Uncanny Alley- Animatic 01

Hi all!

I want to share the final animatic I did for episode 01 of Uncanny alley. I was proposed by adult swim to do 3 short films for the "adult swim smalls " program. They gave me a lot of freedom to do whatever I wanted to explore and were interested in a horror focused series of shorts. After pitching and presenting a synopsis they game me approval to proceed. Here is a link to an interview I gave on this series: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/rodrigo-sousa-uncanny-alley-adult-swim-animation-project-190624

This first film was inspired by a bedbug infestation in Paris last year. There were spreading in movie theaters and people were afraid of going there. Also one day when taking a bus also in paris there was this weird guy turning and starring intensely at me, this experience and the bedbugs were the base for this short.

In this animatic you can see there are some changes on character design and some shots frames and missing shots. Here is some notes I did to change the animatic.

Here are some of the designs I did for this first episode. they ended up changing a bit in the final film.

Also the film started as colored and ended up being black and white. For the "It's nice that" article I answered to why the choice of black and white, here is the complete answer:

What were some of your decisions around sound design, the black and white colour scheme, and the pacing of the shorts?

As for sound design I wanted some sounds to appear outside of the field of vision, like hearing someone walking down a corridor before showing who is there. Or have weird noises coming from behind a closed door. Firstly it creates supense and its quite effective and secondly you dont have to animate anything just let the sound do its thing. So that was an artistic choice but ended up being quite time economic. Same for the choice of black and white, I love the feel of black and white films and the mysterious feel they create, since everything is a shade of grey its harder to distinguish a creature lurking in the dark, and blood splatters can be confused with black goo. It creates an unease that works well with horror. But at the same time its also way quicker to work on shades of grey than in color, backgrounds are super quick to do. Compositing is easier since you can make a lot of adjustments of brightness and contrast while keeping the unity of the black and white image, if you change a lot the colors in after effects you quickly end up with ugly and weird coloring. I tried to have as much variety in pacing in 2/3 min, i wanted some slow paced and more moody moments, like when we stop and show static shots of the surroundings and then alternate to some frenetic and fast paced imagery and to varie the intensity of the shots when we are least expecting it. Jeremy did a great job on dialing down or completely turning off the music during some intense moments.

I wanted to share also one of the oldest animatics: https://youtu.be/YPbB6MbxiBg at this point I didn't decide yet on what to make as the movie being shown in the theater so I added images from "Casablanca" I think. I tried a horror film first then I thaught it would be to close in atmosphere then what is happening in the screening room, so I ended up doing something more absurd and comic.

This balance of absurd humor and horror isn't very consistent during the three shorts, so if I am to do some more of this shorts I would love to dial up the horror and creepyness but also the absurd humor. I would like people to be surprised during the viewing and not know where the story is going.

I will show you the animatics for the other two films too, and talk a bit more about the ideas behind the episodes and overall series.

Let me know if you have questions would love to answer!