PROJECT TITLE
Frazzeline
PROJECT TYPE
Title Sequence, Motion Design
Role
Art Director, Designer, Motion Designer
The concept for Frazzeline began with a distinct feeling of being watched from afar...my dog was lurking in the shadows of a hallway early one morning. It sparked a question: How easily does the familiar turn sinister? For this self-initiated project, I wanted to create a suspenseful title sequence that focused on this question. By shifting lighting, isolating sound, and recontextualizing the mundane, I sought to explore the uncanny valley of household spaces, casting a darker light on otherwise neutral environments. I really wanted to lean into dualities—safety vs. danger, dark vs. light, floating vs. tethered, etc. and explore how texture, depth, and pacing could help emphasize this feeling of the uncanny.
exploration
I experimented with various domestic scenes, eventually settling on liminal spaces such as hallways, doorways, and transitional thresholds. These areas provided the necessary depth to play with forced perspective, allowing the viewer’s eye to wander into the darkness where the mind fills in the gaps.
For font selection, I first utilized Six Hands, a frantic, multi-authored handwritten script. While eerie, it felt too overt. I transitioned to Work Sans, a clean, utilitarian sans-serif. This shift created a more unsettling contrast; the stability and "safety" of a standard typeface acting as a veneer for the chaos unfolding behind it.
motion
Choosing a 2.5D workflow over full 3D was a strategic decision to preserve the photographic "grit" of the domestic spaces while introducing an eerie, flattened depth. This approach allowed for a diorama-like quality that feels more voyeuristic and unsettling than a fully modeled environment would allow. By keeping the elements two-dimensional within a 3D space, I opted to emphasize the feeling of false security; the slight disconnect in parallax creates a subtle feeling of being "off" that perfectly mirrors the project’s theme of the uncanny.
The motion design for Frazzeline is built on structural instability. I wanted the movement to feel uneasy, logical one moment and fractured the next. The camera movement often feels untethered and floating, interrupted by sudden, sharp movements. Taking cues from the The Walking Dead (Season 9) title sequence, I blended smooth, sweeping camera pans with the jarring nature of stop-motion. By pairing jolting transitions with heavy grain and film textures, the digital space feels physical, dirty, obscured, and uncomfortably close. The goal was to ensure the viewer never feels truly "settled."