The Ritual

Naomi Bloodworth

The Ritual is a 3D psychological horror teaser created by Cara Wu and I. The teaser centers around a man whose wife has died to disease and his last hope at saving her life is to perform an ancient, forbidden ritual to bring her back. Although he does this with good intentions and slight selfishness, he unleashes a monster seeking his destruction as well as the destruction of the man’s world.

Overview

Thesis

My Thesis

Environments can tell a story without dialogue or characters. Environments serve as deeper insights into a game or film. By focusing on strong design, staging, and lighting, one can provide deeper meaning to the whole of the narrative that can stand alone without dialogue and characters.

Cara's Thesis

Character animation is a means of controlling an audience. When audiences distance themselves from the content, it breaks the immersion and allows for one to not feel as terrified or unnerved by what they’re seeing. By focusing on character animation, one can immerse the player so deeply that they’re unable to look away and distance themselves.

Proposal

My Proposal

To create a 3 minute 3D horror cinematic game teaser focusing on environmental storytelling through the use of Maya, Unreal Engine, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Speedtree

Cara's Proposal

To create a 3 minute 3D horror cinematic game teaser focusing on character animation which showcases my understanding of modeling, rigging, and animation

Logline

After the death of his wife, a grief-stricken man performs a forbidden, ancient ritual foretold to bring back the dead, but the ritual has more to offer him than the return of his wife

For our inspiration, we took a lot of reference from forests in Ireland and several other media such as the Outlast series, Dead by Daylight, Blair Witch, and Silent Hill’s P.T. These were games that had the kind of vibe we wanted to portray in our teaser for both the environment and the characters. For our main character, The Man, we referenced a lot of The Most Dangerous Game in the beginning. We wanted to depict a man who was depraved and had no morals. As we went on in the concepting stage, we drew ourselves more to a character that was sympathetic and desperate. We heavily referenced the book The Ritual and its film primarily for the eerie tone and the look of the monster. We particularly were drawn towards The Ritual for its environment as there were many layers to it to dissect and we wanted something like that to be reflected in our teaser.

Storyboarding

The original story was that our man was actually a hunter who hunted humans for the thrill. By killing the wildlife of the forest and now killing innocent people he angers a god. Who becomes animated and hunts him instead. Hence, The Hunt. But that was scrapped due to the conflicting nature between the hunter’s morality and the audiences’ feelings.

After the first idea was scrapped, we went for a more emotionally driven story. The hunter was now just a man, more specifically a husband who was so swallowed by grief that he went through a blood sacrifice in order to bring back his wife. The ritual, however was forbidden and in completing the ritual the husband got instant karma in the form of a beast hunting him down. Ultimately, this idea was also too conflicting in regards to why the beast was angry in the first place and we ended up scrapping this too.

Due to second pass on the story failing, the current story ended up morphing into what it is now because we realized from our midterm that what we were trying to make a story out of didn’t have anything backing it up. Previously, we had been basing our entire story on a god from Celtic mythology and we were not focusing on the actual research we had done. The midterm was a hard hitter for us but it made us realize the reasons why our original story didn’t work. We wanted to create a story based around a culture and a religion but we had twisted it so far that it didn’t make sense anymore, so we went back to the very beginning. We redid our research and came up with a story more sensible and natural reaching to the lore we had been referencing. In the end, the story became about a man so entrapped in his grief that he irresponsibly performed a ritual he knew nothing about because of his selfish actions of not wanting to accept what had happened to his wife.

It reflects us in a way about how we went about the entire creation in the beginning. The man irresponsibly attempted to perform a ritual based on a culture he was not well versed in and like us, who attempted to create a story about something we did not wholeheartedly commit our research to. Both outcomes were negative and self-destructive.

Here's the final animatic from December 2020.

Characters

The Man

The beginnings of the man started with Cara searching up variants of "old Irish hunters”. Since he was a hunter at the time, Cara looked into old rifles and lower and middle class hunter clothing. Generally it was all the same baggy, loose fitting collared shirts and vests. She even looked into modern hunting wear and tried to tie in aspects of the modern wear to 19th century clothing.

This idea was ultimately scrapped because it was overall too modern to fit our 19th century setting. It was hard to give the man a suit and vest and not think, modern age. My solution to this was to eliminate the suit and to texture his clothes with old off-colored fabrics. It’s all earth toned, nothing is vibrant, and the fabric is coarse.

The reason for The Man's plainness and almost forgettable appearance is because of the original story. If we wanted the audience to empathize we needed a easy bridge, visually, for the audience to put themselves into his shoes, hence why he lacks visual interest compared to the wife, the monster, or the environment for that matter.

The Wife

The Wife is a silent foil. She’s a key driving part of the teaser but her presence is essentially meaningless. Originally, we wanted the wife to be faceless, almost presentless. From the beginning we strongly believed that her physical appearance was not necessary to be shown. Because of that, we found reference from God of War to be a good example of what we wanted to embody. The wife’s face or body is never shown, but from the character acting and environment we can distinguish that this body bag was an important person to the other characters

Unlike the man, we needed the wife to be rooted in the world, to be a focal point of the story. This is why Cara referenced old Irish patchwork quilting. The Irish would quilt random scraps of fabric together. There wasn't much of a pattern to them due to them being out of necessity rather than luxury. The red thread references an image Cara based the wife’s pattern off of as well as the old blood sacrifice boards we had early in the boarding process.

