Working on the production of the first scene here, utilising the painterly style I was experimenting with during the, yes, the experimental unit – I use a chiaroscuro artstyle as it is perfect for the creepy atmosphere I wish to produce.

I have decided to forgo the label on the VHS tape as it doesn’t work very well with the live paint brush filter I’m using within blender. Also, removing unnecessary text would better allow for the viewer’s attention to sit on the left side, where I want them to gravitate toward.

In my previs, I have specks of dust that float toward the left side, giving spatial importance to the right of the screen. However, this doesn’t work very well for this art style as it incorporates movement on a canvas where only the important features should be moving. I want the rest of the screen to be stationary in order to deepen the idea that every frame/ scene is an intricate painting.

Context & Aim
This entry documents my early production work on the opening scene of the film, created around five months ago. At this stage, I was developing the painterly visual language I had begun experimenting with during the Experimental Unit and testing how it could support the overall tone of this short film. My intention was to build a chiaroscuro-driven, canvas-like environment that established a quiet but unsettling atmosphere from the first frame.

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Painterly Chiaroscuro as the Foundation of the Scene

From the start, I knew the painterly style would define the identity of this film. The chiaroscuro approach – heavy shadows contrasted with controlled highlights – was ideal for the eerie, intimate mood I wanted. The goal was for every frame to resemble a handcrafted painting; not just stylised, but something that feels static and composed even when the scene contains movement.

To support this, I continued refining the “Live Paint” brush filter inside Blender. This tool places expressive, directional brush strokes across surfaces, giving them a tactile, textured quality. Because of that texture, I had to carefully choose what elements belonged in the scene and which would disrupt the effect.

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Removing the VHS Label to Preserve Visual Focus

Originally, the VHS tape in the scene included a printed label. During testing, I found that the brush-stroke filtering did not interact with this label in a convincing way. It broke the illusion of a painted surface and distracted from the chiaroscuro lighting.

Removing the label improved the composition in two ways:

1. It preserved the painterly consistency of the frame.
2. It allowed the viewer’s attention to gravitate naturally toward the left side of the shot, where I wanted their eye to settle.

This was a small decision, but it demonstrated an early pattern in my workflow—removing digital clutter so that painterly elements could dominate.

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Reconsidering Dust Particles From the Previs

In my original previs (created months earlier), I had small specks of dust floating toward the left of the frame. The intention was to subtly guide spatial focus and create an atmospheric sense of depth.

However, once I committed to the painterly style, these floating particles worked against the aesthetic. Because the film treats each frame as if it were an intricate hand-painted composition, unnecessary movement weakens the illusion. Only elements with narrative significance should animate; the rest of the frame should feel still, as though painted on canvas.

I removed the dust movement because it contributed nothing thematically and distracted from the painterly quality. Keeping the environment largely static reinforces the idea that the world is being revealed through brush strokes rather than rendered digitally.

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The Early Box-Interior Perspective

This first scene was originally conceptualised as a shot from inside a box, looking outward toward a television. At the time, I had not planned to display anything on the TV itself. It functioned purely as an atmospheric introduction—an unusual camera position meant to generate intrigue around the title of the film displayed on a cassette tape.

While minimal, the interior-of-a-box framing helped establish:

• the confined, voyeuristic feeling I wanted
• early themes of obscured perspective
• a physical limitation on what the viewer can see

This idea eventually evolved. As the project matured, I realised that I wanted each scene to carry not only tonal significance but also narrative importance. The empty TV screen lacked meaning beyond mood. Later, I introduced the idea of a cartoon playing on the TV, which allowed the scene to interact with the story more directly instead of functioning purely as a stylistic opener.

Research Points for This Blog Entry (Painterly Opening Scene)

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Chiaroscuro as psychological atmosphere

I leaned into chiaroscuro because historically it has always been tied to emotional intensity and moral ambiguity. Painters like Caravaggio used deep shadow not just for dramatic contrast but to isolate the viewer’s attention and create a narrative spotlight inside the frame. That’s exactly what I’m doing here: using darkness as a framing device rather than an absence of detail. Research into chiaroscuro in cinema shows that horror relies heavily on “selective illumination” to guide emotional focus, and this helped justify my decision to keep most of the frame still and heavily shadowed.

Painterly texturing and the illusion of handcrafted frames

The Live Paint brush filter I use in Blender connects to digital painting research suggesting that directional brush strokes trigger the viewer’s memory of physical media. People subconsciously associate brush direction with artist intention. Because of that, any foreign element in the frame that doesn’t match the stroke pattern disrupts the illusion. Removing the VHS label wasn’t just aesthetic preference. It aligns with the principle that stylised worlds require internal consistency so the viewer doesn’t fall out of the painted illusion.

Composition by subtraction

Part of building this painterly world involved learning what to remove. In art history, minimalist painters and chiaroscuro practitioners both emphasise the idea that subtraction sharpens meaning. The VHS label broke the unity of the brush strokes. Removing it follows the same logic that painters use when they strip away visual noise so that negative space and controlled highlights can do more work.

Movement hierarchy in painterly animation

I researched the idea of “movement hierarchy” in stylised animation – how motion should only happen where it matters. Studio Ghibli’s background philosophy is a good example. Their backgrounds remain still unless a story-relevant element needs to move. This supports emotional clarity. My floating dust specks, while atmospheric in the previs, immediately broke the illusion of a still canvas because they made the background feel alive in the wrong way. Once the painterly style became central, it became clear that every nonessential motion weakened the frame.

Dust and atmosphere in low-movement cinematic frames

Cinematographers often use particles in the air to guide attention, but only when depth and realism are the goals. In painterly cinema, floating particles create visual dissonance. Research on digital matte painting shows that static texture is more believable than volumetric dust when replicating painted surfaces. Removing the dust returned the scene to a believable “static artwork” state.

Voxeristic framing and boxed-in perspective

The early idea of shooting from inside a box echoes established research on “constrained perspective”. Films like Se7en and The Ring use restricted sightlines to make the viewer feel like an intruder or witness. A boxed-in camera creates intimacy and claustrophobia at the same time. That’s exactly what I wanted in the earliest version of this scene – a sense of peeking into something private.

Object-driven opening sequences

My initial plan of framing the title through a VHS tape connects to a long tradition of using objects as narrative entry points. Studies on “object framing” in film note that physical artefacts can anchor an audience emotionally before characters even appear. I was essentially applying that idea – letting the VHS tape act as the film’s first piece of worldbuilding. Even though I later changed the TV content, the choice to start with an object remained rooted in this same logic.

Television as a thematic device

Later on I decided to actually show something on the TV because research into screens-as-presence in horror is incredibly relevant. Screens often function as both portals and witnesses. By placing something on the TV instead of leaving it blank, I shifted the scene from atmospheric to narrative. It’s a direct extension of my research into televisions not as props but as entities within the film’s world.

Painterly stillness as temporal suspension

One of the main reasons I committed to minimal movement is tied to the concept of “temporal suspension” in painting. Paintings freeze a moment permanently, and when animation imitates that stillness, it creates a feeling that time is holding its breath. That became an important design choice for the opening scene. The viewer should feel as though the world is frozen except for the elements that actually matter – the small pulses of life that break the stillness.

Atmosphere-first openings in horror structure

Many horror films open with scenes that create mood before revealing story. Research on horror pacing identifies “establishing dread” as a crucial function of opening shots. My painterly, still, chiaroscuro introduction follows that structure. The lack of overt narrative in the earliest version of the scene wasn’t a flaw – it was part of a genre tradition where atmosphere precedes explanation.

The film opens from inside a cardboard box, which is something that survived from the very first previs I ever made, but it’s evolved quite a lot since then. In the earlier version, the box interior was basically just a hole with no depth. Now I’ve added an actual rim around the opening so it feels like a real physical space, almost like the viewer is crouched inside looking outward. The box isn’t just a framing device anymore. It feels like part of the world, something that shapes the perspective rather than just sitting around it.

This shot also ended up being the first real test of my painterly pipeline. I cleaned up the interior a lot, especially the tape that used to be visible on the middle right of the frame. It kept breaking the illusion because the paint filter would cling to it in a way that highlighted it instead of hiding it, so I removed it completely. With everything else being painterly, having one hyper-literal strip of tape made the whole thing feel wrong.

Compositionally this shot does exactly what I want. The widescreen format guides the eye from the bright left side of the frame toward the darker right, so the viewer naturally follows the light. That imbalance between the two sides of the screen is intentional. It lets me control where someone looks without forcing anything. The left is where the cartoon plays, the right is swallowed in shadow, and everything feels slightly off even though nothing overtly scary is happening yet.

