The Recom Fearhouse

WELCOME BACK TO THE RECOM FEARHOUSE

October hasn’t been the same since our sinister 80s slasher film collided with a thousand-year pandemic. Sorry, multi-year pandemic. A thousand years of this might be too scary, and that’s saying something since we escaped a psychotic Axeman in a forest to a dusk-lit, desolate town, some years prior.

Although, it’s up for debate whether we escaped our most vicious foes after all. I suppose we may have “overlooked” remote work being as debilitating as it has been. With New Yorkers primarily still working from home, and the fun months of banana bread making behind us, we face the difficulty of living in The Recom Fearhouse. Conference calls disrupted by barking dogs, spilled coffee from tripping over children’s toys, ordering pizza in a trance of perpetual snacking…

…not getting enough time to play may have made us all a little “dull.”

This essence of insanity from too much vacationing at home was manifested to match that of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a cult classic, and a Recom NYC favourite. An avid appreciation for the film spurred numerous easter eggs and tie-ins to the 1980 hit.

A closer look will reveal all… BUT BEWARE! What you see may frighten, perhaps even scar you!

Unable to view the Overlook Hotel in person, we recreated it in CGI from movie references. We matched the lighting, props, and composition from those of the screen grabs.

Once our foundation was set, our team of horror fans began compositing items from our home offices into the scene.

We embellished the truth a bit, making the “real” Recom Fearhouse from children’s toys, cold coffee, and stale pizza to sell that aspect of homegrown insanity. And ya know, a little whiskey for… improved focus… hehe.

Once we’d decorated the room with our aromatic décor, it was time to collect our sheets of sprawled paper with our twist on “All work and no play.”

 Of course, the typewriter alone wouldn’t be enough of a tribute to the pop-culture, trendsetter source material. Pulling out our digital pocketknives, we carved the famous “Redrum” into our tabletop, and we placed them right beside our matching twin VW’s Beetles. Our twins are still in one piece, though…

To keep the spirit of our veneer-sided Jeep Grand Wagoneer and its many frivolous adventures alive, we added it into our finely tuned monitor before calling our latest Recom Fearhouse a closed case.

Maybe next year we’ll dust our Fearhouse Mobile off and see where it takes us. Hopefully somewhere quiet…

Credits:
Creative Direction: Richard Levene, Steven Orts, Andrew Coleman, Robert Russ, Luke Burke / Recom Farmhouse NYC
CGI: Luke Burke / Recom Farmhouse NYC
Retouching & Editing: Steven Orts, Andrew Coleman, Robert Russ / Recom Farmhouse NYC
Sound Compilation: Robert Russ / Recom Farmhouse NYC

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Recom Farmhaunt

Recom Farmhaunt

Inexplicably a few brave retouchers lived through the night at the Recom Fearhouse forest cabin last Halloween, and the shaken survivors climb back into the veneer-sided station wagon for the next instalment. Escaping the woods, they arrive in a lonely town at dusk…

What warped levels of darkness are layered and blended with a mask of normality?  Will our artists be ready for their “Post” Mortem? Reveal All below….
Peer out from behind the sofa and press play….if you dare.

No horror movie is complete without a poster:

Recom Farmhaunt poster

 

CGI Artists: Luke Burke & Alex Bowen
Retouching: Federico Chiesa
Art Direction: Federico Chiesa
Music composition for animation: Federico Chiesa

Halloween: Behind the Scenes of Recom Fearhouse

Inspired by the 80s horror movies we love, and particularly by The Evil Dead, we decided it was time for us to star in our own Night of Terror. Of course we’ll need the right vintage of car, complete with wood-effect side panels.

Image one: The Axeman
Join us as we willingly enter our own world of fear in the Making-of video!

[vimeo 237740867 w=640 h=360]

Now we’ll drive together from our small-town American home to a cabin in the woods…what could possibly go wrong?

Image 2: The Cabin
We built our movie-inspired sets in CGI using Maya. We were striving for a cinematic feel to the scene, so the environment is all-important – it becomes a character in the story that we’re telling.

Recom Fearhouse - Cabin CGI 1

With the layout of the shot decided, we added textures, and began work on the lighting.

Recom Fearhouse - Cabin CGI 4

For lighting direction we found a lot of inspiration from the photographer Gregory Crewdson. The exquisite lighting of his elaborately staged photographs, many of them taken at night, create a mood that connects the viewer to the story he is trying to tell.

We lit and rendered the scene in Vray and rendered volumetric fog for the desired atmospheric effect.

Recom Fearhouse - Cabin CGI 6

With final adjustments in Photoshop, the scene is set.

Recom Fearhouse: Cabin in the woods

What will happen to us here? Will we stay together, sensibly turning our finely tuned monitors into security cameras, and using our Wacom styluses to defend ourselves? Or will we inevitably become separated in the forest? …Stay tuned….

Aaaand….Credits:

Recom Fearhouse Credits