The Pine Creepers is like something out of a Stephen King novel: Three teens set out into the woods near Lake Michigan to hang out, drink beer, and try to escape the summer heat. But as the night goes on, the narrator realizes they’re not as alone in those woods as they would have liked. The 12-minute short uses dynamic lighting and minimal character movement to draw the viewer in and evoke the feeling of a horror story told around a campfire. 

Written, narrated and animated by Mercury Filmworks’s Andy Coyle, with music composed by Ryan Carlson, The Pine Creepers has reached audiences both online and on the big screen. We caught up with Andy to discuss passion projects, his use of lighting as a storytelling device, and the untapped potential for horror in animation.

How would you describe your role in this film and what did a typical day look like in production?

Andy: I did everything on it. My buddies Shane Plante and John McKinnon came on to help me finish the short, but I did the writing, the recording, the editing, storyboarding and character design. I drew the backgrounds, did the animation and compositing. Pretty much everything. It was a very small-scale production.

The reason I wanted to do it in the first place was because I wanted to make the kind of thing that no one would really let me make during my day job. During the day, I produce and direct a show called Hilda, on Netflix. I love it and it’s amazing to do that every day, but once you’ve done something like that for a while, you start to say, “Oh man, I’d love to do all kinds of different things.” This was something that I was doing just for the love of making it.

The average day was whenever I got some time to sit down and spend a few hours on it. It was sandwiched in between doing all kinds of other projects in development, and the show during the day. Whenever I got a spare little bit of time, I would sit down and start hammering out a shot, and just take my time with it. It was very loose. There was no standard day in the life of making it because it was such a small little project.

What did the planning stage of this project look like?

Andy: It was straightforward. It was an organic process. I had no expectations. I had no clear end date for it. So I was doing it for the love of just doing it. I wasn’t trying to use it to make money or anything like that. The planning was more on-the-fly. 

I had a general broad sense of, “I’m going to try and get this shot done tonight. I’m going to spend a couple of hours playing with it.” And then if I didn’t get it done, it wasn’t a big deal. If I wasn’t satisfied with where I got on it, I would put it away and work on it the next day. 

While I was doing this, I was also finishing the second season of the show that I was working on, and I was directing a movie, Hilda and the Mountain King. But I always knew it was a matter of when I would finish it off, not if.

Where did the story for Pine Creepers come from?

Andy: It was a story I wrote. When I wrote it, I didn’t really have any concrete idea of what I would even do with it. It was just a short story. It was one of those things where you just play around. I was coming up with a few different short stories and I had mused that these could be cool ideas for launching off points to make something more with them. Just self-contained little stories that I wanted to tell.

How did it become an animated short?

Andy: I was close to finishing the writing when I started thinking through visuals, and an idea for execution started to come together in my mind. 

Everyone always thinks: “Oh, I would love to make a show or a film on my own.” The problem with that is always the scope and how much insane work it is to actually make something. When you think about the intensity of the labour of putting together a short film, something that’s more traditionally “cinema,” having one person do it is a really difficult challenge.

When I was writing the short story, I started imagining it sort of like a podcast. I thought it feels at home in this place. If you were to that with limited visuals and some animation, then you could probably carry some of the heavy lifting with the narration. It started to come together as I was finishing that story. 

There was a lot more to the story when I had written it. Adapting that into animation, I had to do a lot of modifying and adapting and editing after the fact, once I started putting visuals to it. 

Did you initially intend this short for YouTube? If so, how did that influence production?

Andy: It wasn’t necessarily intended for YouTube, but I always intended it to be something that could find its own audience. So YouTube was an obvious avenue to do that.

It wasn’t a commercial endeavour, necessarily. I wasn’t trying to turn this into a business. But it is a piece of art I wanted to share with people who would just really like to see that kind of thing. It just felt right, in the process, to say: “This feels like it would be great to release on YouTube.” It didn’t change anything about the way I was making it. 

I crafted it so specifically to be a personal experience for the audience. I imagine the right audience being someone in their bedroom with headphones on. It wasn’t designed to play on a big screen, although we did do a fun screening of it at the Ottawa International Animation Festival this year and it played really well in a room full of people. 

What were the challenges in creating an animated horror short?

Andy: The thing with horror, especially the kind of horror that I’m interested in exploring, is that there has to be some balance between the reality and the stakes of the world that you’re telling the story in, and the visual style. You could go really stylish with it, and it would be very exciting probably, and attention-grabbing, but I think you would then lose some of the grounded nature of the reality you’re telling the story in. 

So the more stylized you go, the less real it feels. That was a big challenge because you could easily make it look very boring. If you made it ultra-realistic, you’re not leveraging the medium of animation in a powerful way. But if you make it too stylish, you’re stripping the believability away from the world, and then the stakes are difficult to establish. 

How did you approach that balance between realism and stylization?

Andy: Finding that balance was the biggest challenge. I desperately a) didn’t want it to be boring to look at; b) didn’t want it to be goofy to look at; and c) I also had to engineer it so that it could be made by one guy in his basement. And I didn’t want to get too complex and really ambitious with some of the artwork to the degree that it would take me weeks to do one of these shots. 

I needed to figure out how to communicate these stories in an economical way, that is effective in terms of the tone but also visually stimulating. Navigating that was the biggest challenge of doing this in animation. 

