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by Mayra Ebensen, Silvia Loose and Paula Wodniok
Story development began in October 2022, during the weekly meetings with our Professor Jürgen Schopper. We received strong support from Dr Rodolfo Anes Silveira, Jonas Kluger, Berter Orpark and our team assistant Petra Hereth. We discussed many concept ideas and styles that we wanted to try out, and that’s how our team finally came together. The three of us – Mayra Ebensen, Silvia Loose and Paula Wodniok – were all interested in a very stylised animated film.
After the first story outlines and concept drawings, we finally agreed on a children’s film with a scary factor, initially set on Halloween and with a rather humorous tone. We later moved away from this theme, but the core of the story remained: the child’s unique creativity and overcoming fears. To further explore the depth of the character, we had the support of psychologist Dr Walter Stehling, who gave a seminar on the hero’s journey and character motivation.
Concept Art
Our story is about childhood fears, especially the fear of the dark and of being alone. For the eerie atmosphere of the old house where our whole story takes place, we drew inspiration from art nouveau architecture and films such as Henry Selick’s “Coraline” and “The Nightmare before Christmas”. Ornate designs and the complementary colour scheme were intended to give our setting something unreal.
In order to visually emphasise our character’s fear, we designed the rooms of the environment to be crooked and huge in comparison to the main character. We also wanted the lighting design in the entrance hall and corridor to appear cool and unfriendly.
The small play corner in the attic, on the other hand, was to be like a safe oasis for our protagonist. The walls are hung with real children’s drawings and their toys are scattered on the floor. In addition to the attic, the most important setting is the entrance hall. We incorporated a lot of Art Nouveau elements here: the large window front, with curved arched windows and an ornamental door, the ornate coat rack and the curved, winding banister are modelled on the organic design of Art Nouveau.
In terms of colour, we wanted to limit ourselves to blue-purple and yellow. The shadows and rooms are predominantly kept in cool and dark tones, which makes the yellow tones of the light colours stand out all the more and trigger a feeling of warmth and security.
Animatic
We had time to work on the story until the beginning of February and created the storyboard with the help of Prof Michael Coldewey. Every week there were new variations of editing and camera angles, with self-recorded sounds and music. We drew the floor plan of the house, planned how our characters would move around in the rooms and where the camera would have to be positioned to avoid any off-centre shots. At the same time, we built the first rough models of the characters and the house to get a feel for the size and effect of the shots in 3D space. Gradually, we mixed our drawn 2D animatic with the 3D animatic. We regularly updated this hybrid with our progress until we had finalised all the shots while maintaining the painterly style in a symbiosis of 2D and 3D.
Character design/model
We wanted to keep the look of our main character relatively simple, but with plenty of room for manoeuvre in her expressions. Her cartoon-like design, with lots of round shapes and a large head, contrasts with our second character, the long, skinny monster.
During the whole process of sculpting and rigging, Benc Orpak was at our side as a tutor. The girl’s body is sculpted and rigged in Blender and her mouth can be moved using a combination of different shapekeys.
The eyes were hand-painted on her head in all shots. This method gave us more freedom in her facial expressions, whereas modelled eyes would have restricted us.
Various combinations of animals immediately came to mind for the design of the monster.
In the very first concept drawings, it still had a very bug-like appearance, but gradually more animals were added. Sometimes it had a beak, sometimes a huge mouth and rabbit feet, until we finally came up with the moth as the main inspiration.
This insectoid model led us to the wings and the fluffy chest area. The long, scrawny arms are modelled on stick insects and the monster’s paws with pointed claws give the whole thing a heavy and terrifying look.
The flowing Art Nouveau design is also reflected in the shape of its antlers. They snake along its head and give the monster an elegant recognisable feature: when it first appears, the creature emerges from the shadow of an ornamental coat stand. It retains this design in its antlers until the end, while its body undergoes various metamorphoses.
Environment
We wanted to convey the character and age of the house through the furnishings and interior design. So after we had built the rough layout and basic model in Blender, we distorted the walls, furniture and windows so that there were hardly any straight lines in the background. The painterly style we had in mind should also be reflected in the modelling itself: To achieve this, we built almost all the assets ourselves, we distorted all the objects and for the curved details we worked a lot with curves.
The biggest challenge for us was the fabric simulation of the curtains on which the final shadow play showdown takes place. The shader initially caused the materiality and drapery of the curtains to be lost. We were able to counteract this by lavishly draping the folds and selectively sculpted the light. The girl interacts with the curtains, with her hands acting as hooks. There is also wind that moves the fabric slightly. For the shadow animation on the fabric, however, the sheets had to remain as still as possible to avoid intersections with the Grease Pencil.
