Rotten

Gosh, where to begin? At first, I wrote the main story (of the man killing the woman and so forth) in a day and wasn't sure what to do with it. After watching some Jonni Philips animation or other (big inspiration btw), I figured I wanted to do something like it, with real life drawings used for stop motion and cardboard backgrounds. Turns out that's really really hard, so I decided to use video of the backgrounds and animate over it instead. About five months after filming the intitial cardboard scenes for future use, I finally got the motivation to start planning out and working on the project. But while planning it out with the ideas I now had, I wanted more to it than the original story, because I wasn't happy with certain parts and it was too short with what I had cut out. Then, I got the idea to add many different sequences, some old ideas and some new. I continued planning and working a little bit each week over the next two months until I had my finished product. The central theme is intrusive thoughts. It is a story about violent urges and morality. So, with that in mind, let's go through each sequence.

Bus Stop / Hammer

Here we have two people, a woman and presumably a man standing at a bus stop. The background was a dictionary I ripped up and slathered in paint. Interspersed is a semi-rotoscoped video of the man swinging a hammer at the woman's head speeding up. The intention was that it was the man imagining himself doing that. This first scene lays the foundation for the "story" presented in the video. Everything that follows is other short sequences that follow the same theme. One might imagine they are other thoughts that this main character has in that split second, or perhaps other people sharing a similar problem.

Title

The title, of course, is a reference to my first real video/project, "Don't Get The Rotten." 'The Rotten,' supposedly, is a sort of disease. This video is also about a sort of disease. The background is a video of my hands playing the piano (no, I do not play piano) compressed to hell and with effects over it. I used the same footage in this video by having it projected on the walls to get that flashing effect. It cuts to black with a smacking noise. I had the video end with the same smacking noise as a way to bookend everything. There are a few things I would change in this video if I were given the chance to and that is the biggest one. I will explain further down in this text.

Ants

I have mixed feelings about this sequence. This scene was added in because of an earlier video of mine. When I shared the video with someone and they asked me what black things are, I jokingly said they were ants. This sequence was a reference to that conversation, clarifying both to that person and to general audiences that the black things really are just what this character calls ants, who crawl into his brain through his nose.

Afraid of the Dark

In this one, a little man walks into the room, claims that he does not like the dark because it is scary, and then is dragged away by a creature into the dark. Fun fact, that is the same creature you briefly get a glimpse of at the end of my 3d maze video, albeit with a few edits. This sequence reflected a brief period in which my overactive imagination got the better of me, and I, too, was not always comfortable sitting in total darkness at night.

Dark Cloud Thoughts

This, like many of the sequences, comes from one of my distressing pictures. Here is a man, looking troubled, and the camera pans up to show a little thought bubble crudely portraying acts of violence. Simple enough. Person with violent thoughts.

Coffee

This is a reminder for the audience that the main story is gonna continue later.

Great Mother

As mentioned in the Dreams sequence, this sequence reflects how uncomfortable I sometimes feel hearing "positive" things. This video was made a little after I discovered the wonders of ASMR, and in this case calming ASMR meant to relax the listener with soothing phrases. For some reason, at one point, hearing some stranger say these things horrified me in a manner words do not do justice to. I quickly turned it off and decided to listen to the non-speaking sorts of ASMR for a little while. What I felt, though, listening, is well portrayed by this sequence, so that words are not necessary. After it cuts to black, I have the person from the Dreams sequence waking up, showing that what was happening was a dream, so that I could connect them. That would give me a way to describe what was happening in the Great Mother sequence later.

Coffee redux

The man from the opening scene is now in his house, and has a sip of coffee. I meant for it to show him pick up the mug and drink from it but I am a very lazy creator so you get this instead. Again, it is a reminder to the audience that the main story is still going on.

Skeleton

This piece represents my own feelings, that I want to escape my body -- metaphorically and literally. In the metaphorical sense, this body feels wrong, like it is not my own. It is a fleshy prison inside of which I am a prisoner. For this reason, I literally want to peel off all of my skin and muscle and sinew and get out. The flashing text saying "FREEDOM" and the short bit with the discarded body looking up is presented in that manner to add some comic relief.

Dreams

Here is the man again, ready to update his dream journal after his nightmare about the Great Mother. As he scrolls down to the bottom of the document, we see a lot of other strange and morbid dreams. As you may well have guessed, they are all my own dreams. He gets to the bottom and types up the dream (the one entry that is not my own dream), explaining clearly that he was scared because the Great Mother, as she is called, sounded comforting but he felt like his life was in danger. Which is how I felt.

Laughing / A Thought

A very straightforward depiction of how a stray thought may dampen my spirits. I love the can crush sound effect ha ha ha. Of course, in the original picture this sequence is inspired by, the thought was of my own mortality, instead of hurting others or being hurt, which is more what the video is about.

Slide

I like this one. A person's hair jumping up and down like they're being shocked over and over while some manner of goblins and ghouls surround them. Dunno what this is but I liked it. Maybe the gobbies and ghoulies are thoughts. Or maybe it is representative of how I feel that any passing eye staring at me might know that something is off, that I am not a correct human being. They will know just by looking.

Dinner

This is the meat of the story. The corpse is berating the man for his destructive nature. The woman's corpse is now also covered in makeup, a way to "hide" the ugliness of what has happened. I guess...? That's bullshit but I'm not good enough with words to explain my whole thought process. The corpse continues prodding the man with questions. "Do you want to hurt others?" "Do you want to hurt?" In a way, this is a conversation between me and myself. The man tries to shut up the corpse but it goes from questions to statements, becoming increasingly aggressive before falling over as the world around the man disappears. The flickering of his body was a glitch. But a good-looking glitch, at least. Because I was using real voices as little as possible, and none in this scene, I had all the tone in their "voices" conveyed by the music in the background. Her finals words "rotten to the core" were me shoehorning in the word Rotten so as to wrap things up.

Bus Stop redux

We're back at the beginning. Everything that happened prior was an instant thought in the man's head. But the man feels guity just for thinking it, and quietly apologizes. The woman, now cemented as a symbol of his wretched conscience (hence the aura around her for that single second), turns and says "what," because she thought she heard him say something. "Nothing," he replies and that is the end. We are back where we started and the whole video has taken place in the span of a few seconds. As I mentioned earlier, it ends with that same smacking noise, which would give the impression that he did end up hitting her with a hammer, but it was supposed to be nothing more than a bookend. The first smack wasn't meant to be him hitting her with a hammer either, although it may seem that way.

End

And so, our little video is now over. I needed lighthearted music for the end because everything prior was so dark. I happened to come up with this tune while on a walk, and I whistled it the whole time so that I would not forget it. The picture is whatever I had that wouldn't be recognizable as anything. It doesn't matter. On the left, it spells out Rotten. On the right, it spells out Sequences. So there you have it.

_____

This, to my knowledge, is the first piece in which I made all of the music/background noise specifically for each scene, rather than using something I already had. The ending song, "Fishies," is named so because I called it Fin (end) while working on it. Each title reflects the scene in some way, except for "No Flash," which is called that because the song was inspired by the main song in David Reilly's THE EXTERNAL WORLD (NSFW). Also, "Beggar's Trophy," which was probably some pretentious nonsense idk.