For my second-year assignment, the brief required me to "Create a three-minute motion graphic that tells a complete and effective story.
The artistic style will
combined old story book imagery and the aesthetic of desktop cinema. It had to follow the theme, 'Pixelated Abyss'.
I developed my narrative story using Adobe After Effects, where I created a short animation that tells the story of a character called Mallory.
We had to create this using A3 dimensions as we are currently working to display our story through interactive projection mapping techniques.
Mallory wandered through the village, his walking stick tapping against the path. The village was quiet and old, its wooden huts falling apart, the air thick with stillness. He scanned the familiar landscape, eyes tracing every corner.
Then something appeared.
Ahead of him, a void appeared, sudden and unnatural. Mallory froze, heart pounding, but it was too late. The abyss pulled at him with an invisible force and he stumbled forward, tumbling in.
The darkness wasn’t empty, it flashed with strange life. Bright, flickering lights moved around him, coloured blocks racing by. Mallory’s body started to change, breaking apart into pixels. His arms fractured into fragments whilst his legs stretched. Panic rose in his chest as he fell.
He crashed onto a cold, flat surface, landing perfectly. He looks at the world around him. He was standing on a massive desktop screen with strange symbols sat below him.
An unfamiliar icon caught his attention. Mallory stared at it, confused. He had never seen anything like this before. His hand stiff and pixelated, reached out.
He clicked.
The browser opened below him, making him fall.
A message popped up:
“YOU CANNOT ESCAPE.”
The world glitched. Mallory stumbled back as strange videos burst onto the screen, voices and faces spinning into view.
They are talking in frantic tones about simulations, alternate realities and hidden worlds. It was overwhelming. But then, a new tab forced itself open.
Cybernet City.
A bright, red ENTER button caught his attention. Mallory hesitated, every instinct screaming at him to stop. But curiosity pushed his hand forward. He tapped the button. The screen fractured. Error codes exploded in his vision, warnings flashing faster and faster. The page glitched wildly, its image tearing apart, until it melted into darkness once again.
The Deep Web.
Mallory stepped forward cautiously, each breath sharp and shallow. The space around him felt warped. A glowing word, ‘Gate’ hovered above him. Maybe this was the exit, his way out of this nightmare. He reached out and clicked.
Mallory turned just as a virus burst out of the shadows, its body of pixels lunges at him. Mallory gripped his walking stick tight and swung with all his might. The creature crumpled to the ground.
He caught his breath, but more were coming, cockroaches spilling from the darkness, swarming towards him in a relentless wave. Mallory froze, gripping his stick tight. There was nowhere to run. Nothing he could do.
Then blackness. Everything dissolved, leaving only a single swirling loading icon, spinning endlessly. Light returned.
Mallory was back in his village, walking the same path as before. The sky hung quietly above. There was no abyss, no sign of what had happened.
But something was wrong.
The air felt distorted, heavy with silence. His surroundings flickered for just a moment, the edges of the world jittering like a corrupted screen. Slowly, the view zoomed out until the village shrank into a tiny glowing square.
Mallory was no longer real. He was just a figure trapped inside a laptop screen.
And someone was watching.