Hysteria: A horror video game trailer
Julia McLean
Multimedia Design graduate specializing in Digital Design
An eerie yet somewhat whimsical trailer for a game. The storyline involves a creature that lures children into a forest using distant memories or items they are familiar with. Throughout the game the user begins to lose sight of what is real and what is fake whilst trying to escape the hysteria. Due to my intricate aesthetic I decided to go with a simple animation style while also amplifying and layering sound effects to create tension and draw the user in.
All the text is center aligned as it is the focal point and the blank background creates uncertainty and is presented in an ominous way with the addition of the layered sound effects. The trailer begins the story in lowercase and draws it out as a contrast to the text later in the video that is fast paced to stress the viewer and cause tension; it is a brief yet gentle introduction in order to further emphasize the tension and suspense later and puts the viewer in a position of eagerly waiting to see what follows next. The text later becomes uppercase to symbolize stress, panic and fear.
All the elements were hand-drawn on an ipad and then fine-tuned in Adobe Illustrator on a desktop. I then moved these from illustrator into photoshop to create layers for after effects which then could be manipulated using the puppet tool.
I aimed to have my style come across as mixed media, but completely digital; the low opacity is like charcoal, thin lines pen and ink/fine liner, highlights paint etc... I tend to be a perfectionist and spend ages on digital drawings so I decided to push myself to be rough around the edges and create something less clean; this also aids in the direction of my deliverable (horror themed).
I always add loads of intricate details even when I am completely aware for the most part they won’t even be seen. I still added the details as usual but decided to make it less clean overall for more personality and to create a childlike detail of placing the colour roughly over the outlines.
I wanted the illustrations to look as child-like as possible to push the narrative. When children are involved in horror related content people tend to get uneasy, especially when joyous or expressing emotion.
I created the vortex above in after effects and wasn’t sure if I was actually going to use it as it did not seem to fit my style. I initially had the same grey background but it seemed like an anti-climax as this scene is essentially a big reveal and a key point. In order to create a wow factor I added the vortex effect and made it fit the theme by including other visual effects in the video such as the turbulent displacement which is seen quite often. As a result the vortex is less of a shock or out of place.
Thank you!
