After watching Room 237, a documentary about the wild conspiracy theories that have sprung around the late Stanley Kubrick’s 1979 cult movie The Shining, I began to develop an interest in the film’s elaborate stage design, marveling at the amount of work Kubrick and his crew put into creating an obsessively detailed rendition of the Overlook Hotel on a British film lot, including some pretty huge exteriors.
In particular, I was thinking of how much easier such an endeavor would be today, with the ability that we have to create gigantic virtual sets out of computer code. From this simple thought came the idea to rebuild some of the movie’s iconic locations in CG. I didn’t have any particular project in mind when I started gathering reference material. In fact, I first thought I would use some of the scenes I was building as quirky backgrounds for some 1970s furniture assets I had wanted to model for some time.
One thing led to another and as I was putting together more and more locations and optimizing my scenes to see whether they could be rendered in an acceptable time for an animation, I began to envisage a short series of sequences that would evoke the aura of the film-both mysterious and familiar-with a contemporary CG twist. The rough idea turned into a concept and, after a few weeks, I found myself with enough footage to build a brief short.
Without delving too deeply into the rather basic premise, let’s just say the result is a full-CG, self-contained, non-linear dream sequence that recycles, manipulates and re-purposes some of the movie’s most familiar imagery and tries to answer the question Danny might have had at the back of his mind whenever he fell asleep at the Overlook: What is in Room 237? This is not meant to be too serious, so you’ll find some period and contemporary film references as well as echos of some of the most fringe theories surrounding Kubrick’s work.
Completely incidentally, this project is a milestone of sorts for me as my longest animation ever. These 2 minutes and 22 seconds might feel brief, but they took a long time to render, even with calculation times brought down to a maximum of 5 minutes per frame!
