Roe (S@R@H) Keenan

First year - Animation Student Mary had a Little Lamb Horror internet age (1990 - 2024)

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Our Final set up for our presentation

This is our script, with our story board and a brief research for the animation style, colour scheme and backgrounds

This our character design and research. We based Mary off a mixture of Wednesday Adam’s and The Hex girls from Scooby doo.

She has this dark black aura around her, not normal for a little girl her age.

We made lamb little girl, no longer a lamb. We decided to give her albinism, which is a condition that leaves an individual with no pigment left in there body, everything is white or very pale.

All our characters look like they’re from scooby doo, very simple and easy to replicate character design.

This is the research for our background we’ve mainly used deep blues and browns for it, taken from ‘the nightmare before Xmas’.

There’s a tonal shift from the classroom scene to Mary’s house scene, goes from bright to dull showing off Mary’s character.

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The Pitch

•As a group, all four of us wrote our parts of the pitch. Roe Keenan gave us each our part.

•We then sent our parts off to Roe keenan by email, and Roe edited them all together and printed it out for us to read during our presentation.

Filmic Approach Maia wrote for the Pitch.

•The story is told from Mary's perspective. But it is 3rd person.

•The final animated film will be in 2D animation.

•During Mary's house scenes. (Rob Gardiner) designed the perspective and camera angles to be shakey and move in his panels. This was to show how creepy Mary's house is and how unsettled Mary is as a person.

•The camera will show Mary's room. And close ups for her computer with creepy pasta stories on it and horror books she reads. Her creepy pasta obsessions will be clear here. The camera will tell it all. Zooming into Mary's facial expressions. No dialogue is needed to express her murder plan.

•Us as an audience only experiences what Mary experiences. Which is unreliable and skewed. We experience how annoying Lamb is to Mary. We are brought to school with Mary and Lamb in the morning. We experience Mary's school experience of her feeling annoyed by Lamb. To Mary, Lambs' friends laugh at her. Laura's friends aren't actually laughing at Mary. But because it's from Mary's perspective, we as an audience are meant to believe they are.

•It was (Lucy O Niel's) idea was for Mary to eat lamb. We see close shots of Mary eating lamb and killing her (drawn by Lucy O'Niel). Mary's bloody hands (drawn by Roe Keenan) And then slender man (drawn by Roe Keenan) appearing in the darkness of the wood.

•The film will have dialogue, but not much. We were going for a quiet film with that creepy film experience. The dialogue is mainly between Mary and Lamb. And Lamb and her school friends.

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Myself and Roe Keenan's Comparisons research

•These films are also films the character Mary watches and is a fan of.

•The audience we were basing our animated short film were for adults and older teens. 

•Mary had a little lamb is a children's poem and song but with the horror in horror films. The children's poem will remind adults of their childhood and so will the 90-2010s set design era.

•These horror films I've researched include cults, supernatural forces, and the storyline of a child who isn't so kind.

True crime comparison

Roe Keenan researched the slender man stabbings and the Japonese school girl murder case when a girl slit her classmates throat with scissors.

Supernatural film comparison

•Roe researched the 2000s creepy pasta website. And slender man stories. Slender man video games for the 2000s.

•I researched a few films like......

•Pet sematary in 1989 by Steven King has a creepy, possessed child. Who is taken over by supernatural forces. Mary is a creepy child who worships supernatural forces.

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•The Insidious films They have supernatural forces. Slender man summoning is included in our story.

90s- early 2000s Film comparisons

•These films include goth horror, slasher horror, cults sacrificing people story lines, and murder children story lines.

•Texas chainsaw saw massacre inclued violence and revenge.

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•The Blaire witch project included wood scenes at night with supernatural evil forces

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•Midsummer included a cult.

•Children of Corn in 1984 were children part of a cult murder all the adults and worship an evil entity. Just like how Mary worships slenderman and kills and sacrifices Laura.

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•The bad seed film. A girl who murders her classmate. Just Mary, who kills Laura. They both have storylines where a child kills their class mate.

•The orphanage (2007) Creepy goth horror. The film includes creepy dolls. And gothic dark interiors. The character Mary is very gothic. ⬇️

•Another comparison is the film Alice Sweet Alice. Another story line where a girl commots crimes

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Here is the Comp research Maia and I did, Maia did the bulck of it, i mainly just did d=research on the films she choose, to see if the actually fit the themes of our pitch and animatic.

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•Backgrounds for the animatic I made with water colour

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Here are Maia's backgrounds for our animatic.

Maia stuck to the color scheme we decided on, light tans, browns and deep blues and muted reds.

we had to cut some of here backgrounds from the final animatic, as the flow of the whole piece wasn't really working.

Maia's work had great detail and if very well done.

She used a mixture of gouache paint and watercolours.

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Background Design

Background for character Mary's bedroom

I drew the bedroom, and Roe Keenan @k00297208 designed the posters.

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Our script for the pitch

Lucy did the characters, Rob did the themes and Genres, Maia did the filmic approach and comps and I did everything else.

This is in reference to all the rolls everyone played in the making of the project

I didn’t actually follow the script as I panicked during the pitch, but I did try to memorise it and I think I did well enough though, and said all I needed to.

We did end up going over time during the pitch but I think overall we did well.

