The Animation Process

As a fan of the F13 series, I always found it a bit perplexing that Jason's backstory has never been fully explained. We know he drowned as a boy, but now he seems to be an undead adult man. He went from being a sympathetic victim to being an unstoppable killer. I decided that fleshing out this transformation would be the crux of my piece.

I thought of this idea in comic book terms. It would be a short piece that bridges the gap between the first two movies. It would be serious in tone. Therefore, I would use a sketchy style that would translate quickly and easily to animation, as well as capturing a "horror" feel. Most animated projects dictate designs with solid bold lines that can be filled in with color easily. With a sketchy style, that would be difficult, so I would paint in one color per character. The results would be abstract, but satisfying in a "comic book" way.

Several websites helped with my research, including The Pit of Horror, House of Horrors, and FridayThe13thFilms.com. I checked facts with the F13 timeline, originally published in Fangoria. I needed plenty of photos of Jason, his mother, and Alice for reference when I did my drawings. I also watched the first two movies to refresh my memory on the details. I decided to be consistent with certain cinematic nuances, like the use of white titles on black, cut-aways to the full moon, and fade to white transitions.

Now I had to nail down my storyboards. I went through a few stages on this, trying to tell the story economically and in a way that made sense. You can see my final storyboards HERE. Notice the titles I brainstormed on the side... my first instinct was to go with "Jason: The Rebirth." I didn't come up with anything I liked better, so I stuck with it.

With all my references assembled, I began drawing the cartoon. I don't animate every storyboard in order. I usually go for the easiest or most fun segments first. In this case, I started drawing sections with Jason walking and morphing. For the scene in which Alice kills Mrs. Voorhees, I referred to the original footage. I wanted that kill to look familiar to viewers. HERE'S AN EXAMPLE of a pencil drawing of Alice.

You may think that my pencils look pretty good scanned, but I've learned through experience that inking my drawings on fresh sheets of paper yields better results. After INKING MY DRAWINGS, I scanned them into Photoshop and imported the resulting bitmaps into Macromedia Flash. If I was doing a standard cartoon, this is where my inklines would be very uniform and clean. For this piece, however, I decided to let the inks be somewhat messy.

Once the artwork was in Flash, I vectorized each individual picture. When I stepped through them in the timeline, they looked like THIS.

Next, I dropped out the white areas and laid in color behind each drawing. I left some bits of white showing because I liked the "highlight" effect it gave the characters. Check out the results HERE.

Now for the final touches. To imitate the slow motion feel of the original scene, I layered a transparent version of the sequence on top of itself, offset by a few frames. If you LOOK CLOSELY, you can see the crossfades between the images. I also added a zoom to intensify the action.

The water effects were achieved by vectorizing high contrast photos of splashes and waves. I colored those images in several ways, fading between them to give a sense of movement.

Once I was satisfied with the animation of the piece, I exported AVI files from Flash, set for video standards (720 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second). I brought those AVIs into a non-linear edit program, Toaster Edit, and cut them together with music and sound effects.