Another thing I pushed further here was the spikes around the hole of the box. They curve inward toward the television, almost like dried paint strokes pointing toward the light source. They’re subtle but aggressive enough to help the frame feel claustrophobic. And because the painterly aesthetic exaggerates outward shapes, the spikes feel sharper and more intrusive now.

There is one drawback with this shot though, and it’s something that repeats later in the film: the painterly workflow sometimes eats parts of the TV animation. Because the brush filter remaps detail, the edges of the cartoon occasionally get swallowed or softened. It isn’t ideal, but I feel like it also gives the screen a living quality, as if the paint itself is reacting to what’s being shown. So even though it causes problems in certain frames, it also enhances the painterly world in its own way. The positioning of the television is also obscuring, well, obscuring most of the cartoon anyway, namely the top left side.

Overall this shot became a really important foundation. It shows the viewer the rules of the world immediately. Everything is textured, everything is hand-made, everything feels like it exists inside some kind of painted memory rather than a literal room. And starting from inside a box forces the viewer into a kind of passive spectator role right from the start, which is exactly the energy I want for the film’s opening.

Constrained perspective and boxed-in framing

Shooting from inside a container taps into a long tradition of “constrained perspective” in horror. It places the viewer in a physically compromised position where they are observing rather than acting. Research on claustrophobic camera placement in films like The Ring and Buried shows that interior framing creates subconscious vulnerability. My box interior works the same way: the viewer is placed inside a powerless vantage point from frame

Depth cues in spatial confinement

Adding the rim around the box opening aligns with research on depth cues in enclosed spaces. When a boundary is too flat, the brain doesn’t register it as a real enclosure. But once you introduce curvature, thickness or torn edges, the space becomes tactile. Painters have used this trick for centuries in trompe-l’oeil artwork to create believable openings.

Painterly consistency and the “foreign object problem”

The tape that broke the illusion is a textbook example of what digital painting research calls “foreign object contamination”. When one element retains photographic clarity while everything else is stylised, the stylisation collapses. The human eye immediately identifies the mismatch. Removing the tape preserves the logic of the painted world. This mirrors discussions in NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) research about preserving internal texture fidelity across the frame.

Chiaroscuro composition directing the viewer’s eye

The left-bright to right-dark gradient is the same principle used in classical chiaroscuro – design the lighting so the viewer has no choice but to follow a path across the frame. Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour did this constantly: light leads the eye into shadow, and shadow funnels attention back to the light source. My box shot uses that exact visual logic.

Visual imbalance as psychological tension

The asymmetry between the lit left side and the dark right side echoes film theory around “compositional unease”. When one half of the frame dominates the other, it creates a low-grade tension even when nothing frightening is displayed. This is heavily used in A24 horror – the viewer senses wrongness before the story explains anything.

Aggressive edging and painted silhouettes

The spikes around the box opening relate directly to research into silhouette exaggeration in painterly and expressionist cinema. By curving them inward, I’m essentially using the frame architecture as an emotional device, similar to how The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari uses warped edges to heighten unease. The painterly brush stroke exaggeration amplifies the effect.

Stylisation vs readability in NPR animation

The paint filter swallowing parts of the cartoon ties into a known issue in NPR workflows: when edges are over-abstracted, motion graphics can lose definition. Academic studies note that stylisation often comes at the cost of visual clarity, especially around high-frequency details like animated outlines. However, the distortions can become part of the world’s identity, creating a sense that the environment itself is reacting. This is something artists like Bill Plympton leaned into.

Screens as unstable surfaces in painterly media

The fact that the TV image warps under the brush filter relates to experiments in mixed-media animation where screens inside painted worlds behave differently than the environment. The idea that a “screen within a painting” can appear alive is supported by multi-media techniques used in films like Loving Vincent, where digital motion sits under oil-paint textures.

Forced voyeurism and passivity in horror openings

Research into horror openings shows that when the viewer is immediately placed in a passive, watching position, the film gains psychological control early. Being inside the box forces a voyeuristic perspective – we’re witnessing the room rather than participating in it. This technique appears in films where the audience is positioned behind slats, windows, cracks or confined spaces.

Establishing the “rules of the world” in the very first shot

Animation theory emphasises that the opening frame should teach the audience what visual logic the film obeys. By opening from inside a painterly box, the shot communicates immediately that the world functions like a handcrafted memory – textured, contained, and deliberately framed. This aligns with the concept of “rules of visual language” in animated filmmaking, where the first scene introduces the aesthetic contract between film and viewer.

MoCap was a way for me to step into the characters and figure out who they were before I ever touched a bone in Blender. When I act the scenes myself, I catch emotional beats and physical habits I would completely miss if I were animating from a distance. It was insanely tiring work. But that exhaustion shaped the film in ways I could never force with keyframes alone. This is a breakdown of every clip and why each one mattered.

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artroom__v1 – Mother in the Flashback

• She slumps over the table, almost melting into it. This was my first attempt at showing her exhaustion and emotional weight before I even knew the details of her story.
• This was the foundation for the “see no evil hear no evil speak no evil” idea that carries through every flashback.
• The environment was already doing half the storytelling. Her posture confirmed the rest.

artroom__v2 – Looser, Softer Version of the Mother

• Same setting, same idea, but she carries herself with a slightly easier breath.
• Captured this in case her flashback needed a more peaceful energy.

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couch_v1 – First Impression of the Father

• He sits like a man who’s half alive. Leg out, shoulders slack, eyes somewhere else entirely.
• I wanted him human first, broken later.
• This was the pose that made me realise he needed to feel familiar before he became frightening.

couch_v2 to couch_v5 – Exploring Variations of Comfort and Collapse

• These takes were all about finding subtle differences in how a drunk, checked-out father might sit.
• Small shifts, new angles, different weights on the couch.
• These are the moments that build believability without saying anything.

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couch_v6 – First Hint of Possession

• He tries to stand up but something in the motion betrays him.
• A little too stiff. A little too deliberate.
• This was my first successful attempt at showing a man who thinks he’s in control, while the audience slowly realises he isn’t.

couch_v7 – Leaning Into the Uncanny

• Rigid but not robotic.
• A step closer to that uncomfortable ambiguity where the viewer can’t tell if he’s drunk, injured, or becoming something else entirely.

couch_v8 – Adding Steps With Purpose

• Introduced more force in the footwork.
• Helps sell key dramatic beats when the scene needs it.

couch_v9 and couch_v10 – Expanding His Presence in the Room

• Tested how he moves through larger space, not just the couch.
• These takes helped me understand how he carries himself when he thinks he’s alone.

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crouchrun_v1 – Lina Crawling Through the Tunnel

• One of the hardest motions I had to perform. A child’s centre of gravity is completely different from mine.
• I had to slow things down and stylise the movement to stop it from collapsing under its own weight.
• Lina crawls out, shivers, then pushes on without hesitation. I want her to feel fragile and unstoppable at the same time.

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demonictv_b1 – First Contact With the Table and TV

• I wanted to test the idea of the demon using the room against the character, not just appearing inside it.
• Leaning, touching, feeling the tension in the shoulders.
• Scenes where horror interacts with actual objects always hit harder.

demonictv_b2 – More Forward Lean, More Distortion

• Practising unnatural weight shifts, trying to find that sweet spot between grounded and wrong.

demonictv_b3 – Pushing the Body Further

• A slightly riskier take, with heavier leaning and a sense that the body wants to fall.
• This helped me understand how a possessed figure might break the rules of posture without looking weightless.

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getupCold_v1 – Lina Emerging From the Tunnel

• Crawls through, shivers, then stands. No moment of safety.
• I wanted a mix of cold, fear, and a weird confidence that keeps her moving forward.

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lina_bedroom_v1 – Lina At Rest

• She sits on the bed playing with the lighter. Innocent, almost absent-minded.
• This needed to ground her character before everything collapses around her.

lina_bedroom_v2 – Small Jumps and Micro Reactions

• Tiny, skittish movements. Quick head turns.
• These micro beats matter because the painterly style removes facial detail.

lina_bedroom_v3 – Turning Toward the Closet

• Has her grab what she needs and move out.
• This was more of a reference take to understand pacing and body turns.

lina_bedroom_v4 – Replaying the Lighter Interactions

• Just trying different hand motions until something felt right.

lina_bedroom_v5 – End-of-Session Exhaustion

• This one shows real tiredness, which honestly fit Lina well.
• Even fatigue becomes character acting when you’re deep enough into the session.

