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.