DAS UNHEIMLICHE
Das Unheimliche is the final Animation short of my Honours Degree in Design and Animation at UNSW Sydney.
It delivers a brief, layered look into baseless fear, shame and entrapment that manifest through anxiety. Rotoscoping (see below) is used very consciously to support feelings of discomfort in both the viewer and the protagonist. The haunting presence of the live-action body promotes the vague notion of something being amiss. The natural uncanniness of the medium prompts the viewer to reflect more deeply, beyond the simple narrative being presented.
What is Rotoscoping?
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Rotscoping is an animation technique which is achieved by filming video footage and then hand-tracing it frame-by-frame (I did so in Photoshop using the plug-in Animator's Toolbar). While this is broadly considered a "cheat's" way of animating (though equally time consuming), I consciously chose this technique for Das Unheimliche due to its visual thematic correlations to narratives presented in the work, such as anxiety, the uncanny, retreat into the mind, and the potential for juxtaposition between realism and abstraction.




On Failure and Letting Go
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Over the course of developing this animation, many aspects of it changed drastically. For one, the succession of events is unrecognizable to the original concept, and significant amounts of the project ended up having to be discarded due to no longer suiting the overall work. As an animator and story teller, one has to learn to come to terms with this happening frequently. To the top left, you can see two lengthy animation sequences that didn't make the final cut, and at the bottom right are the various colourways and shading approaches the animation cylced through to get to its final iteration.