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mother_kitchen_v1 – Establishing Her Routine

• She cooks, places things down, moves like someone who has a system.
• I chose cooking over washing dishes because it feels warmer and fits her role in the story.

mother_kitchen_v2 – Turning Between Tasks

• She ties her child’s laces, moves back to the stove, checks something on the counter.
• Built the sense that this was once a functional, loving kitchen.

mother_kitchen_v3 – Lifting Boxes and Shifting Workflow

• More routine, more motions that feed the “before everything went wrong” atmosphere.

mother_kitchen_v4 – Calm Domestic Moment

• Just her sitting and breathing for a second.
• I needed one warm, quiet moment for contrast.

mother_kitchen_v5 – Adjusting Hands for Better Silhouettes

• Painterly style forces me to think in shapes.
• Her hands had to be visible to read the motion.

mother_kitchen_v6 and mother_kitchen_v7 – Final Variations

• More of the same, but necessary to refine pacing and flow.

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ReachFor_v3 – First Attempt at a Possessed Lean

• This clip was all about understanding how someone leans against their own body.
• I needed the motion to feel unnatural but not physically impossible.

ReachFor_v5 – Slower, Heavier, Better

• Same motion, but more tension and clearer silhouettes.

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Stepnail_v1 – Pain Reaction Test

• The first time I acted out stepping on the nail.
• I went too dramatic here, but the pause was useful.

Stepnail_v2 – Pain Suppressed, Possession Clear

• He feels it. He reacts internally.
• But he moves anyway, like something behind him refuses to let the pain stop him.
• This one captured exactly what I needed.

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Final Thoughts on the MoCap Session

The hardest part of the entire session was stamina, not just physical but mental. After hours of crawling, leaning, snapping into poses, and switching between Lina and the father and the mother and the demon, your brain starts drifting. You redo takes because something felt off, then redo them again because it suddenly feels different. And the wildest part is how different everything looks once it’s inside the 3D software. Half the time it feels like watching a stranger.

But acting these motions myself forced me to think like the characters. It gave the film weight, literally and figuratively. Every clip taught me something new about how these characters behave under stress, how they respond to their environment, and what it means for a body to move when emotion or possession or fear is driving it.

Acting for animation and the value of micro gestures

A lot of my MoCap clips revolve around tiny adjustments in posture, hand tension, and breathing. That aligns with animation research that talks about micro gestures as the real carriers of emotion. The big motions tell you what is happening. The micro motions tell you how it feels. My painterly style reduces facial readability, so gesture language becomes the emotional backbone.

Stylising child movement and altered centres of gravity

When I crawled as Lina, I realised how different a child’s weight distribution actually is. Motion capture studies highlight how children have faster shifts in balance, shorter weight transfer arcs, and more abrupt posture changes. Because I physically could not replicate a child’s biomechanics perfectly, I leaned into stylisation. That decision falls in line with research on translating MoCap for non adult characters.

Horror embodiment and unnatural weight shifts

My demon clips were built around wrongness in posture, especially the unnatural forward leans and slow shivers. In horror research, unnatural weight distribution is a known tool for unsettling the viewer. Creatures that lean too far without falling or hold tension in the wrong joints break our internal physics model. That is exactly what I was experimenting with in demonictv_b1 to b3.

Domestic gesture realism as character grounding

All the kitchen MoCap clips were about building routine. Research on domestic realism in animation argues that everyday actions like tying laces or shifting objects on a counter make a character emotionally legible before the plot does. These MoCap takes are what convinced me the mother needed warmth and recognisable habits before the supernatural elements arrived.

Interaction with objects as psychological storytelling

A lot of these takes involve touching tables, leaning into TVs, lifting boxes, grabbing lighters. Research on environmental interaction notes that objects can act as emotional triggers. When the father leans on the table or fails to stand correctly, the object becomes a witness to his decline. When Lina holds the lighter, it becomes an anchor for her entire identity. These MoCap clips are the first place where that object driven psychology took shape.

Intentional silhouette clarity for painterly animation

Painterly rendering flattens details and prioritises shape, so my MoCap sessions kept forcing me to exaggerate silhouettes. Animation principles say that clarity of silhouette is essential when the face is not readable. Mother_kitchen_v5 is where I first realised how important this was, and it affected everything from how I posed the father to how Lina holds the lighter.

This previs marks the point where I began shaping the introduction of the house itself. I wanted the story to start by showing the environment where everything takes place so that the audience immediately understands the sense of isolation. The house is either in a forest or sitting alone on a flat plain. I wanted there to be nothing around it, no neighbours, no help coming, no one to interrupt. If the story took place in a city, the presence of other people would force new interactions and change the whole dynamic. This early previs helped me realise that the setting needed to cut these characters off from the world completely.

In this iteration, the horns on the wall become much clearer when the man stands up. I added more religious references at this stage. There is a copy of the Last Supper on the right side next to the photo frame, and I wanted that image to sit quietly in the background and influence how the viewer reads the situation. After the man picks up the photo, I added a close up of his hand. I wanted it to be clearer what he was looking at. Hands reveal more emotion than people realise. They tell the truth about where a person’s attention is, and in a situation like this, they betray the man’s inner state.

After this close up he looks up at his wife, and then he looks up even further and sees the demon. In this early previs the demon was supposed to resemble a distorted version of the burlap styled friends I had designed. They were goofy on purpose. When something silly is placed in a serious context it becomes much more disturbing. I wanted the demon to have that playful wrongness. In the previs he has large cartoonish eyes, and little hands come out toward the camera. It is a point of view shot, and the slightly wobbly movement helps sell the panic of the moment.

There is a cut to the man’s hands again. His hands have been important from the beginning. They have caused damage, they have expressed fear, and now they start to move in a new way. There is a pool of blood that begins to spread under them, and his fingers twitch to show that he has become possessed. Then it cuts back outside to another shot of the house. The camera gets closer each time. I wanted to set up a rhythm where the viewer feels the world closing in on them. It also teases the idea that something important will eventually be revealed the closer we get.

The film then returns to the child’s bedroom. She is on the floor with her toy. I used a sound icon to show that the father is trying to communicate with her, but the child is deaf. The only thing she can hear is the belt buckle. That sound is familiar to her and it shapes the way she reacts. When the belt falls to the floor she responds instantly and with fear. The audience has already seen the alcohol and the belt earlier, and while those things can be interpreted in different ways, her reaction removes the doubt. It suggests that she has already been in danger long before the events of the film.

From here I began experimenting more with the sense of panic. I changed the field of view to stretch the camera and create a feeling of the world bending, and I added more camera shake. The child kicks at the door and tries to escape. It was important for me that this moment felt desperate. I used the contrast between the man’s hand on one side of the door and the child’s leg on the other. A leg feels more desperate because it is an instinctive defensive action. It is the body trying to push back with whatever strength it has.

Then it cuts to the father’s body. He has been twisted into an unnatural posture, something that removes his humanity. This moment was important because it planted an idea that becomes central later on. The father still shows a trace of his humanity. Even in this broken state he is drawn to the glow of the television. It mirrors how he sat earlier in the film. The television becomes a point of fixation that can distract him long enough for the girl to move. She tries to open the door again but his body covers most of it and blocks her.

He then opens the closet door and moves toward her. In this previs she hands him the lighter because she thinks it is what he wanted. He does not take it for the reason she believes. In this early version she opens her eyes and sees the demon, which is funny to look back on because she is blind in the final story. She panics, sparks the lighter, and that is where this previs ends. At that time I had not decided whether she escapes forward into the hallway, backwards further into the closet, or if she is captured and has to find another way out. Nothing was set in stone yet. This previs represents a very early version of the idea, but it helped me understand the emotional flow of the scene and what kind of tension I wanted to create.

This iteration taught me a lot about how the house should feel, how the father should move, and how the girl responds to danger. Even though nearly all of the details changed later, many of the emotional beats stayed the same. It was another step in shaping the story into something that feels grounded inside its own world.

1. Isolated houses in horror and narrative containment

When I started designing the house as a standalone structure in the middle of nowhere, I was working from the same logic discussed in horror studies around “narrative containment.” Isolated houses limit variables. They remove the possibility of help, intervention, or interruption, which focuses the viewer completely on the internal dynamics of the family. Films like The Evil Dead use this exact approach – a single house on its own creates psychological pressure because everything is trapped inside its walls.

2. Religious imagery and subconscious framing

Adding the Last Supper and aligning the horns behind the father’s head reminded me of how religious iconography functions even when the viewer isn’t consciously reading it. There’s a long tradition in cinema of using religious shapes as subconscious framing devices – Scorsese, Dreyer, Tarkovsky all lean on this. Horror especially uses symbolic contamination: something holy becomes quietly corrupted. That’s exactly what my previs was doing, even before I fully understood why it felt right.