The Monster

The Monster went through the most changes. As we mentioned before, The Monster was going to be a god and a monster, 2 characters in one. We were still going off of our Celtic research but we couldn't find much about monsters and translate them well enough to fit our current designs, so we called a friend, Madeline Ames, or Maddie for short. She’s an amazing Illustrator and lover of Celtic mythology and all fantastical things, so we asked for her help in designing the God and monster, which she did a great job of.

We especially loved the four armed, caved in skull, centaur design of the monster. He was the terrifying monster that we had wanted to create. But then our Mid year presentation hit. Then we realized we didn’t have enough time to create the cool monster that we wanted nor did it fit the story we had to fix anymore. So the design was completely scrapped. Sorry Maddie. We really loved the monster design she created for us.

We kept some aspects of the original design like the skull and antlers. But the biggest change was making him bipedal instead of quadrupedal, this was due to time and the fact we only got to see him for at most a few seconds. So he needed a clear silhouette if we wanted to make him scary or at the very least unnerving. So I chalked up a bunch of designs of heads and bodies and mashed them together. And since this is technically a monster teaser I won’t reveal his final model.

Environment

For awhile, we were split between creating an entirely low poly environment, realistic, or semi-realistic. We ended up going with a stylized realistic environment.

Left Behind

All of this design work was scrapped. There wasn’t enough story within any of it and the design work wasn't enough.

Originally, we had wanted to have 3 locations: the cabin interior, the cabin exterior, and the ritual site. This was a decision I'm glad we dropped, because making 3 sets would have been very taxing.

These are some of the assets we had started creating. I still think they're very interesting but in the end they didn't hold up to the rest of what we were attempting to do.

These were some of the lighting tests and "final" environments we had near the midyear. Needless to say, the final product is much more substantial.

Moving Forward

In regards to the book, this one specifically went through several iterations. We wanted a book of old that was eerie and clearly dangerous but that didn’t quite fit with the designs we had already. We ended up going with a book that was more realistic yet also vague enough that the protagonist would not know what he’s getting himself into with it. To this day still, I love the design of the book with the skull and veins.

Designing the environment was very crucial for us because we wanted to commit to involving our research throughout every aspect of the film. I started out researching Ireland’s geography and the vegetation as well as the culture. As I had mentioned before, we had based a lot of things off of a Celtic god and we still wanted to keep that, so I did more research on Celtic paganism. I wanted to know more about the culture and the reasons for some of their beliefs and actions. The religion itself is very nature based and nothing is done without purpose. Oftentimes rituals were performed simply to mark the beginning of something new or rather to appease a god. In the case of our teaser, the protagonist’s wife has died to disease and he’s going to this god to ask for healing before it’s too late to reverse her death.

Around late March, I was working on our Unreal file and Cara was animating, but we still had assets we needed done. I had dragged my feet with finishing the texturing on two of our assets and they were the most important ones: the book and the tree branches. Some other set dressing assets were also needed like flowers in the water, so we enlisted the help of Byran RitzSpikes, who is an impressive 3D artist. We took one look at his portfolio and knew he was overqualified, so we accepted his help.

Thanks again Bryan! We were super impressed that you textured each page and we feel super bad that it’s not even shown that much in the teaser.

This rig for the book, after all the hard work I did, ultimately did not work with Unreal. I learned this, unfortunately, around the time Cara and I learned that Unreal did not accept controllers. More importantly, Unreal did not accept locators, which was entirely how the pages worked. Bryan had given us this beautifully textured book, but I had failed to realize I didn't rig it for a game engine, so I had to go back to the beginning.

I ended up having to rerig the entire book with no controllers or locators. Every part of the book was bound together by a singular joint, which was the spine. All the joints had to connect to each other for the book to import properly in Unreal and still animate the way we needed it to in Maya

Designing the statue was very tricky and difficult for us. We had struggled in the beginning with a good monster design and thanks to an amazing design from Maddie we had decided to give the statue just a mask. We liked it much better than the previous statue we had designed but it wasn’t received well. I ended up redesigning the monster to be more good presenting, more like a god. We wanted to make the statue appear to be more like a worshipping stone or at the very least an actual effigy of the god the protagonist is pleading to.

A look at some finished shots

Technicalities

Until getting heavily into production coding was not something that I had ever done seriously. I knew some basic coding but nothing to this level, and Unreal Engine 4’s coding isn’t even the heaviest, so that says a lot about the learning curve for me. I went into production thinking I would never have to touch coding. I got the animations from Cara, imported them in after some hard troubleshooting on my end, and they worked, until we had to bring in the wife. As Cara mentioned, Unreal Engine did not like parenting. With the way Cara traditionally rigged, the wife was included within the man’s rig through parenting, which would normally work just fine within Maya. Unfortunately for us, Unreal thought that was funny and I quickly discovered that I was about to get very intimate with coding. Looking back on it now, it’s simple and a bit embarrassing that I struggled so much with it but to be fair, I came in with limited knowledge about Unreal and hardly any knowledge about coding.

