why was this for kids
when i was a kid, a bad case of stripes absolutely terrified me. i don't know what it was exactly—maybe watching camilla slowly transform into something completely unrecognizable, or maybe it was the part where she literally becomes part of her house. either way, it lodged itself in my brain as one of those oddly specific childhood fears that never really went away.
so naturally... i turned it into a vfx project.
this one ended up being a lot of fun to make. i painted the stripes directly onto myself in photoshop, then brought everything into after effects where i used displacement maps to make the patterns wrap naturally around my body. the little striped tentacles creeping out of me were animated with puppet pins, and i added tiny movements throughout the scene to give it that subtle dream—or more accurately, nightmare—feeling. nothing moves quite enough to feel alive, but just enough to make it feel a little... wrong.
compared to some of my other projects, this was actually a pretty straightforward build. it was one of those ideas that translated from my head to the screen almost exactly how i imagined it, which is always a nice surprise.
the best part has been seeing everyone's reactions online. apparently i wasn't the only kid traumatized by weirdly specific pieces of children's media. i've had so many people commenting with books, tv shows, and random pop culture moments that used to scare them, and a lot of people have been asking me to keep making these childhood nightmare videos.
thankfully, i was a pretty scared kid, so i don't think i'll be running out of ideas anytime soon lol.
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