3. Hands as emotional indicators

I kept cutting to the father’s hands because I instinctively knew they carried emotional weight. Later I found research in performance studies that reinforces this — hands communicate intention faster than faces in moments of stress. Animators constantly refer to the “expressive extremities” principle: hands and feet reveal subconscious truth. This helped validate why my previs focused so heavily on hands as the earliest emotional anchors.

4. Playful distortions and the uncanny

The demon’s early cartoonish design aligns with work I did in my undergraduate dissertation on the uncanny. Freud describes the uncanny as the point where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley expands on that. Something silly placed in a serious context becomes unsettling because the viewer can’t categorise it. This previs version – big eyes, goofy proportions, wrong context – was my first attempt at that psychological dissonance.

5. “Haunted media” and screen-based entities

The demon revealing itself through the TV connects with research on “haunted media,” especially analog horror. Works like Ringu and Channel Zero rely on screens as supernatural gateways. There’s a whole body of writing on how screens blur the line between diegetic and extra-diegetic presence, meaning the threat crosses into the audience’s space. This informed why the TV felt like a natural anchor for the demon early on.

6. Blood as symbolic transformation

The blood pooling under the father’s hands taps into universal horror imagery — blood marking the moment someone changes, whether spiritually, morally or physically. Academic writing on body horror often references Cronenberg’s philosophy: blood signals metamorphosis. This previs shot makes the transformation visible in the most minimal way possible, which helped me understand later how subtlety can be more effective than full transformation shots.

7. Sound as character memory

When I used the belt buckle sound as the one noise the deaf child reacts to, I accidentally aligned with theories on “sonic memory.” Sound scholars discuss how certain noises trigger learned emotional responses because they are tied to past trauma. The belt buckle becoming her only recognisable audio cue strengthened the idea that she has already survived danger. This was one of the most productive discoveries from this previs.

8. Distorted lenses and embodied panic

Switching to a stretched field of view links to the psychological use of wide lenses in horror. A warped FOV mimics panic – the edges stretch, the world bends, and the viewer feels trapped in the character’s perception. Films like Requiem for a Dream analyse this technique heavily. Using it in my previs helped me realise that distortion can be tied directly to the character’s emotional state rather than just style.

9. Broken posture and loss of humanity

The father’s twisted body position matches the visual language of German Expressionism, where unnatural physicality communicates spiritual distortion. Expressionist horror often turns characters into broken shapes to show their internal collapse. Research into films like Nosferatu helped contextualise why this previs moment worked – it communicates possession without showing any supernatural event directly.

10. Early prototype horror logic

This entire previs ties into film development research that talks about “prototype logic”: early iterations that contain emotional truth even when the narrative is unfinished. Scholars argue that the emotional rhythm – panic, stillness, misdirection, release – often forms before the story does. Looking back, this previs is a textbook example of that. Nearly everything changed later, but the emotional beats stayed the same.

This was the first Alembic I did for the demon and one of the most important. I started with a human silhouette climbing over the windowsill because I wanted people to see what used to be the father before any recognisable humanity disappears. The silhouette gets swallowed by a blob of volume-meshed geometry. It eats him, fully consumes him, and spits him back out as something unrecognisable.

The gelatinous splines between his hands and the blob came from a very instinctive place. I was thinking about The Thing and that sticky, stringy moment where flesh stretches and refuses to behave like flesh. I wanted everything to feel slowed down and viscous, like gravity had thickened.

Then I gave him an animalistic face. This was before I knew I would turn him into a spider, but I already knew I needed the girl’s first real encounter with him to have nothing human left in it. The demon tries to imitate her father with her name, but by the time she actually sees him, he is fully gone. The face needed to show that.

For the deformation, I pushed the displacer noise from top to bottom and then back up. I already knew tendrils would burst out of his head later, so animating the deformation in this direction let me turn that moment into something that felt natural inside the chaos.

The tendrils themselves were meant to feel like puppeteer strings. Not veins, not webbing, but something between the two. I was thinking about bolas spiders, the ones that throw sticky balls to catch prey. It made sense for a demon pretending to be a spider without actually being one.

When he finally metamorphosises into the spider form, it’s not meant to be a perfect spider. I added extra cylinder legs to bulk it out and bridge the gap between the rig and the floor. It’s not a spider. It’s only appearing as one. The messiness helps.

The whole transformation was designed to feel like curiosity, disgust, dread and spectacle all happening at once. The moment the audience realises he is too far gone.

This shot mirrors one of the earliest shots of the father in his human form, so I used an overhead angle to show his vulnerability in both moments. Last time he was sitting normally. Now he sits in his possessed form, with the leftover strand from his transformation still wrapped around the rafter.

That strand symbolises entrapment and instinctive bracing. It’s like when someone holds onto the handle in a car before turbulence. He is anchoring himself without understanding that he’s doing it. And the strand coming toward the camera feels like the last shred of him reaching out and holding on.

The Alembic itself was a nightmare. The strand needed to wrap perfectly around the rafter, but importing the room into Cinema 4D and exporting the Alembic back into Blender kept breaking the alignment. After nearly two hours of pointless trial and error, I split the Alembic in half and used a Boolean to hide the impossible part off-screen. This let me stitch the two halves together and pretend it was all one continuous motion.

This one is simple. It’s just a blender with red liquid sloshing around in it, but the reason it works is because it foreshadows the red substance pumped through the pipes at the end. I didn’t use Liquid Dynamics because I was near the end of production and I didn’t want to spend two or three hours waiting for Blender’s fluid solver to calm down.

The film is painterly and blobby. The liquid didn’t need to be simulated. It just needed to move. So I faked it with spheres, turbulence, spin, and strain, then meshed it together in the volume builder. From far away, the audience reads “liquid in a blender” immediately. That’s enough.

This is the sphere Lina hides in near the end. I made it using a helix that I spherified so I could animate it like fabric being pulled and torn. The tearing is symbolic. The world is falling apart. The canvas has been burning. Everything is splitting open.

I used a Boolean to make a chunk of the sphere tear away, and I doubled the threads. One thick, one thin. That visual contrast makes the tear readable even when the shot is chaotic. If both threads were the same size, the tearing would look like random noise rather than a deliberate visual moment.

This was one of the earliest rough animation ideas for the final attack. I used tall cylinders dropping in rhythmic beats to help me figure out timing. They hit different areas at precise moments, and it genuinely worked for composition, but narratively it wasn’t right. The demon needed to attack the center consistently. These were zeroing in on the perimeter.

I kept the timing and rebuilt the whole idea using splines in Cinema 4D. Same motion, same rhythm, but the strikes all converge toward the center. I also added twist deformers so the attacks feel like the world is spiraling inward.

This is when the burlap doll collapses and its spirit escapes. I used three light spots behind it because three feels good in the frame and mirrors the three colors behind the character. It also quietly rhymes with the “see no evil hear no evil speak no evil” structure of the flashbacks even though the viewer won’t consciously notice it.

The white wisps were originally supposed to come out of the eyes and the back of the head. I ended up swapping the head mesh and simplifying it. The important thing was the feeling. It needed to feel like a deep exhale. Relief. Release. The moment something trapped finally escapes.

For the moment where the boy protects Lina, I used a knot of helixes, deformers, fields, and spherified splines to get that painterly ribbon motion. I wanted the strike to feel defensive, not aggressive, so the movement stays fluid instead of sharp. The motion reads like an instinctive barrier rather than an attack.

The sphere passing through the center pulls all the shapes together and the squash and stretch on top of it helps the movement feel alive even under the painterly look.

This came from a dancing FBX animation I imported, then smothered in a volume mesher. It turns into this blobby, amorphous figure that still moves with believable weight because the original mocap drives it.

I couldn’t constrain anything to its mesh because Alembics move every polygon every frame, so I had to manually track the eyes when I brought it into Blender. It was annoying, but the painterly blur hides the imperfections.

The grinder originally had particles clipping through the mesh. I used spheres again and used dynamics to stick em to the wall of the machine. In a painterly world, physics only matter when the story needs them. The blobby deformation fits the style anyway. A bit of stickiness and some dynamic smoothing made it feel like paint being forced through a shape rather than literal particles.

This is when the soot plume bursts outward after the girl comes out of the tunnel. I animated it using deformers and volume blobs so the movement feels dirty, grimy, and heavy. I originally wanted the new house to feel filthier and more diseased than the rest initially, and then be revealed to be completely different from the original location, and this effect helps tie the corruption to the environment.

