The creation of Ben

Every stereotypical slasher needs the stereotypical jock! This is one of my favorite BTS posts we have made so far!

These were the main directions for the design of Ben! Due to the nature of Afterschool slash, everything was given the note to play into cliches within different slasher and horror films!

Lou (https://twitter.com/louceph ) had the fantastic idea to model Ben's marks after a constellation! I believe this one is specifically Aires for any star fans out there.

Here is the first draft of how you first see Ben in the mirror! The mirror scenes were very important to get right as it shows the distortion of Ben as you go through the game. They were important to show the deterioration of what Ben experiences and how everything seems to shift around him. We felt like having a common place to go back to to show that change every time was a good idea!

And here we have it! The "base" design of Ben! Now the fun part really began as we were able to put him through different levels of distortion!

The first loop we only wanted him to look slightly different, nothing too crazy just yet, but that would quickly change.

We wanted each time you looked in the mirror to be unexpected, and to be a drastic change at times.

This next one is where it really kicks off! Leaning more into the distortion was really fun to come up with different ideas of how we could make things look the same, but different!

Next we have the mirror room scene, which started with this lovely sketch by Kertoir https://twitter.com/kertoir

Which then lou took and made one of my favorite scenes!

I think the hall of mirrors is one of my favorite parts! If we were ever to do a live action Generation Loss project again a hall of mirrors will probably end up somewhere.

Now onto my personal favorite version of Ben! We called this one "The Machine"


We started out with this made by kertoir, which was good but i felt like it was missing the "human" aspect of it all. Ben wasn't just a machine after all.

Thats when i remembered this character from a VHS 94 segment! The concept of someone still being themselves but having such a large part of them changed forever really stuck with me and was very horrific to think about all of the implications it would have. So the link between the two when having Ben be a husk of himself was very easy to make! So kertoir moreso started with a skeleton base then worked their way outward!

We wanted Ben to be more machine than anything else but it was a balance. I gave the note to have a bit more of the actual body rather than mostly machine. I had the idea that if too much of him was gone then he would know something was up, so including more of his actual body within the machine overall felt a lot better! We gave this sketch and the note to Lou who came back with this!

We wanted to have the camera not covering the whole face so you could still see the soul (or lack thereof) within the machine! I loved the idea that this was all sort of cobbled together, bits and pieces being added as the body deteriorated more and more. There are a lot of details in this next piece that i loved, such as the speaker hanging off of the mouth to show that every word that he said wasn't really his.

Overall Ben quickly became one of my favorite characters to write for, and seeing him come to, well, "life" was fantastic to see!