After solving the problem of parenting the characters to each other I soon faced another problem, which was the fact that there were multiple characters and their animations in the scene playing all at once. Although our chair, Anthony, thought it was really cool for them to be in the same scene at the same time, we thought it was a bit awkward. Eventually that idea turned into us staging background characters around to push the mystery of the environment further. Going back to the coding, in order to hide multiple characters or have them appear at specific times and then disappear I had to figure out code for toggling visibility on and off with event triggers. Needless to say this was singlehandedly the most troublesome bit that I had to solve. There were countless tutorials, forum postings, and help from Harrison Walsh from the game design department but it just did not work consistently. Eventually I figured out that there was simply just a button that worked way more consistently than coding ever did.

We had lots of baby wives!

Animation

Sometime right before our BFA class, I reminded Cara of something our chair, Anthony Scalmato, had mentioned to us before. He mentioned to us to check our Mixamo, a database of motion capture (MoCap, for short) animations along with some character meshes. Upon further inspection we found out that we could import our own meshes and have Mixamo rig it so we could use their animations. We were practically crying when the man was rigged. The only slight issue (which would later become a blessing) was that the rig only consisted of joints which made sense because MoCap didn’t need controllers in a rig. Ultimately we gave up on adding controllers (which again was a blessing) and started throwing MoCap animations on him left to right, downloading any cycle of animation we could possibly use in our teaser.

Of course, we still had to animate things like the man carrying his wife, him looking around, flipping pages, etc. There were still plenty of things that we had to animate ourselves but with Mixamo we were able to get the bulk of our animation down. Within a week or two we had the front half of our teaser done. There were some things we had to go back and tweak, but we had the animation and we had hope that we could finish in time.

The back half ended up taking two to three weeks to finish rather than one week, like the first half, because we had to animate more on the man and monster.

We had to import the animations to Unreal Engine 4 and found out the hard way, after Cara had made a walk cycle with the man and the wife, that Unreal didn’t like controllers. Any animation we did to the controllers wouldn’t translate into Unreal and what did import, if it imported at all, resulted in it still being on the first frame of animation. Unreal only took information from the joints. It also didn’t like Arnold Shaders, locators, multiple roots, and standard hiearchy. It was a big learning curve to go from Maya to Unreal.

There was also the issue of how to keep things in place like feet. The Mixamo animations had all the joints animated, but the joints in the feet were somehow animated to the joints in the legs without IK handles, so Cara had to figure something out to make the man or the monster look like they weren’t having leg seizures. She managed to put IK handles on the pre existing animations and animate them into place.

Fixing up the Mixamo rigs was very time consuming, so we were running out of time to animate even faster. We had the ability to ask for help from the underclassmen, but Cara and I were very hesitant to involve them because our rigs were not traditional full rigs. The idea of asking an underclassman to animate a mess of joints didn't feel right and it would have most likely put us further behind rather than forward, so we pushed on on our own together.

Final Thoughts

A lot of things in The Ritual were cut out. The first semester of Cara and I’s BFA consisted of strictly storyboarding almost. We were held up simply by the story for so long that production suffered. Due to having to spend so much time discussing the nuances of the story and its boarding we did not have much time for asset creation in the production portion of the pipeline. By the end of the semester at our midpoint presentation, we were so far behind that we hardly had any production ready. We had an environment with our assets coupled with Megascans and SpeedTree assets and half finished character models. Needless to say, the presentation did not go well and we ended up spending our entire winter break reworking everything. We reworked the entire thesis, from our defenses to the entire story and production.

In the beginning of our BFA year, we started out with a story that we absolutely loved. It was simple. It was going to follow the devastation and downfall of a hunter who’d gone too far with the hunt. The hunter had begun hunting humans for sport because he’d grown bored of hunting predictable animals and his greed summoned the God of Hunt to destroy him for his perversion against nature. The story behind it was supposed to be simple enough to interest someone and want to play it. It wasn’t meant to be a narrative film, simply the teaser to a game, however we struggled with getting others to understand our concept and this resulted in 4 months of deadlock with the story. We were barred from any production until the story was “complete”, however we knew that we would never be able to find a compromise and we started production regardless to avoid losing too much time. At the end of it all, the story still did not work and we were forced to rethink our entire thesis. The work was grueling but we used the entirety of our winter break to redo our thesis and advance on the production we previously failed at.

Creating The Ritual was exceedingly difficult technically and for a time being we considered rethinking the entire thing even after all of our hard work in the span of just winter break. Before this, Cara and I had never used Maya and Unreal Engine 4 (UE) together before. At most we had done VFX and environment designing within UE, but never any animations, cinematics, or coding. There was a lot of troubleshooting, crashing, and insane fixes that we had worked around. Despite the hardships, we both learned so much more than we ever thought possible on a single project and it was very rewarding.