Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505195
characters that had really raw emotions felt liberating," says Artwick. "I think it helped all of us fall in love with these characters and identify with them and see them as these fully formed people." This kind of emotional investment can be crucial to making the tension in horror work, especially when gore is off the table. But where animation has an advantage over live action is that "we don't have the constraints of real cameras or real sets," says Artwick. In addition, Roth adds, when it comes to budgets, having a 20-foot-tall character with 200 eyes in animation costs far less than in live action. This kind of freedom resulted in complex, shiver-inducing creatures. The team also leaned into the naturally haunted feeling of the New Orleans setting, using environments like graveyards to make the characters feel trapped, or "framing elements to block the audiences view from something that this page: "Our design teams did a really lovely job using New Orleans as an inspiration piece," says Joanna Lewis, referring to the city's graveyards (top) and evocative interiors (bottom). may be lurking behind a building or closed doors," says Artwick. Using Harmony software, artists employed effects like rim light to make night scenes creepy. Classic jump scares were also employed, and sound effects were a key component. In one of the first episodes, "one of our characters is kind of dragging a metal pipe against the ground," Artwick says. "Visually you can see it, it works, but once that echoey, creepy, metal scraping [is added], it really brings it to the next level of—oh, I feel like I'm here now." "There are different ways to be scared," says Songco. "You can fear for someone's life. Those moments where you're yelling at the screen—don't do it! Those were the things that we were trying to do. Sometimes creepy whispers, or the right sound effects, will make something as simple as going into a dark room feel scary. We had a lot of discussions with our writers about what are the things that give you nightmares?" FALL 2023 27