When it came to completing this project for submission, I was in the mindset that this would be a teaser/sketch for a more fleshed-out version of the same film. I began by finding assets to use in the animation, which was searching for PNGs to use in the backgrounds of my virtual game. Whilst searching, I developed a few new ideas such as using silhouette in the final scene as the player character walks onto the pier, and also decided that the entire gameplay would be 2D sidescroller perspective as opposed to a mixture of that and top-down. Moreover, I realised that it would save time but still convey the idea clearly if I used images of a child's bedroom and a kitchen rather than building these environments from scratch, so I made sure to find suitable images with the elements I needed (i.e. a dresser and enough floor space for arguing parents).
Sprites & Assets
I painted a thick scribble in Photoshop and used a textured brush to erase parts of the edges to design a dialogue box for the NPCs' messages in the game, because messiness connotes the childhood focus of the film. I organised all of my assets in desktop project folders labelled by scene, as well as UI. I spent some time designing, sketching and flat-colouring the villager NPCs required as per my storyboard, which I would properly shade and refine with more time after submission. Since this "game" is inspired heavily by Animal Crossing, I used this scratch project avatar creator to generate character design ideas and speed up the process. I used a small canvas size to create a more pixel art-style look as the assets would go on the console's top screen. Initially, I began designing the player character with a t-shirt, but soon changed this to a hoodie as it would be more natural-looking for them to have their hands in their pockets animated in a walk cycle, as I didn't want to spend unnecessary time on animating the arms as well as the legs. I made the jeans very simple so as to more easily break apart the leg into thigh, shin and foot - I exported these all out as PNGs to then duplicate for the second leg, but in restrospect, I could have just exported the layers. Finally, I added an outline to the sprite using outer glow in layer styles. The abstract silhouettes represent someone's turbulent home life, and these were designed purely on improvisation.
Compositing
This is the 'AdobeMasters' YouTube tutorial which helped me create the looping parallax background. I began by duplicating the tree assets and arranging them into a composition 3 times the width of the frame using the anchor point method, keyframing the precomp and using a loop expression to ensure it continues throughout. I then did this with the rest of the background layers such as the mountains, bushes and dirt path - there did turn out to be some noticable jitter when it loops, I'm not too sure why but I'll guess it was poor accuracy on my part. It makes sense that the path jitters, however, as I enabled 3D to bring it forward like a flat surface. I also enabled motion blur so the movement looked more natural to the human eye (which managed to ease the jittering in somewhat of an illusion), and added a drop shadow to the bushes.
This 'Move Shapes' YouTube tutorial helped me create the walk cycle for the player character - I followed some tips for the legs, as the sprite's hands were in their hoodie pockets. This basically meant using anchor points and rotation to create the start and end frames, then work in halves following that, and leaving the interpolation to the program. This walk cycle precomp was then used for the other scenes. There was a flickering frame issue that came with looping it, however I overcame this by deleting the last Time Remap keyframe and placing another 1 frame beforehand, as well as purging and toggling the "continuously rasterise" button. I gave the sprite a small cast shadow by creating a black fill ellipse shape layer and adding a heavy blur effect to it - I ended up copy-pasting this onto several other assets such as the NPC sprites and their surrounding props, to better composite the scenes as they appeared. Here are the keyframes for the walk cycle on its own:
I used the posterize and mosaic effects to create a more old-school video game look to the background, but kept the village walking scene at a higher quality. Admittedly, this muddles the overall style choices in the video and results in a more confusing aesthetic, but I think it worked. I used the Typewriter effect on the text for the dialogue boxes on the bottom screen when the player would walk past each character, and keyframed the graphic's size from 0 to 100 like it would in a real game. I used the Bezier Warp effect, as well as the Bad TV distortion preset (tweaking parameters such as the Venetian Blinds transition), to animate the arguing silhouette figures - this was definitely inspired by a creator I've mentioned before, YOURLOCALBREADMAN. This surreal artist has made video game-style animations for a long time and uses VHS distortion & static in his work frequently, designing "creatures from the void" and utilising the RPG style to give an immersive feeling to his work. I enabled 3D on these figures so they would look more dimensional in the perspective of the kitchen and move around a bit more naturally on the floor, despite being abstract. Here are the keyframes for that scene:
I composited the props together for each character's little scene and keyframed their positions to look like the character was walking past them. I wanted the player character to move across this little log bridge in this illustration, which meant it needed to be down low in the frame so that the sprite wouldn't either be too small or too tall for the screen, so I created the illusion of a larger pond - it wasn't extremely successful, but did the job in those few passing seconds. Here is the way I masked the pond:
For the last scene on the pier, I overlaid a black solid over the player character sprite in Layer Styles to give them a silhouetted appearance, for a more poignant, reflective feeling & because it fits the image better. Admittedly I did forget to add the 8-bit look to the pier image, so it doesn't match the bedroom and kitchen, but this is something I'll correct in a refined future version. I keyframed the player's position until they reach the end of the pier, then split the comp in the final comp and used Freeze Frame under Time to pause the motion.
I ended up precomping a lot of things because I found it helped me visually & mentally organise my workspace a lot better, atop being practical in the sense that I could duplicate the dialogue box animation but change the text easily and fade in/out scene changes on the top screen with no hassle - most importantly, it meant less unnecessary shuffling around in general. This is how my final timeline looked before precomping once again to fade it out at the end:
Audio
For audio, I was quite minimal; I found free-to-use sounds for the doors opening and closing, as well as the Nintendo 3DS startup track. I found audio of a couple arguing and edited it in Audition - I pitch-shifted the voices to be lower, and added some extreme EQ starting with a basic low-pass filter to make it feel like it was coming from another room - panning to the right helped with that also. I time-stretched the song to make it slightly slower paced and more relaxing, and also sped up the door sound effect. I keyframed the audio to fade in and out in After Effects, as it has simple tools for audio design and it didn't seem necessary to use Premiere at any stage. The arguing audio fades out completely once the music for the village sequence kicks in. The song used is Apple Cinnamon by Daystar, and is royalty-free.
Conclusion
This turned out to be an ode to the games that have continuously taken away the pain, for me and a lot of other people in the world. There is a lot of my soul in this project, even if it isn't spick and span like it could be had I taken more time to polish up assets and such. It has exactly the eerie reassurance vibes I wanted, this slightly eerie but non-threatening feeling. This was definitely inspired by the liminal and oddcore/weirdcore/traumacore aesthetics going around, as I'd say this project was actually quite therapeutic, as well as the various surreal creators mentioned in this previous post. Childhood nostalgia and digital landscapes are often used as symbols and themes for vent art (covered here), and are frequently touched upon in the games mentioned in the brainstorm that starts off that post. Video game spaces are often very liminal and tap into human psychology, melting the digital and human worlds, which is why I felt this project would fit the brief well. From the apathetic walk through turbulent home life to the twilight forest stroll, I found a lot of connections being made to art I made in this post after I'd finished compositing this piece.
I had some issues exporting but got there in the end in Media Encoder. Overall, this was really fun and showed me that I'm much more patient that I expected, and am excited to use After Effects for more projects. I believe that the parallax could definitely have been done better - more seamless and actually slower, enabling me to more accurately superimpose the NPCs and their individual "scenes" into the sidescrolling format. Here is my final submission piece:
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