Shading
At the beginning of the project, none of us had any experience with shading, which didn’t make our complex idea of the painterly style in 3D space any easier. We used Alan Wyatt’s Painterly Shader, which worked very well for still images, but gave us problems as soon as the camera moved. We were finally able to prevent the textures from running by reworking the node tree. Our 3D mentor Berter Orpak helped us in particular to adjust the shader for the main character and to integrate it uniformly into the environments. To break up the corners and edges of the individual assets for a painted look, we used geo-nodes. As geo nodes are generated anew for each frame, we customised them individually for each shot. The particular challenge of the shader was that we could only set one shadow colour and one light colour each, so we had no midtones, which severely limited the choice of colours and made it difficult to set the lighting. We were finally able to solve the problem during compositing in Nuke, where we had much more opportunity to manipulate the colouring and the image looked less flat. Claudia Fuchs added the final visual touches in colour grading, giving the film a coherent look.
Animation
To bring our characters to life, we used different animation styles to convey the essence of our characters. We received great help from Prof Melanie Beisswenger, who supported us for months to dive deeper into the art of character animation.
For the little girl in our film, we developed a mixture of traditional hand-drawn animation for eye and facial expressions and 3D animation. This hybrid approach allowed us to give her a unique charm. We animated her by hand throughout the film, using the reference videos we filmed as a guide.
As we didn’t narrate any dialogue, the body language of our protagonist became all the more expressive and small details such as a brief shrug of the shoulders made her and her emotions seem much more human.
The monstrous antagonist, on the other hand, required a completely different approach. The monster goes through three phases in the story: It transforms from a static and two-dimensional shadow on the wall to a dynamic purposeful shadow to a manifested 3D monster. During this process, we also changed the style of the animation to a grotesque one. Through this stylised aesthetic and its exaggerated proportions, we locate the monster in the world of fantasy and shadows animated by fear.
Music
The close collaboration with composers Victor Ardelean and Julia Chen in the early development phase led to a creative partnership. We discussed the musical perspective on our story with them and had the opportunity to fill in small gaps in the story before the production phase began. We received the first drafts and musical ideas soon after. At that time, only a few shots had a finalised look. The composers had a colourful mixture of drawn 2D animatic, Greyshade blocks from the Previs and filmed references as a template. It was all the more impressive to see how the music even took scenes at this rough animation level into account and turned them into a film. This allowed the composition of the music to influence the animation throughout the film and vice versa. The prerequisite for this was that the timing of the shots was as accurate as possible. We discussed the final fine adjustments to the music and timing together in the recording studio at the music academy.
Language
Although we have no dialogue in the film, we had to record sounds such as breathing, laughing or monster noises in the recording studio. Nedda Denk lent her voice to our child as a dubbing artist. Her voice, which already sounded very young, was later slightly enhanced in the sound mix by our sound designer Gerhard Auer, making it indistinguishable from real children’s voices.
Severin Denk provided us with great scary monster noises, which were later also pitched and integrated into the sound design. The voice recordings were a new challenge for all of us because – unlike with dubbed films – all the sounds and emotions had to be improvised without a visual template or even lip movements. It was important to think about all the sounds that we might need later in some way in advance. We also included snippets of dialogue that we didn’t have in the script at the time, because we wanted to leave room for changes for the later animation process. In the end, we finished the voice recordings
with a seemingly disproportionate amount of takes and variations. We were all the more grateful in the end during crunch time when we wanted to add and replace some expressions for clarity and were able to draw on our archive without any complications.
As there is no original sound in the animated film, Gerhard Auer built a “radio play” for it. He created the sonic atmosphere for all the rooms and recorded follies, such as the crunching of leather for the monster or the rubbing of fabric when the curtain or the girl moves.
An essential chapter of the story was the enchanting world of shadow puppetry. Carola Kärcher, a professional shadow puppeteer, supported us in this endeavour. We brought her into the team in April, at the very beginning of the production phase. We talked about our idea in Zoom meetings and showed her our animatic. Together with her, we thought about how we could design our shadow plays, both visually and dramaturgically. Mrs Kärcher developed some ideas and sent them to us as reference videos.
Of course, we also had to consider the special features of our protagonist. For example, our character has four fingers on each hand and one of them is stuck in a dinosaur hand puppet the whole time. These details had to be incorporated into the shadow play performance. Despite these limitations, Mrs Kärcher presented us with numerous impressive ways in which we could make use of them. This ultimately enabled us to create shadow puppetry scenes that could only come from our main character and her unique imagination.
All shadow play is hand-drawn frame by frame. We used the Grease Pencil feature in Blender for this. We were able to easily draw shadow plays that take place on a flat wall in our 3D space in the 2D animation workspace and then insert them as objects in our environment. Grease Pencil was particularly helpful for animating a shadow play in perspective directly in the 3D scene, which spreads over several levels.