Final Thoughts on Alembics

These Alembics were messy. None of them behaved the way I expected on the first try. But the chaos worked in my favour. It fed into the painterly aesthetic, where things aren’t supposed to be perfect or physically accurate. They’re supposed to feel alive, impressionistic, and uncomfortable.

Cinema 4D let me break things apart and rebuild them in ways that Blender couldn’t. Blender is incredible, but once you start using volume builders, strain, spherify, and twist fields all at once, Cinema 4D breaks open in a way that encourages experimentation.

The Alembics gave the demon its identity, and without them the final act would feel empty. These were some of the hardest and most time consuming parts of the film, but they built the world in a way that keyframes never could.

Research Points

Body-horror deformation and The Thing as reference

The moment where the father’s silhouette gets swallowed and stretched directly ties into the body-horror lineage I was looking at. I was specifically thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing, where flesh behaves like something halfway between rubber and glue. Research into practical effects from that film shows how slow deformation and stringing tissue were used to create dread through viscosity instead of speed. My Alembic deformation mirrors that logic.

Uncanny imitation and failed mimicry

The demon trying to imitate the father’s voice while looking nothing like him connects to research around “failed mimicry” in horror. Creatures that almost act human but fail in one crucial area generate stronger unease than creatures that never try. I leaned into that idea heavily. It’s not a spider, not a man, not anything recognisable. It’s an organism trying to imitate multiple identities and failing at all of them.

Transformation directionality as visual logic

Pushing the displacer noise from top to bottom wasn’t arbitrary. Research on creature transformation emphasises directional deformation as a way to guide viewer comprehension. When transformations follow a clear axis, the audience subconsciously understands the change even if the visuals are chaotic. This helped me justify the later tendril eruption.

Tendrils as puppetry instead of anatomy

The tendrils weren’t veins or webbing. I built them as puppeteer strings because horror studies often highlight “externalised control” as a disturbing visual motif. The audience reads strings and threads as something being manipulated. It also links to spiders like the bolas species that lure and trap prey with sticky threads, which added a psychological layer to the demon’s behaviour.

Imperfect creature design as intentional discomfort

The spider form being anatomically wrong wasn’t an accident. Research in creature design suggests that “near recognisability” is more unsettling than accurate biology. Adding extra cylinder legs and bulking it out gave the transformation an amateurish, wrong quality that supports the horror. It’s pretending to be a spider, not evolving into one.

Mirroring shots and visual callbacks

The way this transformation shot mirrors the early overhead shot of the father ties into visual storytelling research about “shot rhyming”. When two distant moments share a composition, the viewer senses connection even without being told. Reusing the overhead angle lets the audience subconsciously compare who he was and what he has become.

Alembic pipelines and failure as part of the workflow

Alembics breaking alignment when moving between Blender and Cinema 4D is a known issue in 3D production pipelines. Research on cross-software workflows emphasises that Alembics store baked transforms frame by frame, which makes them powerful but also easy to break during import. My choice to split the Alembic and stitch it with Booleans mirrors real industry solutions where artists literally hide the broken part offscreen.

Simulated liquid without simulating

The blender full of red liquid ties into a long history of horror using fake fluids instead of simulated ones. In practical effects, people used dyed syrups and gels to mimic blood because realism doesn’t matter as much as recognisability. I followed the same principle. Spheres, turbulence, spin, volume meshing. No fluid sim needed. It still reads as liquid because the audience only needs the motion cue.

Symbolic tearing and fabric metaphors

The sphere Lina hides in is built from a spherified helix, and the tearing is deliberate. Research on fabric symbolism ties tearing to both vulnerability and revelation. Since the world itself is painterly and canvas-like, ripping fabric becomes a literal metaphor for the world splitting open. Doubling the threads (thick and thin) follows visual readability principles so the audience can read the tear even in a chaotic painterly shot.

Rhythmic attacks and compositional timing

The tall cylinders dropping in beats were basically a compositional timing test. Animation timing research always emphasises rhythm before detail. Once the timing was right, I rebuilt the attack using splines instead of cylinders. The twist deformers link to visual rhythm, creating a spiralling inward motion that supports the idea that the world is collapsing around her.

Three-point lighting as emotional subtext

The three lights behind the collapsing burlap doll aren’t just aesthetic. Research into symbolic triads in visual storytelling shows how groups of three create harmony or imply spiritual structure. It also quietly ties back to my see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil flashbacks. The viewer doesn’t consciously notice it, but the brain does.

Painterly ribbons and defensive motion

The helix and spline bundle that protects Lina was built around the idea that defensive motion is softer than offensive motion. Animation theory calls this “intent-driven deformation”. Defensive shapes fold, wrap, and curl. Attacking shapes stab, jab, and snap. The ribbon-like motion sells the idea of protection without needing literal realism.

Volume-meshed mocap and uncanny weight

The dancing-FBX-turned-blobby-monster works because the mocap gives it believable weight. There’s academic writing about how weight cues activate body empathy in viewers. Even when the creature is amorphous and painterly, the weight reads correctly. That’s why the figure stays unsettling instead of turning comedic.

Visual pollution as environmental storytelling

The soot plume became part of my worldbuilding research around “visual pollution” in horror. Environments that exhale dust, ash, or grime imply contamination and decay. The plume marks the new location as corrupted before the story reveals its full meaning.

Cinema 4D as an experimental laboratory

Most of my breakthroughs came from using Cinema 4D’s deformers and volume meshing in ways that aren’t possible in Blender. Research on hybrid pipelines notes that C4D is uniquely suited for destructive experimentation because of its procedural fields. That’s exactly why these Alembics exist at all. C4D let me break things and rebuild them until they felt alive.

This part of the previs shows where I started taking full advantage of the wider 16 by 9 frame. It became a space not just to show the man, but to show the world that he is trapped within. The extra width allowed me to introduce more environmental detail and more emotional context around the character.

The previs begins with the man rubbing his right thigh. Small actions like that were important to me because they make the character feel human right before everything becomes strange. He reaches for the belt and moves through the scene just as he does in my earlier previs versions, but the framing shifts slightly. He is pushed closer to the camera, which lets the audience focus on his behaviour and the tension in his body.

I also started exploring the idea of flashbacks in this stage. There is a moment where he stands in the kitchen and sees his wife at the stove. The camera moves behind him and the warm memory breaks apart into a derelict, diseased version of the same kitchen. It was meant to show how far things have fallen and how much distance there is between who he was and who he is now. In between these two shots there was supposed to be a second one where the demon appears and waits for him. It is missing in this old previs, but the intention was clear. He looks up at the demon, and that is when he becomes fully possessed.

After that the previs cuts to the child’s bedroom. She is sitting on the floor playing with a doll, and the father is making his way up the stairs in his possessed form. I used this moment to introduce her as the main character and to connect her to the father’s approach. Cutting back and forth between her and the father was a way of showing two very different emotional spaces without any dialogue. He is climbing toward her, and she is unaware of the danger.

She reaches for a lighter, and in this early version the idea was that the lighter was what the father had been looking for earlier. I make this clearer in later drafts, but this previs shows the first seeds of that connection. This is also the first place where I experimented with the idea of the girl being blind. In this previs she relies on her hearing, and there is a piece of cloth sliding under the door that she does not hear. It was meant to show her vulnerability and her dependence on senses other than sight.

She stands up, grabs the lighter, and goes into the closet. This was always an important moment to me, even in the earliest previs work. Inside the closet there are burlap framed dolls. In this early concept I wanted these dolls to play a far bigger role in the short film. The idea was that in the presence of the demonic father, the dolls would come to life or at least become affected by him. They were meant to be a physical extension of his influence, silent witnesses that react when he is near. Later on I changed my mind about how central they should be, but this previs shows where the original idea came from.

The rest of the previs continues the same structure as earlier versions. The father approaches, the sense of danger builds, and the girl hides in the only place she can. What changed in this iteration was not the broad sequence of events but the space around them. The wider frame, the flashbacks, the possessed transformation, and the early introduction of the girl’s blindness all helped me understand how to use visual storytelling to shape the narrative long before I committed to the painterly style.

This previs was another step in figuring out the emotional rhythm of the film. It taught me how to move between memories and the present, how to balance two different points of view, and how to signal danger through sound and movement. Even though many of the details evolved later, the core foundations were already here.

Expanding Narrative Scale With the 16 by 9 Frame

When I moved to a 16 by 9 frame in this previs, it was not for aesthetic novelty. It changed how I thought about storytelling. The wider ratio finally gave me room to show the man and the environment as a single emotional unit. Horror often relies on environmental pressure, and this previs is where I began using width to trap the character visually rather than relying solely on close shots. The wider space let the room feel like a presence instead of a backdrop, which shaped how I later approached every shot in the film.