I’m not good at working in groups and I do feel like all over we could’ve done more work and communicated better on both our strengths and weaknesses, what we expected from everyone in the group, but at the end of the we got the project done and finished.

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My final version of the script

I cut out some scenes and added some more, like the house scene.

This one fitted our animatic better.

My idea with the script was for it to have nods towards the original Mary had a little lamb poem, such as 'Fleece as white as snow' lamb is a little girl with albinism, 'all the children laugh and play, laugh and play' Mary thinks she's being laughed at or tormented and 'she turned her out and out and out' Mary began eating her friend from the inside out.

This was just a ;little idea i had as i wanted to keep as close to the poem as possible.

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Each person was in charge of a different area of our project. I was in charge of the protagonist (Mary) and the Lamb.

We decided to take inspiration from Scooby Doos animation style.

Alice May - Scooby Doo villian from Season 1.

I took inspiration from Alice May for my character Mary. The dark brows the how to shade and shape the hair and eyes.

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I made mood boards to brainstorm more on Marys character. Due to the bloody scene at the end of the script. I decided that having accents of blood red in the characters design would portray Marys violent, bold and antisocial character.

I originally had Marys dress white but decided to change it later on as i felt it didn’t represent her character.

Also due to the fact it was very similar to Marys character design and dress. At this point i realised i wanted these two characters to contrast each other in their designs.

Wednesday Addams was a great inspiration for Mary’s style. I wanted it to be formal and uniform like due to the fact we see her in school that day.

Here is the character pitch I had created for Mary’s character.

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When it came to Lambs character , i knew i would have to take inspiration from sheep. Sheep are pale animals.

I found that lambs are quiet innocent, bouncy and playful animals. I wanted to represent this personality in Lambs character design.

A lambs colours reminded be of albinism. After discussing this idea with the group we decided that Lamb would be an albino teenage girl.

I took exact colour swatches from multiple people with albinism for Lambs colour pallets.

For Lambs cute facial features i took inspiration from Blythe dolls.

After MANY different ideas and inspirations i finally decided on a lambs character design:).

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Here is Lucy's Character design for Lamb, i was originally IN charge of her but handed her over to Lucy as I wasn't good at putting my ideas to paper.

I thought of making her have Albinism as there is a line in 'Mary Had a little Lamb' that goes 'IT's fleece as white as snow'. I thought it would be a good idea to change lamb to a girl and make her completely white.

I really like what Lucy did with her character and and the color pallet she used for Lamb. I feel like i made a good decision in letting Lucy Design lamb and Mary

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Lambs mood board / character pitch.

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More of Lucy’s character design

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Mary Had a Little Lamb

•I edited the final Animatic for Mary Had a Little Lamb. Using the app CapCut.

•We were going to add music to our animatic. Like mary had a little lamb rock style. Or mary had a little lamb quiet lullaby. But we agreed it would take away for our animatic.

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(Some of) My Panels

Here are two of my night time wood panels, as you can see here I did have a bit of trouble keeping the same color for the sky, the first has more blue while the other has more black.

But I did keep the same colour and texture for the trees through out the painting process, I used my darkest brown and mixed it with my darkest blue and a little red to town them down a bit.

They’re not as close to our colour pallete as I would like them to be but you can still see it present.

Here are two of my day time woods panels, the sky colour is identical and the tree colours are the same too, I just needed to be more consistent with the ground colours.

I’n the second panel you can see Lucy’s character design we decided to leave the border around them just to make them pop out more.

I had to photocopy some of my panels cause 1. It made no sense to paint out 10 wood scenes and 2. a lot of the shots are in the same place it would to much work to paint them out twice.

Here is the shot of Mary’s bloody hands, I used a really pale skin tone and mixed red and black for the darker shades of blood. I did my best to back the blood pattern as realistic as possible cause I’ve never seen bloody hands in real life before.

Here are references for the hands

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Edited the colour study.

We agreed that square colour swatches are much neater and easier to the eye. These colours match our aesthetic the most.

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Here are the main colours we used for our Mary Had a Little lamb pitch. It mainly mixed the blues and the tans to get the right colours for the night time trees and background and added the white to the lightest blue to make the background sky for the day time.

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Lucy’s Character Design https://k00278298.tumblr.com/

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Mary, we were going for a gothic Wednesday Adam’s mixed with a hex girls vibe. We wanted to make a little innocent but also have this bad creepy aura about her.

Lamb - The hand drawn one was the original character design for Lamb but I didn’t like what I was doing with the character so I handed it over to Lucy.

She did the digital piece, which is what I was in-visioning for Lamb a sweet innocent like character.

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Robs Work @k00298453

Here is all the Panels Rob has painted for the project, we won’t be using all of them as Lucy has drawn all the characters for the Animatic,

Rob had to re do some of these panels as they weren’t in the colour scheme that we wanted.

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Story board

We are going to recreate our story board. We have given ourselves a section of the story board to recreate in the style we chose.

Maia is green

Rob is Red

Roe is yellow

Lucy is Blue

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How we spread out the storyboards among us ,

In the end I took over Lucy’s storyboards and she did all the character design and placement of the characters, we decided for some scenes just to use the same drawing and make it bigger or smaller depending on the scene.