Process

For the visual part, we found 3 appropriate Rorschach images to serve as the base images for the animation, then drew in the intermediate frames by hand. We had considered other ways to animate the phenomenon of pareidolia, but could not find a good way to do animations in a smooth and clean way - clouds and faces, for example, would be too difficult to animate in such a short span of time. The idea to use Rorschach inkblots came quite suddenly out of nowhere, but it was easily accepted as the idea we would go with once we proposed it.

We had to choose inkblots that looked relatively similar to one another, such that animating them was possible within the few seconds we were allotted. Hence we rejected images that were overly complex, of varying colors or values, and instead went for simple black/white pieces with good symmetry.

The biggest challenge was dealing with learning to animate, since we haven't got too much animation ability. We split the process down into drawing out the mid-point frame, then the quarter-point frames, and so on to have the closest frames nearby for reference.

For the audio part, we selected a spooky music as the source. We listened to the music again and again to select the parts that have 'some' relationship to the images and combine them together to make a new 3-second soundtrack. The loudness of the soundtrack was adjusted so that it did not directly tell people what it was but more as a spooky ambience.

We used that spooky soundtrack to go with the theme of change and uncertainty, and added a tritone paradox overlaying the BGM to add to the idea of paredolia.  Since paredolia is the idea of finding patterns that don't exist, we thought that using the tritone paradox, which has different people hear different things (either ascending or descending notes) would be the most appropriate way to add color to the animation.