I made the “Shadow of Innsmouth” video in the first semester of my honours project as a trailer for the Virtual Reality movie I was trying to make to explore the potential for using a painterly style and approach to make complex VR environments.
The trailer is set to an extract from Graham Plowman’s “The King in Yellow” on his “The great old ones and other beings” album (www.facebook.com/CthulhuMythosMusic) and Graham has kindly extended permission for me to use it in the trailer.
In building the trailer I determined that the technique I was using, painting with complex 3D shapes which I morphed to animate active objects, was too resource heavy for either the VR tools or my (pretty powerful at the time) PC. My subsequent efforts consequently focussed on researching and implementing a novel VR painting approach and building small vignettes of action rather than a full movie.
The bus going down the highway image is from the opening as the hero is coming to Innsmouth. The hero is shown as a part-human part junk built robot. This approach was intended to avoid the scale and difficulty of smoothly animating what could eventually have been five to ten minutes of human activity. The lamp eyes are a nod to Pixar and the hero is one of several different robot models I sculpt-painted.
In the scene in the YouTube link image, the hero is opening the door to the hotel room in Innsmouth. The bathroom is from the same hotel-room and designed to help build the dark unsettling atmosphere of the environment.
The railway was for a scene at the end of the trailer, showing the hero stumbling along the railway line trying to escape from Innsmouth. In the trailer you see it from ground level rather than this bird’s eye view.
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