but they do have their fingers on the trigger -- they're the last bastion of total control the handler has on lila, the thing that keeps her from giving herself to the handler entirely. she's not got a hole in her head yet, while someone who truly loves and cares about her has their finger occupying the trigger.

i definitely faltered both in effort and in composition in the middle, it really was the beginning and end where i had the clearest vision of just what i wanted in frame. i also originally had this throughline theme of like. silhouettes behind each person signalling who they've killed? but that's 1) too much like klaus's power, not really fitting lila and 2) it would have looked ugly so i abandoned that

as a result i don't think there's really 1 uniform theme throughout, instead there are a bunch of little scattered ones which can make the whole thing seem a bit less intentional, oh well. i hope to rectify this problem by my next animation and from the way it's being planned i think it'll work

the various themes are:

light/shadow. specifically the barrier between the two. throughout the animatic i wanted lila to be a character who didn't really seem comfortable travelling between the two, even when people try to drag her from one into the other. every time (except for the few ending shots) i wanted the any highlights to be bright and uncomfortable (and in the case of the police lights, confusing), with the shadows being more natural, because the light is like. idk. "light" being shed on her mother's manipulation towards her. the shadow is what she was trained to accept, it's comforting to fall back into, but it'll ultimately lead to her death by her mother's hands. speaking of, she's consistently in her mother's shadow. literally. i also wanted several shots of her looking extremely comfortable in a dark hunched box because that's the last place she felt safe.

hands. god i love hands. i love drawing hands and i hate drawing eyes. who else think it. anyways lila is very "hands on". one of the lines of hers that i loved and ruminated on the most was the "i remember everyone i've killed" ones. it makes her a foil to five, an opposite of her mother, and just says so much about her and the blue/orange morality plane she's on. she either can't or just doesn't need to compartmentalize the memory of the murders she's comitted like five presumably did. rather than five using it as a means to an end, she's made it her end. and so i wanted a lot of scenes that are very tactile bc she's such a deliberate character, and being so touchy-feely with someone she's seconds away from killing seems alien to people (i mean i assume so. it is to me at least, and im a professional in not killing people. so) but to her it's necessary, or at least her process. she holds hands with diego (and luther and allison! don't know how obvious those were) when her goal is to kill them. it helps that it also fits the theme of the music; she gets "too close" to them by nature, and only recently it's been bothering her that everyone she brings close to her has to die. except the handler, of course.

speaking of again. her mother forcibly grabs her hands before shooting her. she's incapacitated with her hands tied -- there's nothing to do, and she's a person of action. also, the handler's hand on her shoulder is pretty present. the moment she shows signs of surpassing her as she grows up, the handler makes sure to clip her wings and bring her back down lest she realize that she doesn't actually need her.

semi-related, not to do with hands but more with lila and deliberate choice. in the animatic it's kinda framed like she killed the hargreeves, even though it's the handler that actually shoots them all. i feel like from her perspective it doesn't actually matter who took the final shot if she was crucial in the step it took to kill them. that's why someone like five's reasoning would piss her off so much. he killed her parents because he unconsciously or not ranked them lower in importance than his family/the apocalypse, and then proceeded. to him, they're orders from someone else he's carrying out, and i think in season 3 he starts peeling back some of that programming and acknowledging that some of the responsibility also lies on himself. in contrast, lila recognizes all of her victims as full human beings, equal to herself in importance, and still kills them. and that recognition is supposed to be some sort of assurance? i guess. and because of all this she as good as killed the hargreeves from her perspective.

marigold silhouettes. this is very on the nose and barely a theme but it shows up in at least 3 places so im counting it. her parents' heads are blacked out, as are people's silhouttes when their marigold is showing. i figure that's a bit of handler-vision going on, where she sees people in terms of what power they could offer her. her parents are nameless faceless nobodies, and everyone else, even people like five who worked with her and lila, her actual daugther, are just defined by how she can use them in the end. lila is used to and even imitates this line of thinking at times, but it really sucks when it's turned towards her, doesn't it? (and by the way, diego is spared a silhouette in his death scene. i wonder why! ;))