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Microgestures as Emotional Anchors

The moment where he rubs his right thigh looks insignificant, but that kind of microgesture became essential in my character work. These tiny, almost nothing movements make the human moments land harder before the supernatural elements overwrite them. In horror, grounding the audience in small, believable actions creates sharper contrast when things become unnatural. This previs is where I realised how far those minor behaviours could carry emotional weight.

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Early Flashback Experiments and Dissolving Memory

The kitchen flashback in this previs was my first attempt at blending past and present in a single movement. The warm kitchen shifting into a decayed version was meant to visualise internal deterioration rather than literal memory. This previs helped me understand that my flashbacks weren’t supposed to be recollections. They needed to be emotional truths, visual metaphors for loss. The missing demon shot between the warm memory and the ruined kitchen is the clearest indication that I was already building the thematic structure that later defines the film.

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Possession as a Visual Cut Rather Than a Gradual Transition

Even though the demon shot is missing in this previs, the intention behind it shaped the film. I wanted the possession to feel like a hard narrative break, not a gentle slide. In horror, abruptness often reads as violence, and this previs established that tone early. The idea that he looks up, sees the demon, and essentially changes identity underscores the brutality of the possession. That rhythm stayed consistent even after moving to the painterly style.

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Parallel Emotional Realities Through Intercutting

Cutting between the father climbing the stairs and the girl playing with the doll became the prototype for the dual POV structure of the final film. This previs taught me how effective it was to let danger and innocence play side by side. Horror becomes more tense when the audience knows more than the character on screen, and this previs is where I committed to that structure. Everything in the final film’s first act comes from this early intercutting experiment.

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Early Exploration of Lina’s Blindness

Her reliance on sound in this previs was the starting point for her blindness. Watching how she responded to cues differently from sighted characters made the emotional logic of her disability click. The cloth sliding under the door that she does not hear became my first real test of how to frame threats that bypass her perspective. It taught me how to use auditory cues and how to manipulate what she can and cannot detect long before I finalised her character.

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The Closet as a Liminal Sanctuary

This previs was also the first moment where the closet became her safe space. Even though the painterly version of the film handles this differently, the emotional intention began here. The idea that she gravitates toward enclosed, warm spaces made sense narratively and visually. Her slow, deliberate escape into the closet helped me solidify the idea that small enclosed spaces would always protect her from the wider, more corrupted environment.

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Burlap Dolls as Environmental Reactors

In this previs the dolls were supposed to react directly to the father’s presence. This idea grew out of my interest in making the environment respond to the demon indirectly. Even though the dolls no longer behave this way in the final film, this previs is where I learned that props could serve as emotional extensions of characters. The dolls being passive observers later on was influenced heavily by this experiment, even if their role changed.

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Establishing Emotional Rhythm Through Visual Repetition

By repeating similar sequences from earlier previs versions but reframing them with wider space and more emotional clarity, this previs taught me how important rhythm is in horror. Scenes do not need new events to evolve. Sometimes the evolution comes from the way the space around the character tightens or stretches. This previs made that idea tangible. The events stayed the same, but the feeling shifted dramatically, and that became a core part of the final film’s storytelling.

This previs marked a noticeable shift in how I wanted the film to feel. The camera in this version sits very close behind the man’s head, which created a more intimate atmosphere. I wanted the viewer to feel a sense of kinship with him at this stage, before any preconceptions form. When you see the back of someone’s head in a dim room, it feels like you are sharing the space with them. There is something private about sitting alone in the dark watching television, and I wanted the viewer to experience that same compromised, vulnerable position.

This was also the point where I started to realise how important the environment was going to be. It was no longer just a background. It was a living part of the story, and because of that, I moved to a wider 16 by 9 frame. A narrower aspect ratio would have forced the audience to rely too heavily on character expressions, but I wanted the environment to carry meaning and subtle manipulation. The characters in this film are small pieces in a world that has a presence of its own.

In this previs, you can see more focus placed on what sits around the man. A lamp on the left, a painting on the right, and the room framing him in a quiet but meaningful way. I placed the couch arm in the foreground to give the viewer a bit of emotional distance. It creates a soft barrier that makes the audience feel safer, even though the unease is already forming. This is still the beginning, after all. I wanted to lull them into a sense of comfort before things take a turn.

The second shot returns to the scratching gesture but with more detail. This was where I began experimenting with religious imagery. I added what looked like a halo of spilled beer above a face in the background. The intention was never to be literal. It was about tapping into shapes and symbols that people already understand without thinking. Religious symbols tend to sit in the back of the mind, and using them subtly helps the audience form interpretations based on their own knowledge.

This previs was also where I first experimented with foreground, mid ground, and background separation. Breaking up the space this way made the environment feel more layered and helped me control where the viewer places their attention. It also contributed to the sense of observing something from a slight remove.

Later in this previs, I used a visual glitch that ripples through the shot. This was an early idea for showing the antagonist’s influence over the room. Curtains moved, frames shook, and objects responded to an unseen force. I abandoned this direction once the painterly style became central, but it was useful for figuring out how the supernatural presence might interact with the world.

There is a moment where the man stands up, and his head aligns with two horns on the wall behind him. It is not something the character intends, but the composition forms a strong image. It lets the audience draw conclusions about him even before anything is revealed about his personality. This was one of my first attempts at letting the environment shape how the viewer reads a character.

The belt scene also evolved here. I added a spill of alcohol splitting down the middle, which echoed the idea of a parted sea. It was bold, maybe too bold, which is why I moved away from it. The snakeskin belt contributed to a quiet religious theme I was experimenting with. Snakeskin naturally carries associations with temptation and moral decline, and pairing it with the derelict environment helped build the father’s character without relying on dialogue or direct explanation.

Another moment that came from this previs was the father picking up a photo of the mother and knocking over the family photo next to it. It revealed his emotional priorities in a clear and visual way. These kinds of choices became important building blocks for the final film.

Toward the end of this previs, there is a simple shot of the girl hiding in the closet. She is only a silhouette here, but the intention was always to turn this into a tense back and forth between her and the demon moving past the door. Even in this rough version, the idea was clear.

This previs did not use the painterly style yet, but it shaped most of the symbolic and emotional ideas that later became central to the film. It taught me what needed to stay, what needed to change, and what the environment should say about the characters long before I painted anything.

Research Points

1. Proximity, intimacy and point-of-view

When I started playing with the close over-the-shoulder framing in this previs, I noticed how much it aligned with theories around “subjective camera” in horror. Scholars often bring up how proximity to the back of a character’s head collapses the distance between viewer and subject, placing the audience in a vulnerable observational role. Films like The Shining use this kind of trailing shot to form a quiet emotional connection before anything overtly frightening happens. This helped me justify why the closeness in my previs felt right for the early, intimate tone of the story.

2. Environmental storytelling as character exposition

In this previs I realised the environment wasn’t just a backdrop. It echoes what Henry Jenkins calls “narrative architecture” – the idea that spaces themselves can communicate backstory and psychology. The couch arm blocking part of the frame, the dim lamp, the painting on the right – these are quiet signals that tell the viewer how the room feels before the character even moves. This informed how I later built the entire house around emotional cues rather than realism.

3. Aspect ratio and emotional hierarchy

Switching to a 16:9 frame connected strongly to discussions in film studies about how horizontal compositions create room for environmental meaning. A tighter aspect ratio forces facial reading, but a wider frame lets the world speak. Horror films that emphasise space – like Hereditary – use this same logic to make the environment feel overpowering. This research supported my decision to treat the world as an active presence rather than simply a location.

4. Symbolic shapes and subconscious religious cues

The subtle halo created by a beer spill in the previs links to theories on “implicit iconography.” Religious shapes are powerful because they sit in cultural memory, even when used abstractly. Horror often plays with these half-formed symbols to trigger subconscious interpretation. Reading about this helped me understand why the hand-drawn halo felt impactful even before the story had been refined.

5. Layered depth: foreground, midground, background

My use of foreground–midground–background separation connects to classical compositional theory. Renaissance and Baroque painters used layered staging to control how the eye travels across an image, and cinematographers continue to rely on this same spatial hierarchy. Breaking the space into three planes let me guide attention without excessive movement, which later became essential once I committed to static “painted” shots.

