Story Development
The initial idea we came up with was what if there was an ad for a Frankenstein creature and the creature rebels against its owners. The story then developed into an ad for a Frankenstein-like doll that was alive and would go through brutal playtime with children and it could feel pain inflicted upon it.
When developing our story, we each began by writing our own version of the story. We each wrote a rough outline of the plot points of the film and rough storyboards. In my version, the whole film is an ad that introduced the doll as being alive and being tortured by children as part of its play features. In a scene where the children are about to cut up the doll while pretending to do a surgery on it, the doll jumps up and attacks the camera crew, cutting the ad.
When combining our individual story drafts, the final story was changed so that the doll attacked a child watching the ad in real life, rather than during the ad. We then changed the ending to have a child watching the ad be strangled by the doll and the film revealing that the dolls are being recalled due to being dangerous, implying other children have been harmed by the doll as well. Several scenes that made it to the final version include the children taking off the head of the doll and rearranging its limbs, and the children playing surgery with the doll.
Character Development
Doll (Frenzie)
For the design for our doll, we took inspiration from toys such as Pop Mart figurines to get the idea of toys that are marketable to a mass market. We sought to create a doll that had aspects of being marketed to kids but having an ominously evil feeling to it.
During the development process, every one of our group members did our own design of how the doll looked with our own art styles and we decided to combine them together to see which features of the doll we liked the most to create the final version. The features we liked in particular were the pointed horn-like pigtails and the long and exaggerated limbs which we felt would allow the doll to move in very expressive ways.
After designing the doll, we had a group call session where we all drew the doll together to make sure that we all understood how to draw the doll and keep the style consistent for when we animated which I felt really helped us improve our consistency between our scenes.
Host
For the character of the tv show host advertising the doll, I designed him based off of tv show game hosts from the 1960s. In particular, I wanted to capture the charismatic personality the hosts would have. I wanted to twist their cheerfulness to create a sense of eeriness.
Storyboards
For my scenes, I animated the opening of the ad which shows children playing with the doll in brutal ways and mutilating it. I sought to make use of dynamic camera angles and tried to emphasise the macabre aspect of the story by having the camera focus on the doll’s still expression as its being played with.
Script
Our group member Kim wrote our script with the dialogue in our animatic primarily being the host talking, apart from a couple of lines that for one of the kids. I did the voice acting for the host and while it was initially only for use in the animatic to see how to time the dialogue with the scenes, we ended up using it for the final version as we felt it worked well enough.
Animatic
In our initial version of the animatic, edited by our group member Kim, we combined our storyboards with a few proof of concept clips that our group members had done. Because we needed 15 seconds of proof of concept footage, we decided to split it between us three to each member doing a five second proof of concept for each of their scenes to see how each member’s storyboards could look in the final animatic. We presented this animatic in our first presentation which saw our film successfully greenlit. Some feedback that we received was that we needed to make the scenes of the ad and the scenes showing the kid in real life watching the ad easier to differentiate. We were also told we needed to make the dialogue more clear as we had edited it to sound a little distorted to make it sound like an old tv ad but it was too distorted that it was hard to hear at times.
In the final version, we added changes such as having the logo of the toy company at the beginning to add world building, and we changed the audio of the host to make it less distorted so that we still had the voice sounding like it came from an old tv but it is now more clear to listen to.
Scenes
I drew concept art of several scenes to figure out the colour palette and the lighting of the scenes.
For the scene where the host is introducing the doll, I initially designed the background of the ad as having a darker brown colour palette. However, we were given feedback that the background was too dark and the background design was too ‘adult’. So, I redesigned the background to have a brighter colour palette with a more vibrant design with stars and shapes.
Backgrounds
For the backgrounds, I sought to warp the perspective as much as I could and used the patterns of the backgrounds to help create a surreal sort of feel for the backgrounds.
For the background of the tv the kid is watching from, I sought to create an eerie atmosphere by warping the perspective of the wallpaper and the tv, as well as by pushing the shadows and the lighting. I took inspiration from tv’s and wallpapers from the 1960s to have the retro feel of the rest of the ad.