Bad Dream (Five Nights at Freddy's Animation)

I once was reading/watching/listening to some kind of nerd-talk about the fourth Five Nights at Freddy's game, and I remember someone bringing up the gripe of wishing the game had preserved more of the surreal, stylized, dreamlike tone from its early promotional material. This idea has never really left my head.

While the game does have some excellent 'dream logic' moments (my favorite being how you can hold the doors closed on the monster in the closet until it turns back into a harmless stuffed animal), it is true that the visual style of FNaF4 is fairly grounded and plain when compared to the weird lighting and colors from those early teaser images. The main inspiration that spawned this animation is the desire give FNaF4 back that unnerving feeling of bent reality.

FNaF4, being a game that must be played, still needed to abide by enough of its own internal logic to be fair and beatable. An animation doesn't have this requirement, and I tried my best to take advantage of that. It was a lot of fun messing around with things I normally wouldn't, like deliberate continuity errors (like the bit where the door's hinges suddenly switch sides), sound effects that don't quite match what the objects should sound like, and best of all, stylized lighting.

The lighting was the most fun to do, by far. Because of being a dream, I didn't need to worry about making the lighting realistic, and so I cheated all over the place to make the image more pleasing. I employed invisible objects which still cast shadows to get rid of light where I didn't want it, even if it should realistically have been there. I also played around with the darkness outside the doors in FNaF4 being too dark to be real: There are windows and the glowing eyes of the Nightmares which should be visible even with the flashlight off- but they aren't, for the sake of the gameplay. Here, I tried to call attention to it as one more weird thing that doesn't quite make sense.

Time to make: just a tad under three months.