Epithet Erased OP2 - "Say No" Animation Process + Art (Patreon)

This is a slightly-abridged flyover of the animation process for Say No, the "opening" to Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic.

The above video contains five versions of the opening:

• The initial concept thumbnails, by me
• A rough animatic
• Another animatic with rough keyframes
• The "final" version that Powerhouse handed in
• A reworked, true "final" version produced by indie animator Ky Bullock.

I hired Powerhouse, who worked on the first season, to cover this one. While I think their initial animatic looks pretty good, there are a lot of versions I didn't include here that contain a ton of really rough-looking shots. Molly looks off-model in a ton of them and I had to supervise way more versions of this than I would've liked to.

Probably the most prominent example is Molly's face in the initial colored version of this shot. Here's a comparison before and after my revisions:

Epithet admittedly has a very tricky style to replicate, so I can understand small mistakes, but this one was pretty bad. I'd given them full turnarounds of Molly along with her updated design proportions, but they ended up using the old reference which I explicitly told them not to do. Giving art feedback is exhausting, lol.

Speaking of turnarounds, we've always provided Powerhouse with our own custom character turnarounds (you can see the ones Rhea made in the past here). It's kind of bonkers we had to do that at all to be honest, both for S1 and PoP. That sort of thing should really be included considering that even this level of short animation runs around $40,000 (oof, thank you Kickstarter Backers).

Anyways, I bring this up because this time around Powerhouse did take a shot at doing some turnarounds on their own and they're... a little rough.

Apologies for the small sizes. Unlike the animatics, these files are not available for download from the work folder Powerhouse shared with me so I'm just screencapping them. Luckily, they're pretty awkward and you wouldn't really want to use them as a reference anyways. Naven's is ok aside from his weird crooked smile and Lorelai's profiles look alright.

In fact, Lori and Marty look great in profile when they walk by in the first shot of the video, don't they?

Yeah, that's because our main illustrator Bo did turnarounds for them. For free. Bo should absolutely not have had to do that.

Rereading my interactions with Powerhouse's animators, you can really tell that I was doing my best to be polite. Here's a great example:

This one is from a version of Powerhouse's work I didn't include in the above video (there were like 7 different versions of the animatic, I didn't want to make it too long). I basically had to DM them and say "Hey. You know how I gave you an exact reference that looked... good? Maybe... use that. And redraw this please."

I won't include them here, but just assume that almost everything you see in the video has three layers of me circling things in red and trying to change them.

It's always basic shit like this.

Also of note: The Molly in this shot has the wrong skin tone. She's too dark and a little washed out. I didn't catch this until it was way too late but it's kind of unbelievable they messed that up considering we gave them colored turnarounds!!!

It's also worth noting that Powerhouse asked for two separate extensions on this project to get other work done. I gave them both because I didn't need this finished  for months, but frankly that was very nice of me, especially considering the lackluster work they were doing at the price they were asking.

I don't want to exclusively dunk on Powerhouse here. Everyone I've spoken with there seems nice and they genuinely saved our bacon on the first season considering how fast we needed animation turned out. But at the same time I couldn't help but feel like I was working with their C team. So many of the animation mistakes were insanely obvious and the fact they needed to get to me, the client, instead of being corrected by animation supervisors, is unacceptable. Most clients that would hire them would not have any animation or art experience. You can't do that.

This is to say nothing of the dreaded Hip Check shot, which you will notice is entirely absent in the final version. In my original concept, I wanted the full cast to quickly slide in to the beat during the fast part of the song. I thought it would make sense to have them do a little hip-check in the direction that they were moving so it felt like they were bumping themselves on-screen. Weirdly, the shot looks almost exactly how I envisioned it in Powerhouse's initial animatic! But then every variation after that was a disaster. I didn't include the worst ones, but they were so mis-timed that I actually went in and had to chop it up and create a video to show them the timing I wanted. And then they still fucked it up?

I was getting so frustrated with the back and forth that I eventually just gave up and silently decided I would pay someone else to reanimate that sequence.

That's when I hired Ky, who also drew Rick, the Spelling Bee, and the Wolf's designs for promotional material. He's a really good indie animator that works on a lot of other stuff in this space. Initially I hired him to recreate the shot, but he asked if he could have free reign and ended up creating the best-looking shot in the opening. It's also worth noting that Ky did better, faster work for almost 10% of the price point that Powerhouse was asking for. If I ever need promotional animation again, I'm definitely just reaching out to indie animators.

Here are the full credits:

ANIMATION FIXES - Ky Bullock

COMPOSITING FIXES - Gordon Williams

PREPRO WORK - Bo Hello

The Powerhouse Crew, who I have listed separately for Reasons You Can Probably Guess.

DIRECTOR - Ryan Cullen

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR - Lindsey Chastain

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR - Chris Beaver

PREPRO SUPERVISOR - Meg Kluck

PREPRO ARTISTS - Rebekah Jin, Tory Patterson, Savannah Ruddy

ANIMATION SUPERVISORS - Tyler Richlen, Deanna Trudeau

ANIMATORS - Jeff Freeman, Miguel Montanez, John Varvir

BACKGROUND ARTISTS - Caroline Born, Ashley Lange, Megan Redlich

COMPOSITORS - Kevin Cavanagh, Jennifer Fields, Sofia Puerto

__________

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brad Graeber

STUDIO EXECUTIVE - Bruce Tinnin

SUPERVISING PRODUCER - Shane Minshew

PRODUCER - Rachel Citron

PRODUCTION MANAGER - Ryan Arrington

OUTSOURCE COORDINATOR - Mark-Ryan Magallanez

PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS - Sergio Diaz