This week we chose our permanent groups for the project, I chose group 9, which is the horror story set in the abandoned submarine.

Since I had worked in this group before (and was the one who originally came up with the idea) I was familiar with most of the concepts and characters, although some things had changed since I was last working on the project. Another main character had been added.

We talked as a group about how the plot would be structured and laid out, and decided that it would follow our female protagonist exploring the submarine to try and find her former co-worker, who went missing months before on a solo expedition to the same submarine. The male protagonists exploration of the submarine and subsequent mental and physical degeneration would be told in a non-chronological order as the female protagonist finds evidence of what happened to him. The final scene would show the two reuniting, only for the now mentally broken male protagonist to kill his former friend.

We thought this storytelling method would be interesting and unique, while also making the audience curious to know what happened to the missing character.

This week, I worked on making some animation-friendly designs for our characters, and doing test animations to see if the design would work well in 2D.

I drew out a design for our squid deity, basing it off a bigfin squid, as I like their eerie, otherworldly appearance. In my test animation, I tried to show how the squid’s fins flap when it swims.

I also did some simplified designs for the male protagonist; one showing how he looked when he first found the submarine, and one showing how he will look when the female protagonist finds him.

I roughly based his later “broken” design off the film The Machinist, as I wanted him to have the same unnerving yet tragic appearance.

I then made a short animation showing the character morphing between these two states.