I look at it now and I think I would tweak certain things. I feel like I could come up with better answers. But I didn’t want to dwell on it forever because I honestly felt like if I did that then I would never finish it. It was more important to just move forward and find the right answers as I was going.

What techniques and programs did you use to make this short?

Andy: I used a lot of techniques and programs. Toon Boom Harmony played a large role. But I used pretty much anything and everything available to me. It was such a guerilla process, making this thing. Anything that I could make work, I would make work.

I used Photoshop, After Effects sometimes, I used Harmony for compositing, I would record on different software. At one point for an audio effect I was using this old recording software called Cool Edit Pro 2 from 1998. It was very much a punk rock, do-it-yourself process. 

The lighting in Pine Creepers really stands out. How would you describe the role lighting plays in the short?

Andy: It was meticulous. I’m very deliberate with the art direction that I was trying to do in the execution of The Pine Creepers. I felt like the lighting was such an integral part of establishing the tone and visually communicating the story. Lighting is such an important element of storytelling, visually, in cinema. There are definitely ways in animation to emphasize other things that are appealing, but I couldn’t imagine telling this story without using the light — and also the lack of light. 

The darkness in the short plays a large role, and that was a fun and interesting challenge to tackle in animation. You don’t want to obscure the point of your shot. You want to make sure it can be absorbed by the audience in a clear and dynamic way. But you also want the feeling of the darkness. You want that oppressive blackness that permeates the shadows. That was just as important, and just as challenging to figure out. 

How would you describe the process of animating the lighting?

Andy: A lot of the lighting was very dynamic and interactive. There’s a shot where the narrator leaves the tent that he’s sleeping in with his buddy and walks outside; he’s carrying a lantern in the darkness. So as he walks forward, I blocked in the shapes cast by this lantern moving dynamically with him as he steps forward through the darkness revealing just slightly more of the environment that surrounds him — but never to a degree that you can get a full picture of it. That composition communicates so much while showing so little. You’re just feeling him very small in the frame, isolated in darkness, lit by just his little lantern. That’s a fun thing to play with.

There’s another shot that’s very interesting too, and a little more stylish. As the fire dies out, I animated the shapes of the lighting receding and dissolving, to bring us down to complete blackness and transition to later in the night. I think it was a really fun and effective visual storytelling tool that provides alternatives for interesting visuals. You don’t have to have so much character articulation. 

Also, the iconic language of a campfire was important to the story, because this is a campfire story at its heart. You want to invoke that feeling in the audience that we’re all sitting around that fire, listening to this story about these little goblins who live in the woods.

Which part of the short was the most interesting or challenging to animate?

Andy: I think the most challenging bit of the short to animate was the climactic shot in the tent. I put together this low angle where the narrator climbs back into the tent, grabs the sleeping bag, pulls it over top of him, huddles up, and freezes with fear. He’s listening, he doesn’t hear anything, and then the crunch of the pine needles outside the tent starts to build. And then the lightning flashes and against the back of the tent, you can see the cast shadow of the pine creepers crawling around. 

That was obviously a very complex shot. It was intentionally done as the payoff. It was made to be a satisfying reward for the build-up. And it also employed a lot of restraint. I was attempting to milk the suspense and the tension as much as I possibly could. Less is more when dealing with those kinds of elements because your imagination fills in a lot of the blanks. 

It was also an odd angle to try and animate at. It was functional. I knew I needed to get all of these things in the shot, so how do I craft a shot that accomplishes everything all in one big payoff? That was the hardest bit to pull off in animation. 

The rest I engineered to be as easy to do as possible out of necessity. 

What are some of the challenges and benefits that come with animating a short with limited character movement?

Andy: The challenge is sustaining the vitality of the characters and the story. You don’t want to be unengaging. You want to make sure that the story is moving forward – that it’s stimulating enough that you’re still captivated, and the visuals are adding to the narrative. 

The limited character movement was aided by the fact that it was also a narrated story, which allows you some insight into the character’s thoughts and feelings. So you don’t necessarily have to rely on just the animation to do it. The benefit of that was that it made made it able to be completed by a guy with a day job. 

There’s also something to be said for restraint. It allows for the audience to fill in some of those blanks and imagine the parts not visually articulated.

How would you describe the reaction to Pine Creepers so far?

Andy: Great, so far! It seems to be well-received. At this point, it’s a brand new channel on YouTube, a brand new idea. It has no built-in audience. We’re approaching almost fifteen thousand views in a couple of weeks. That’s modest, but I feel really great about it. 

The best part of that is that ninety-five percent of the audience are just people who found it on YouTube. It’s not people I know, it’s not people in the animation industry, it’s just people who are into the kind of things that it is. That’s what I wanted to do with it – find a direct pipeline to an audience, so I didn’t have to play by the rules of any gatekeepers. I didn’t have to go to anybody and pitch them this idea.

I just made it, and now the audience can experience it, and it’s been great. The reception to The Pine Creepers proves that there’s so much more potential to be unlocked here. I’m really interested in exploring that.

Alright, here’s another shot breakdown from “The Pine Creepers”! pic.twitter.com/XPSTs7t7SJ

— Andy Coyle (@kindofandycoyle) October 23, 2022

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