Used sound effects from: FNaF4, Sister Location, RU-vid Library, and plenty of my own foley work.
This video is mostly an excuse to just let myself have fun playing around with the assets I created for my animation ‘Bad Dream’ last year. When I made that, I wanted to adhere to the ‘don’t show the monster’ mentality to enhance the spookiness, but it came at the cost of my high-detail Nightmare models I spent many weeks making only getting something like 30 cumulative seconds of screen time, and even then they just kind of stood there. This is effectively a best-of compilation of all sorts of cool things I was itching to have the Nightmares do in ‘Bad Dream,’ but restrained myself from showing for fear of blowing the tension.
One thing I made sure to preserve from the game is how the Nightmares seem a lot more handsy with the player in FNaF4 than other Five Nights titles. Almost every death animation has the monster physically grabbing you or even picking you up, as opposed to just screaming in your face. I see it as a little nod of foreshadowing for what happens to poor little Evan Afton at the end of the game, where the older brother and his friends pick him up against his will to shove his face into the opening and closing mouth of the animatronic Fredbear he’s scared of, trying to make it ‘kiss’ him, but instead resulting in the accident. I also see it as a remnant of a previous version of the lore where the dreams belong to Evan on his deathbed. The current lore of Michael dreaming in the POV of his own little brother screams ‘retcon’ to me, but I digress.
Freddy kneeling on the bed actually happens in his animation in FNaF4 if you’re facing the bed when you trigger it. It only lasts for a frame or two before he grabs you, so it’s difficult to see unless you study it closely, but it’s there.
Bonnie slamming the door open like this came to me as a little nod to how Bonnie’s AI has a tendency to be programmed as slightly more aggressive and headstrong, at least when compared to Chica. I don’t think it’s actually the case in FNaF4, in fact I think Bonnie’s and Chica’s behavior might be identical in this game, but that isn’t enough to dissuade me from incorporating this bit of fanon. This is also the only one where I went out of my way to look at the original death scream frame-by-frame for reference.
If Bonnie is the ‘aggressive and headstrong’ one, then by comparison that makes Chica more quiet and subtle. I decided to lean into that again here, having her move more slowly and quietly. Her behavior here is also based on something she actually does game, where if you catch her in the hallway and hide behind the door, instead of using the light like you’re supposed to, she will use the opportunity to creep up to the door while you have it closed and strike after you open it again.
Foxy’s eye being visible through the gap in the closet doors is a direct carry-over from an idea which didn’t make it into Bad Dream. Even in the final animation, Foxy is looking directly at the camera during the whole closet scene, but you’d have no way of knowing because it’s too dark to see. I think that was for the best, so we see as little as possible, but it was cool enough that I didn’t want the idea to go to waste, so I used it again here. The bit with the turning off of the flashlight and obscuring Foxy in darkness being what’s needed to get the doors to close is more of the ‘dream logic’ stuff that I think is quite cool. The business with the tongue is a near one-to-one recreation of the image my mind conjured up upon laying eyes on Nightmare Foxy’s promo image for the first time back in 2015.
The end with Fredbear I’m quite proud of, I must admit. I’m very happy with ‘bad dream feeling’ of it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I have nightmares, they usually instill in me same sort of emotion that I felt while making this final part of the animation. The bit with the back face of the door becoming a dark shadow for Fredbear to emerge was achieved by layering two different renders from the same camera on top of each other in the composite.
After this, I have one more animation idea I want to make about FNaF4 someday, showing the confrontation with Fredbear and Nightmare. It would effectively be an extension of ‘Bad Dream’, just playing out differently thanks to the different threat. My personal interpretation of Nightmare is as a sign of the dream starting to drift away from the initial inspiration (Real-life Fredbear) and devolving into a pure, visceral, ‘platonic monster’. In other words, the form of the nightmare being stripped away to reveal the bare function. My animation for them would incorporate this idea, by having the whole environment start to inexplicably devolve in the way dreams tend to do, maybe having doors appear and disappear, changing the layout of the room, that kind of thing.
3 фев 2023
