Hallucinations

October 2025

Krita, Touch Designer, and Adobe Premiere Pro

When beginning this project, I knew I wanted to incorporate varying techniques, including frame-by-frame animation in Krita, keyframing in Adobe Premiere Pro, and some experimentation in TouchDesigner. So my idea formed to create a character walk cycle in Krita, keyframed, parallaxing environments in Premiere Pro for the character to walk through, and a final mushroom forest environment where the character hallucinates and sees psychedelic visuals, made in TouchDesigner.

Both the concept of a character walking through environments and the hallucinations were inspired by cartoons, as often walking through environments is used as a filler to emphasise a long journey, and whenever characters hallucinate in cartoons, they often see moving shapes, colours, and symmetrical visuals.

My biggest weakness was trying to understand and learn TouchDesigner, as the other techniques I used, I’ve used before and was confident with, but TouchDesigner was completely new to me. I used a variety of YouTube tutorials as well as module content to learn enough to create an audio-reactive mandala effect of which I quite like and think accurately conveys hallucination alongside my use of layered audio.

I encountered the problem when exporting from TouchDesigner, where my video wasn’t very high resolution. Upon further research, I learnt that the free version of Touch Designer has a maximum resolution of 1280x1280, so unfortunately, there wasn’t anything I could do about this.

To increase the efficiency of my processes, I used free online resources for all my audio. Additionally, I used Freepik to find vector backgrounds that matched my desired aesthetic, which I then broke down into layers using Adobe Illustrator and utilised for the forest and mushroom environments.