6. Early glitch experimentation and mediated horror

The moment where the glitch ripples across the shot ties directly to research on analogue horror – especially how screens act as thresholds. Studies of Ringu and similar works emphasise the “haunted medium” trope, where the supernatural manipulates the signal rather than appearing physically. That idea shaped this stage of the project, even though I later abandoned glitch for paint.

7. Accidental symbolism and environmental framing

When the father stands up and the horns line up with his head, it reminded me of mise-en-scène analysis – specifically how directors often use environmental alignment to load a character with unspoken meaning. German Expressionist cinema does this constantly, letting shapes in the environment twist the viewer’s interpretation of a character. Realising this gave me confidence to lean harder into spatial symbolism later in production.

8. Snakeskin belt and religious connotations

The snakeskin belt resonated with what I was reading about symbolic props. Snakes have long-standing associations with temptation and downfall – from biblical imagery to modern cinema. The belt becomes more than an object; it becomes a moral signifier embedded into the mise-en-scène. Research into symbolic prop placement reinforced how small items can contribute to character psychology without any dialogue.

9. Photographs as emotional anchors

The moment when the father picks up one photo and knocks over another directly parallels how films use photographs to expose inner conflict. Scholars often call photographs “frozen memory objects,” and their placement or disruption reveals where a character’s emotional gravity lies. This helped me refine how I later use photographs in the shrine room as narrative anchors.

10. Silhouettes, concealment and liminal fear

The girl hiding in the closet began as a silhouette, which ties into research on liminal framing. Silhouettes sit between visibility and invisibility, which taps into primal fear – you see enough to understand what you’re looking at, but not enough to feel safe. Reading about chiaroscuro and negative-space horror helped me understand why this moment felt strong even in previs.

This storyboard was the first attempt at giving my previs a visual structure, and it shows how fascinated I was with perspective at that early stage. Almost every panel comes from a point of view angle or a very close personal perspective. It is completely different from what the final short film becomes, where the camera often takes a voyeuristic or low angle position that leaves more distance between the viewer and the characters. Still, this storyboard helped me understand the emotional language I wanted from the very beginning.

The opening panels show a hand gripping a photograph. The hand begins to shake and the photograph slips. That was the first time I tried to show emotion through a physical reaction rather than through a face or a line of dialogue. A hand can betray fear or hesitation in a way that feels honest. Even now, hands remain one of the most expressive parts of my characters and they often reveal more than any facial expression.

After the photograph falls, the ghost appears. This early ghost figure eventually becomes the demon in later versions. In these storyboard sketches the demon is always positioned above the character. The character looks up at it. Part of this was compositional. Looking up creates a strong frame, especially when the top of the panel is occupied by something threatening. The other reason was symbolic. Looking up at the demon was a way of showing the imbalance between them. The demon sits in a place of dominance, but there is also a strange sense of desperation in this early version. It hides above or behind the environment, almost as if it needs the person below to look up at the right moment.

There is a panel with a close up of an eye. At the time this felt like a creative way to show that the demon was striking without having to animate a full attack. It was a quick, sharp transition that communicated danger. Even though I moved away from that style later, the idea of using small details like an eye or a hand to represent sudden action stayed with me.

There are also moments where the demon tries to entice the main character, or at least draw them closer. This early idea of manipulation becomes much clearer later in the project when the father tries to communicate through the door and lure the child out. Even though the mechanics change, the emotional intention remains.

The storyboard itself is very bare bones, and looking back at it now I can see how loose the ideas were. Some of the panels are sketches of shots that never made it into the previs. Others evolved into something very different. But there are also small elements that stayed. The photograph, the upward gaze, the connection between perspective and power. These panels mark the moment where the project began shifting from a loose idea into something with visual identity. Even if most of the drawings were abandoned or reinterpreted, they helped me understand how to direct the viewer’s attention and how to build tension from nothing but a camera angle.

This storyboard is important because it shows the earliest version of how I thought the story should unfold. It is rough and simple, but it captures the first instincts that later became much more refined in the painterly version of the film.

1. POV framing in horror and the psychology of proximity

This storyboard leans heavily into POV and close personal perspectives, and that lines up with a lot of psychological writing on “embodied camera positions.” POV shots collapse the distance between viewer and subject, creating a shared vulnerability. A lot of early found-footage horror and even films like The Silence of the Lambs rely on this closeness to make the viewer feel watched while watching. Even though I later switch to voyeuristic distance, this storyboard helped me understand how proximity manipulates the viewer emotionally.

2. The expressive hand — animation theory and gesture studies

My focus on the photograph slipping from the hand fits into animation research on gesture as emotional truth. Animators often prioritise “micro-gestures” because they communicate intention faster than faces. Disney’s Illusion of Life talks about how hands act as extensions of thought. Looking back, this storyboard shows the earliest iteration of that idea – emotion expressed through tiny physical actions rather than dramatic poses.

3. Vertical composition and power imbalance

The demon sitting above the character relates directly to classical film language about “vertical power dynamics.” In visual theory, height equals dominance. German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used towering figures to express psychological oppression. My storyboard follows that logic instinctively – everything threatening is placed above, and the character’s upward gaze confirms the imbalance.

4. Threats that hide in the environment — expressionist staging

Placing the demon behind beams and structures links to expressionist staging, where the threat feels fused into the architecture. In Nosferatu, shadows become characters; in my storyboard, the demon lives in the background before revealing itself. This research point helped me understand why embedding monsters into the scenery feels psychologically heavier than simply showing them.

5. The “eye shock” trope and minimalistic attack indicators

The storyboard panel focusing on a close-up eye connects to a long tradition of “eye shock” imagery – a way to express violence or terror without animating the full action. Examples range from Psycho’s eye montage to anime’s symbolic eye flashes. This technique taught me that suggestion can be more powerful than explicit detail, something that still influences how I handle sudden beats in the final film.

6. Early manipulation motifs – horror as seduction

The demon trying to entice or lure the protagonist fits into horror research where monsters aren’t only predators, but seducers. The idea appears in folklore, religious texts, and modern horror like The Babadook. This storyboard unintentionally touched that lineage – the monster doesn’t just attack, it beckons. This became foundational later with the father luring the child through the door.

7. Sketching as “ideation scaffolding”

Storyboards aren’t final art – they’re what design theory calls “ideation scaffolding.” They let you explore compositions, beats, and emotional rhythms without committing to details. Research into animation pipelines emphasises how storyboards often contain the emotional DNA of the final film even when the surface details change. That is exactly what happened here: the gaze, the hand, the power imbalance – all born here.

8. Using gaze direction as narrative logic

The character looking up at the demon fits into film research on “gaze theory.” Who looks at whom determines narrative power, vulnerability, and information flow. In horror, upward gazes often signal helplessness or revelation. Even in this simple storyboard, the gaze defined the emotional hierarchy of the scene long before the painterly style existed.

9. Photographs as memory triggers and horror motifs

The slipping photograph links to research on how photographs function in horror – they’re physical memory anchors. Works like The Ring and Hereditary use photos to expose emotional truths or family breakdowns. This storyboard version helped me understand that the photograph wasn’t just a prop; it was a trigger for everything that follows.

10. Early visual identity — the storyboard as the first “language draft”

This storyboard represents the moment the project gained its first visual identity. Film scholars write about how the storyboard is often the “first draft of the film’s grammar.” Even though mine was rough, it established the core ideas I never abandoned: tension built from camera angle, emotional storytelling through hands, and an antagonist that dominates from above. This research helps contextualise why this storyboard stage is historically important to the project.

Before I discovered the painterly workflow that now defines my short film, I spent time looking at other possible aesthetics for the project. One of the strongest early influences was analog glitch art, like the six images in the reference grid I was studying. These images became an important part of my visual research, even though I eventually moved away from glitch and towards paint.

The top left image shows a distorted face almost dissolved into coloured static. There are no deep blacks in this one. Everything is built on a bright base, and yet the eyes and nose are still readable. The only reason we can recognise them is because we are human and we have been trained our entire lives to understand faces. That instinctive recognition is related to the uncanny, which is something I am very interested in. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the uncanny in the context of graphic and media design, and I see it as central to horror. I wanted to play with that moment where the brain says “this is a face” even though the image itself is almost gone.

The image to the right is of Gengar from Pokémon. Here the outline is defined by thick blacks, and the body is full of dense, colourful lines that ripple and vibrate. Whites are replaced with reds and the whole thing feels like a piece of pop art that has been fed through a broken television. I find this appealing because it combines simplicity of design with a complex texture. In a way it predicts what I am doing later with my painterly style, where blocks of colour are broken up and given depth through strokes and noise.

