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The New Haunting : Chapter One

The Haunting of Mortimer

The Old Haunting

The Haunting of Mortimer was started in mid 2005. It was (and is) developed as a part-time/personal effort.

The first attempt counts as my first real animation project, and it gave me some valuable experience. This experience led me to revamp the scene somewhat and try again. You can read about the new project in the New Haunting.

This document is far from a complete overview of a project, but rather provides a couple of notes and screenshots for reference purposes.

The Location

The old location of The Haunting was a run-down, Victorian style home.

As it turns out, modeling decent Victorian style furnishings and accessories is a fairly large undertaking, especially when making a house look cluttered and "lived-in" for a while.

House Exterior

These shots are of the exterior. The animation was to start at the front yard/porch of the residence and move into the interior.

Click the pictures below for a larger size image.

	Front porch. This is where the beginning and end of the animation takes place.
	Another shot of the front porch.
	A wireframe of the front porch.
	An untextured shot of the front porch.
	An untextured shot of the entire house. Note that this is actually a different model from the porch shots above, offering much less detail in order to cut down on render times.
	A textured, full-lit view of the house.

House Interior

Click the pictures below for a larger size image.

	A rendered view of the interior. I was not as pleased with the interior as I was the exterior. In order to give the house an old, "lived-in" look, I would have had to add much more detail here.
	Wireframe interior.
	Wireframe interior.

Cast of Characters

The pictures below are full-sized.

	Mortimer, the main character of the animation. This is "version 1" or Mortimer, textured and rendered.
	Mortimer, the main character of the animation. This is "version 2" of mortimer, untextured. Mortimer has been versioned yet again (and this should be the last time) for the new iteration of the short.
	Jimmy, untextured. He did not seem to "fit" with Mort (his features were still slightly charicatured, more toward realistic proportions). This is being addressed in the new version.

Plot

The animation was storyboarded, complete with camera angles, which I found was very important for modeling the scene correctly (and to prevent "over-modeling"). The number of locations was limited to three, which, for a first-time project, is asking a lot for an animation as detailed as I wanted.

The short (in its newer form, still in progress) has been restructured to include three basic locations again, but these locations will be much less demanding model- and texture-wise.

The Haunting Home
The Old Haunting
The New Haunting : Chapter One