"The Tell-Tale Heart"

When I was a junior at UMass Dartmouth (Sophomore in my major), we had a storyboarding/animatic class. One of the projects was to take a short story, and create an animatic in Macromedia Director. Then we had to create an alternate ending to the story, and make the animatic interactive.

I chose Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." There's a part in my interactive animatic right before she attacks the old man (yes, I made the main character a "she," instinctively) , and you could choose whether you wanted to attack him, or suppress that desire.

After all this, I was asked to make a shortened version of it for one of the Electronic Imaging festivals, so I took all the pictures I drew for it, and used Final Cut to make it into a pseudo-movie trailer. That's what this is. I tried making it as dramatic and over-the-top as possible. I love the song in the 2nd half... unfortunately, neither me nor Sarah can figure out exactly where it came from. We know it's a Beethoven arrangement, "Allegretto..." something or other... but beyond that......

The drawings kinda suck, we had very little time to put this together, and I definitely tried doing too much with them. But the best part about it, and the aspect of it that got the most comments from my classmates, was the voice work. My good friend Sarah Hartley, who really is my favorite voice talent, provided the narrator's voice... and to this day, I still can't get over what an awesome job she did.

I'll never forget when I asked her to do the screams. I can picture the moment in my mind- I was on one side of the room holding the microphone, while she was on the other side standing on a bed, screaming at the top of her lungs. And of course, the one that she thought was the worst was the one I ended up using. Her voice cracked about halfway through it, but because of that it just made it the most crazy, disturbing, unconventional scream ever. I just had to use it.

She's since moved to NYC, went to acting school, and is on her way to becoming a crazy-famous actor.