Halloween Halloween Halloween.
I love Halloween.
We don't even cellebrate Halloween where I'm from. We have shitty St. Martin instead. I mean, I like the story behind this holiday, but it certainly isn't as atmospheric. So yeah, I do my part to cellebrate Halloween the best that I can. I watch one horror movie a day throughout the entire month of October, play a couple of horror games, decorate the room, make audio playlists, and of course I plan a little get-together. This year I wanted to make a horror animation. I finished working on my sheep collab entry, so it's finally time to get started on A Girl In A Room II.

1. First step on my list is to design some characters. There's not a lot of them, but still. The environment also needs some designing, I'm thinking of using riveted metal and a faded white for the walls, or maybe use white with shadow for contrast. There's probably a lot of interesting things you could do with the lighting here.
2. Sketching the scenes will take some carefull planning, like angles and body language. That's usually the biggest hurdle for me. Everything runs pretty smooth once I'm done with that though. I usually sketch on one layer: Starting with characters, which I then put in a group. I do the backgrounds afterwards and group those as well.
3. Next I go on a hunt for some fitting audio and sync it to the movie. I only edit or design noises if I absolutely have to. It's more of a final step sort of thing. Also, I add footsteps at the end, when I'm done animating.
4. Then I'll start animating, in no particular order. Sketches are nice guidelines, but they can be too rough. Sometimes the anatomy isn't right, or certain shapes look off. In that case I have to go back to fix it, which is a pain in the ass. Eats up a lot of my time. Usually I add color as I animate, but during the spaceboy animation I decided to leave everything white until later. Picking colors while animating is a great way to waste time. I'll keep it for later
5. At this stage I figure out how to do my backgrounds, and what color scheme to use for my animation. Also, shading and gradients. I might want to go and create a new pallette for this animation. That way I can experiment with it as I go through stage 1.
6. Time for backgrounds. At this point I deleted the character sketches, but the backgrounds should still be there. I could either draw them in flash, or export as png and open in photoshop. I will be doing the latter.
7. Semi-final step; adding gradients, masks and filters. I think I will just use the gradients. Nothing more.
8. Finalizing the audio. I'll use a different software to synchronize the noises, mix them, pan them accordingly and run them through filters to create the illusion of accoustics. Along with optional music, I will master it to the best of my abilities, and export it as one single wav file which I import to flash.

Yup. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take my time with this, but I hope to finish it when October starts, so I can save time enjoying the holiday :)