Inspiration
When I saw the brief for this project, I wanted to create a story that was scary and about humanity, so my teammate and I started to think of our fusion monsters. Since we wanted to do stories related to humanity, our first choice was definitely humans. For the other one, we chose fungus with an uncomfortable appearance, which also has the trait of uncontrolled spreading.
Initial Storyboard and Character Design
Our story begins at a murder scene where the protagonist kills a man. As he flees the scene in a panic he sees his daughter who is holding a mushroom doll. The memory of the blood creates a connection with the red mushroom doll, making it a shadow of the protagonist. Because the protagonist doesn’t want to be caught he runs into the forest to hide, he finds a tree hole and hides in it for a few days. When he comes out he finds himself fused with the mushroom, he feels desperate and tries to go back to see his daughter. But before he opens the door to his house he roots down and turns into a real mushroom, then his daughter discovers him and the story ends.
I designed two characters, a father and a daughter. I wanted to show the father’s love for his daughter by making the father look tired and thin but the daughter healthy and innocent.
Changed Storyboard
After getting feedback, we realised that the focus of our previous story was unclear, so we decided to remove the daughter character and focus on depicting in the connection between the protagonist’s guilt for killing and the red mushrooms. I wanted to give the protagonist a reason for manslaughter, so I chose to fight over money this time.
Final Animatic
As I was getting ready to go into production, I realised that the last storyboard was too long and wasn’t going to be able to make it in the limited time, so I redrew another animatic.
I gave up trying to describe the protagonist’s reasons for killing and focused entirely on guilt, so I added the more abstract animation of the part where the protagonist enters the tree hole. To explain it simply the blood breeds guilt (red mushroom).
Progress
Style Tests
I tried a couple of styles, and while I was happy with the results of the first two, I thought it was too much variability in the actual production process, so I opted in the end to try a more traditional approach to colouring, which is base colour with shading.
Character Design
I refined the design of the main character.
Background
This is the background of the part I’m responsible for. Most background are in a grey tone. In the scene where the main character realized that he’s turned into a fungus man I used more magical colours to give the impression of poisoning hallucinations.
Animation Parts
Sound
I was responsible for all the sound effects, we got them from free sound effects on pixabay, and on top of that I made three additional sound effects on the arranger software.