This short animation was begun around 25th May 2022, and with at least one long 8 month stretch of inactivity, completed around 27th October 2024. I wanted to try doing a street scene, deciding on a whim that it should be based on John St in Sunderland city centre, as that is a fairly old terraced street and I thought the relative uniformity of the buildings would make it easier. I'm not sure when exactly it developed into a short vampire story - probably that was just a by-product of wanting to include the horse and carriage, and the immediate idea I had for the cab driver was this gaunt, Lurch-like figure, which led to the vampire thing I suppose. I'm fairly happy with how this turned out. Some of the animation. I'm happy with, like the vampire stepping out of the carriage, or the maid walking down the corridor. Other parts are a bit stiff and awkward, like the shot where he's climbing the steps. The lighting proved to be a bit of a challenge, given the necessary combination of dusk and mist, and I'm not entirely happy with the result. The volumetric fog obviously blurs a lot of detail and the Youtube compression exacerbates the problem.
1 / 20
The video thumbnail shot.
2 / 20
This whole project started with the doorways. I remember the lintels were sculpted and originally had mad levels of geometry that needed to be simplified.
3 / 20
This was partly an early test for me of how much I could do with arrays and cloned objects to build an environment / set.
4 / 20
I originally planned to do more signs and curtains and blinds to make the houses look more individual, but got a bit lazy with it and only did a few. Frater and Wallace are both names from my family tree: they weren't shipping agents, but in the 1830s the Fraters did part-own a small shipyard in Sunderland.
5 / 20
The "cracked" paving stone shader doesn't look great, but is barely / rarely visible in the final video, so I guess it works.
6 / 20
The set is probably bigger than it really needed to be.
7 / 20
The house interior is pretty rough and minimal. The china plates and the dresser are never actually visible in the film. The splotchy abstract paintings on the back wall (not visible in this shot, but they do appear in the final) are clearly a period-inappropriate style. And there's those damn candlesticks from Grimoire again...
8 / 20
The horse was modelled by trying to "trace" the shape from photos of horses at different angles. It looked easy in the tutorials, but harder when the side and front reference pics are of different animals.
9 / 20
The horse initially looked doofy as hell...
10 / 20
...so I went back and did more scultping, so now it looks pissed off.
11 / 20
The carriage took ages to model. It's closely based on the Brougham cab, which seems to have been a popular design at this time, though I still had trouble finding reference pics for the front under-seat / suspension area and so there was some guesswork as to how it all fits together. This really gave me a new appreciation for the level of attention to detail in Victorian design and craftworking: with the possible exception of the axles, literally every part of the carriage is given some decorative flair and purpose. I'm proud of how my rendition turned out though.
12 / 20
Something that's become apparent to me over several projects is that I get quite nerdy about needing to know how things work before I can model them. The details of the harness and the steering mechanism of the carriage gave me a bit of a headache as I know nothing about vehicles generally, and horses in particular.
13 / 20
I really don't like modelling clothes for characters - clothing isn't something that interests me personally, so I can't bring myself to care about the cut and details.
14 / 20
The woman character is by far the weakest in terms of how much effort I put into it. I couldn't be arsed trying to figure out a suitably ornate hairstyle using the old hair system so I ended up with this awful modelled approach. The dress, I think, is supposed to look like crinoline and lace..? Surprisingly, I kind of get away with it in the final video, as there's a slight silhouetting so you can't make out the details anyway.
15 / 20
I did use the hair system for the maid, as it was just a simple ponytail. The clothing is still pretty rough and minimalist. Again, the shader on the bonnet and collar is more a suggestion of lace than a proper rendition. But again, the details didn't matter in the final result.
16 / 20
I like the facial design of this character. The clothing was a massive arse-ache though, as I was having a lot of problems with clipping. I think I actually ended up deleting all the geometry that was covered by cloth, which is probably hacky as fuck. I'm also not sure how period-appropriate his costume is. I didn't actually model his shoes: they were an asset from Make Human.
17 / 20
The glass shader used looks a bit mad here, in terms of the way it's refracting.
18 / 20
I like the angle of this shot, which was why I picked it for the thumbnail.
19 / 20
I quite like the framing of this. In the final film it uses focus pulls to shift attention while still allowing me to get all the necessary characters and story in a single frame.
20 / 20
This was an early attempt at framing the front shot of the carriage. I liked the lampost in the foreground, but the depth of field meant it was out of focus and the detail of the decoration wasn't very visible (that decoration, like the door lintels, originally involved stupid levels of geometry). Also, you can see (as you can in the final shot) that the vampire's cloak is weirdly positioned and doesn't follow his movement as he turns. Another mistake I couldn't be bothered to fix.
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