Creepy Animated Robot People

This was a fairly interesting, and by interesting I mean creepy as hell, blog post topic for this week. What I gathered was there is mass murdering, serial killing robot person wreaking havoc on quiet community in an isolated tower who is really a creep who still lives at home with his disapproving mother. Great.

Aside from the really odd story line, what added to the “creepiness” of the story lines was the use of contrast, camera angles and most noticeably, sound. Unlike many animated shorts we think of today, like many Pixar shorts, this was all in black and white. There was a lot of contrast between the shadows and the light areas of the image throughout the shorts and the grays were very often more to the darker side of the spectrum. This definitely added to the over style of the shorts.

In addition, the camera angles gave that feeling of someone creepily watching over the scene. We had canted camera angles, POV shots, low camera angles and close-ups all within a three to four minute span of all videos combined. Without the proper use of the camera angles you would get that typical suspense movie feel that these animated shorts had.

Finally but definitely not least, the sound was PERFECT. The echoing sound of the footsteps in the hallway. The sound of wind blowing in an open and vacant space. The sound of electronics shorting out with that electrical hiss. The attention to detail with the sound solidified the creepy nature of these shorts. You got the feeling of isolation and being alone from these videos. The fact that there was someone out there murdering fellow robot people was slowly revealed but you knew something wasn’t quite right from the way the sound design was done. They definitely did a great job of combining the visual aesthetic and the sound to create a shorts that exuded the creep factor.

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