Uncanny Alley- Animatic 02

Here is a post to share the animatic of episode 2 of Uncanny Alley.

Firstly I wanted to share some questions for the "its nice that" article https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/rodrigo-sousa-uncanny-alley-adult-swim-animation-project-190624:

1. What inspired the tryptic of animated shorts? 

The ideas for this series of shorts came mainly from things that happened to me, fears I have or images that creeped me out. The first film rough idea came from a bedbug infestation in Paris in 2023, people were afraid of going to the theater since they would catch bedbugs from the infested seats.The second short comes from an image of a human nervous system extracted and displayed on some sort of table, it looked alien or like some sort of jellyfish creature, and the last film is greatly inspired by a roommate that I had that acted quite weird. I wanted to make each film as a standalone horror story, just like « courage the cowardly dog »  where we discover a new monster per episode or a like in a short creepy pasta. But at the same time I wanted to have an underlying thread connecting all the characters and stories together. There are some hints here and there but this tryptic follows a mysterious curse spreading from person to person.

2. Can you talk us through some of the process behind the making of your animations?

After having the general idea of the short, I will do an animatic (animated storyboard). During this step I test a lot of different shots and staging ideas. At this point I am refining the story and staging simultaneously, it’s sort of a writing/editing phase.

During production I had to go quite quickly so I decided to limit unnecessary movements and have a lot of relatively  static shots. I used 3d heads (made by the amazing Mila Monaghan) on some of the movements and used a lot of video recordings for reference and also in some shots I directly rotoscoped them. Once I finished the animation, I would let Jérémy Ben Ammar make all the sound design and music. I wouldn't give him many notes and would just let him do his magic, the result is always better than what I expected and its always a pleasure working with him. We collaborated on our graduation film and on my concept trailer «Playground ».

The initial idea for this short came from a disturbing image I saw of a human nervous system, something that resembled this:

The alien /octopus quality to it inspired me to make this short. I wanted this nervous system to float across the corridors of an empty building. But for that it had to come from somewhere, the idea of someone vomiting it's own nervous system quickly came to mind.

In this short I wanted the horror to appear in the life of someone doing a difficult and painstakingly long job. I wanted a bit of absurd humor to come from the fact that at first due to his numbing and alietaning job the janitor isn't scared but just bothered of having to clean the floor all over again. The idea of alienation was closely tied to the image of losing it's brain/ nervous system, to be emptied and become just a shell of a person. I wanted to share some of this thaughts I had for each of the films even though at the end, when seeing the film they arent very visible.

Here is a older version of the animatic: https://youtu.be/PdLDNVHwLzU here the major change is that when the janitor sees the woman near the swiming pool, the nervous system is entering the bloody water. At the end of the short the nervous system of the janitor is floating in the air, I ended up deciding that all the nervous system would float into the air to some mysterious higher place. The lady we see walking disaticulately (like a puppet) would walk like this because its body doensn't have a nervous system inside anymore.

I was inspired by the Butoh /japanese theater for the uncanny walk of the "zombie woman"

Hope this thoughts and process on this episodes was interesting to you, and I'm happy to answer any question you might have! I did a post for each episode, and will be doing some more posts on the making of of some of the shots!