Answer the Call

This is one of the most tedious and exhausting things that I have ever done in all honesty. This was a very long process and it took me much, much longer than had previously anticipated. During the quarantine of COVID-19, I picked up a book containing all of the stories written by H.P. Lovecraft himself. I have become obsessed with The Call of Cthulhu. The aquatic giant has captured my attention and I have drawn so many things of him and I love re-reading the story. When I began this animation, I began it with the intent of putting some sort of Kaiju in it. I later was inspired to put the Great Old One Cthulhu in there instead, and the result was quite satisfying.

THE STORY

A young boy has ventured to the beach adjacent to his family’s vacation home, has found himself caught in a bore. To entertain himself, he decides to take a walk along the beach and search for cool rocks, as children do. As the boy looks, a looming storm draws nearer. But this is no ordinary storm. Something dwells at it’s eye. Oblivious to the danger coming to light, he continues his probing. The lightning flashes, and the boy ignores it. The lightning comes once more, and the boy notices something… The light that was supposed to be emitted around him has been replaced with darkness. He stands and turns around to figure out what has caused this obscurity. The boy, in awe, comes to face the Cosmic Entity of The Ancient One Cthulhu himself. Caught in daze the boy hears the voice of his mother calling to him from the house. Concerned about the lightning getting to close, she calls her son to come inside and obviously doesn’t see the Cosmic Horror. “Why not?” the boy wonders as he returns his gaze to the monster. However, in shock, the leviathan monster has seemed to disappear without a single trace of being there….

TH E PROCESS

This took me literal months to finish. I in way too much detail in the background of the first four seconds and that automatically put me way behind. I then got really far into the animation, and one day as I got on to work on my project, the whole file got corrupted. I then had about 2 weeks to finish everything that I had done in the past month. I got back to work as soon as I could. Another obstacle entered my path then. I decided to import videos of people that I had filmed and draw over them. The problem was, the videos would only import in slow motion. I decided to do what I could to pick frames from the videos and chose them for my key frames. This caused it to be too fast in some places, and too slow in others. That made the whole video take much longer to create than it would’ve taken according to plan. A lot longer. Then I was proposed with another problem. The file wouldn’t let me export it as a GIF file. it would for some reason not allow me to use all 256 colors in the table as it should’ve. Instead, it gave me two. Black, and white. And the file became very pixelated. I went with another exporting option and it severely decreased the quality of my work. I was severely disapointed with the outcome and it seemed like the months that I had spent where for nothing. Later on, my teacher then found a way to export it on his own computer in the fantastic quality you see before you. I am actually quite proud of this one. And remember…