Case Study · Personal Project

A house that keeps its secrets.

An original gothic anime I’m writing and producing. It begins here with a 40-second teaser; the full episodes will follow.

A young man with messy black hair stands at the door of a candlelit study, where a silver-haired man sits reading at a desk set with two teacups.

Overview

At a glance

Project: Original anime, written and produced on my own.
Genre: Contemporary gothic · haunted manor · psychological mystery
Released: 40-second teaser. Full episodes to come.
Crafts: Story · Character design · Animation · Sound

Part One · Story and Characters

Every path leads back to him.

A manor that rewrites its past each night, and the two men caught inside it.

Where it started

The story grew out of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s novel about a newcomer in a great house still ruled by someone who is gone. I’ve long been a fan of mystic horror: houses with memories, rules nobody explains, and dread that builds quietly instead of jumping out. I always wanted to turn that into a story of my own, as a novel, a comic or an anime.

I outlined ten story ideas and chose this one to develop first, as an anime. AI tools help me plan, generate images, animate and score, and I finish and assemble everything myself in Clip Studio Paint and DaVinci Resolve.

The premise

Kit, a university student, takes a summer job digitising the archives of Hallowmere, an isolated manor. Hadrian, a former university senior who now keeps the estate, welcomes him with a prepared bedroom and reassuringly ordinary routines.

Then the house starts to change. Every night it tells a family disappearance differently: a locked nursery becomes a study, a portrait changes its subject, and the same person appears as victim, witness and murderer in separate records. Kit wants to find out what happened and finish his contract. Hadrian wants to release the spirits the house holds before the inheritance passes to another family.

The hauntingThe house rewrites its own history, so no record can be trusted twice.
The hostHadrian’s wards keep Kit from dangerous rooms, and quietly steer him back to Hadrian.
The questionWhich of the rules belong to the house, and which belong to the man who keeps it?

The look of the house

Before designing anything I built a moodboard of gothic architecture, candlelit interiors, Victorian dress and gothic menswear. From it came one rule for every frame: deep navy and indigo shadows, with warm amber candlelight as the only source of comfort.

A gothic manor at dusk behind iron gates, one candlelit window glowing. — Hallowmere at dusk

A long candlelit corridor with a polished floor; a young man walks away from the camera past chalk marks on the wall. — The corridor

A black-gloved hand sets down a blue and white porcelain teacup among candles. — Tea at four

Meet the characters

Each lead has a full character sheet: a turnaround, an expression set, key details, outfit notes and a palette, so they stay consistent from one generated shot to the next.

Main Character

Kit

Practical, intelligent and quietly stubborn. He treats the house like a puzzle that can be solved with evidence, and keeps a paper notebook in his own shorthand because the scans in the archive change overnight.

Role: Investigator and witness.
Goal: Finish the job, understand the house, and leave on his own terms.

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Male Lead

Hadrian

Caretaker and keeper of Hallowmere. Calm on the surface and lonely underneath, with a dry humour that only appears when he forgets to be careful. He quietly lets the house steer Kit toward him, and he knows it.

Role: Host, protector and key figure.
Motif: Tea at four, ink-stained fingers, and a watch stopped at 11:09.

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Kit: “Does this house ever let anyone leave?”

Hadrian: “It let everyone else.”
The scene the whole story was built around

Part Two · The Teaser

Forty seconds, not a word spoken.

The first look at the story: the house, the question, and the reply.

40 seconds · 16:9 · sound on

Length: 40 seconds
Team: Solo
My role: End to end: story, characters, script, storyboard, shot design, animation, sound design and edit
AI tools: ChatGPTClaudeMidjourneyRunwayElevenLabsSunoTopaz
Other tools: Clip Studio PaintDaVinci Resolve

A script without dialogue

The teaser has no voices. Thirteen shots and five black text cards carry the story, timed to the half-second in a production tracker and kept under about two and a half words per second so every card can be read.

NarrationCool white, third person: the trailer’s own voice.
KitCool white with a normal fade-in.
HadrianPale lavender to match his hair and ribbon, wider letter-spacing and a slower fade, because colour is the only thing telling the speakers apart.

Storyboard and review

I storyboarded all thirteen shots, then reviewed the boards against the script before producing anything. The review turned up eleven fixes. A few of them:

Chalk, not glyphsKit’s marks in the corridor read as occult symbols, which would make them look like Hadrian’s wards. They became rough chalk arrows and tallies.
One familyThe woman and the boy in the portrait looked unrelated, so they now share a feature and read as one family vanishing.
A stopped watchHadrian’s watch, stuck at 11:09, now shows at his cuff while the wall clock ticks on to four.

Building the shots

Each shot started as a still. Where a shot repeats, I kept the same frame and changed only what moves: the portrait is one image with three different canvases, and the corridor is the same view three times until the study door appears at the end. Image generators draw clock hands badly, so the clock face was made without hands and the hands were animated on top.

A gilded portrait of a dark-haired woman between candelabras. — A woman

The same portrait frame, now showing a young boy. — A boy

The same portrait frame, now showing an empty blue chair. — An empty chair

The archive

Tea at four

Hadrian looks up

Sound and silence

The score is a low drone, sparse piano and slow strings, warm only in the tea shot. Around it sit small, specific sounds: wind, paper, a scan click, footsteps, a heartbeat, a cup on its saucer and a clock that stops ticking at four. When Kit asks his question, the music cuts out completely. Nothing plays until Hadrian answers, and the title holds on a low note that never resolves.

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