The top right image is the one that stayed with me the most. It shows a television and a face inside it, surrounded by a halo of colour. The centre of the image is dark while the edges are bright and almost cloud like. It feels nebulous, and that is what I like about it. There is a sense of possibility. The creature or figure inside the screen could be helpful, harmful, or completely neutral. It leaves room for the viewer to project their own beliefs and experiences onto it, which I think is a core quality of strong artwork. Televisions already play a large role in my short film, and this image helped me think of them not just as objects but as presences.

The bottom left image appears to be a ballerina suspended in a dark, wavy field. Her body is almost swallowed by the background. She is both figure and ground at the same time. This blurring of boundaries between character and environment echoes what I later try to do with paint, where characters feel partially absorbed into their surroundings.

The bottom middle image is the most directly related to horror. It shows a man with his eyes closed or looking downward, his face framed by intense colours against near blackness. It is the opposite of the bright, white based top right image. This aesthetic is something I carry forward, especially the idea of a single head emerging from darkness with colours picking out its features.

The bottom right image experiments with inversion and silhouette. The bright, saturated colours sit against a deep black background, and the form is just recognisable enough to read as a person. Again, this plays into my interest in perception, where the viewer is doing part of the work of completing the image.

At this stage of the project, my intention was to use glitch effects as a language of demonic influence. The demon would act through television screens, warping the image and effectively knocking down the fourth wall. This made sense to me technically because I have a lot of experience with glitch effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Glitch felt like a natural direction to explore, and it fitted with the idea of analogue distortion.

Over time, though, the glitch approach started to feel one dimensional. It surprised the eye at first, but the surprise faded quickly. There was not much subtlety to it, and it risked overwhelming the story rather than supporting it. Around the same period, my story was still underdeveloped. The glitch aesthetic existed more as an opportunity than as a necessary extension of the narrative.

That changed when I discovered the painterly workflow during the experimental unit. Using geometry nodes to generate strokes and texture on three dimensional objects felt like a revelation. It clicked instantly. It gave me more control and let me blend the digital and physical worlds in a way that felt more honest to the story. Glitch art has an appealing analogue quality, but a painting is even more rooted in the physical. It carries a sense of labour and care. Most of the paintings we encounter in our lives are made with love or at least with effort, and that human touch comes across even when the image is unsettling.

Paint also has the ability to lull the viewer into a sense of safety. We are used to seeing paintings as calm, contained objects. By framing every shot in my film as if it were an intricate painting, I can use that expectation against the audience. They feel at home, and then the content or the movement inside the frame quietly undermines that comfort. Glitch, by contrast, shouts its presence from the beginning.

Looking back, these early glitch based references were still important. They changed how I thought about colour, especially the use of strong whites and blacks as anchors alongside saturated hues. They encouraged me to use black as a backdrop and to embrace areas of darkness as active parts of the composition rather than just empty space. They clarified my fascination with faces that are almost lost in noise, silhouettes that bend into their environments, and screens that seem more alive than the people watching them.

In the final film the demon no longer expresses power through visual glitches on a screen. Instead the world of the film itself takes on a painted quality, and the canvases inside the story become part of the plot. People are eventually freed through fire that burns these canvases, which reads as an uprising from below, a raw elemental force that challenges the demonic presence. This connection between cloth, cotton, burlap and paint emerged naturally and only later did I realise how well it tied together. The glitch research may not be visible on the surface any more, but it guided me towards a richer, more flexible painterly language that feels right for the kind of horror I want to make.

Research Notes

Why Glitch Initially Appealed to Me

Before I committed to the painterly workflow, I was genuinely pulled toward analogue glitch because of how unstable and hostile it feels. Artists like Nam June Paik were already using distorted television signals to break the viewer’s sense of security, and that energy was exactly what I wanted in the early stages of the film. Looking at the glitch references made me realise how the demon could “speak” through malfunction – the same way broken CRTs feel alive.

Aesthetic Lineage – Why Glitch Initially Appealed to Me

Before I committed to the painterly workflow, I was genuinely pulled toward analogue glitch because of how unstable and hostile it feels. Artists like Nam June Paik were already using distorted television signals to break the viewer’s sense of security, and that energy was exactly what I wanted in the early stages of the film. Looking at the glitch references made me realise how the demon could “speak” through malfunction – the same way broken CRTs feel alive.

Uncanny recognition in half-destroyed faces

When I talk about the top left image being “almost gone” but still clearly a face, I’m basically playing with the uncanny. Freud links the uncanny to things that are both familiar and strange at the same time, and Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” graph is literally about that drop in comfort when a face is almost human but not quite. In my glitched reference, the brain is doing the same work: it latches onto eyes and a nose in a mess of noise and insists “this is a person”, which is exactly the tension I want in my own work when faces are buried under paint, noise or darkness. Unsplash+1

Glitch as a kind of “broken signal” horror

The whole idea of using glitch as a demonic language fits neatly with how glitch art theory talks about “the glitch moment” as a breakdown in the expected flow of information. Rosa Menkman writes about glitches as interruptions that expose the system underneath the image, not just as a style slapped on top. That lines up with my early idea of the demon acting through the TV signal itself, attacking the image pipeline rather than just possessing a character on screen.

Haunted televisions and “alive” screens

When I say that top right TV image feels like a presence rather than just a device, I’m falling into a big horror tradition of haunted media. Films like Ring (1998) and a lot of J-horror use CRT televisions as thresholds, where something on the screen bleeds into the room and collapses the boundary between viewer and broadcast. My plan was to lean into that – the demon doesn’t just show images on the TV, it is the distortion, which is why that nebulous, haloed TV reference was so useful early on.

Figure and ground bleeding into each other

The ballerina-type image I mention, where the figure is almost swallowed by the background, connects quite nicely to basic Gestalt ideas of figure/ground. The Rubin vase illusion is the classic example: the viewer’s brain flips between seeing a face and a vase because both can be read as “figure” against “ground”. In my reference grid, and later in my painterly work, I’m deliberately blurring that boundary so characters feel half-absorbed into their environment, which suits a story where the house itself is basically an organism.

Single heads emerging from darkness

The bottom middle glitch image – just a head floating in black with colour picking out its features – overlaps a lot with painters like Francis Bacon, whose heads often feel like they’re dissolving out of darkness rather than placed in a neat space. His Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a good example of a face that is recognisable but structurally broken, which is close to what I want when I hold on a single head in my film and let colour and noise do most of the work.

Silhouette, inversion and the viewer “finishing” the image

The bottom right image in my glitch grid is basically a silhouette with inverted colours. It only just reads as a person, and the rest is completed by the viewer’s brain. That ties straight into ideas of perceptual closure from Gestalt psychology, where we instinctively close gaps in incomplete forms. This is the same mental trick I rely on later when my painted characters almost blur into the background – the audience is always doing that last bit of reconstruction, which keeps them slightly off balance.

Why glitch alone started to feel flat

Reading around glitch art made me realise why the pure glitch route started to feel one note. Menkman points out that glitch aesthetics can quickly turn into a “preset look” once people get used to the effect. That is exactly what I ran into: the broken TV look is strong on first impact, but it doesn’t leave much room to escalate or modulate across a 10–15 minute film. I needed something more flexible than “corrupt the image again” every time the demon does something.

Paint, aura and the “safe” art object

Once I switched focus from glitch to paint, it started to make more sense in terms of theory too. Walter Benjamin’s writing on the “aura” of original artworks talks about how physical paintings carry a sense of presence and labour that copies do not. That fits my instinct that a painted frame feels like something someone has cared about and spent time on, which makes it a better thing to corrupt slowly. Glitch screams from frame one; paint lets me lull the viewer into feeling like they are just looking at an old canvas before the horror slips in.

Colour: whites, blacks and saturated horror

Those early glitch references also pushed my colour decisions. A lot of horror scholarship points out how high contrast colour palettes – deep blacks with sudden saturated reds, purples and greens – can create a very physical, bodily reaction, and giallo films like Suspiria are a good example of that approach. In my case, the glitch grid nudged me toward using black as an active element instead of just “empty space”, and to treat saturated colour like something that cuts through the dark materially, not just decoration.

From glitch to cloth, burlap and painted worlds

The last big link between this research and the current film is how I swapped “broken signal” for “broken surface”. Instead of the demon tearing digital images apart through glitch, it now tears through canvases, burlap and cloth, which is closer to a physical glitch in the world itself. The glitch references taught me to think about interruption and distortion as a core language, and I carried that over into the painterly pipeline: cracked paint, ripped cloth, and canvases with holes act like analogues to corrupted video frames. The demonic influence still scrambles reality, but it does it through fibres, threads and paint strokes instead of pixels.