Update #44 - Animation Making of (Patreon)

Gooood morning!

The animation was something I only teased here once or twice, and it was a relief to finally get it out for everyone to see. It was created by the talented Extellus who has other great works on his channel. It was hard to remain tight lipped about it since it had been an ongoing thing since January and only really got finalized in early August, but it seems to have gone over really well. 

So here's the how and why.

In the end of last year I knew I was going to do an UnReal World video in 2019. It was already giving me bad flashbacks to the Aurora 4x and Cultist Simulator video where the visuals alone would be an issue in doing something fun with it. The thing is, I find the idea of putting high effort bits (and budget) onto the more ugly and obscure looking games really funny for some reason. With Aurora 4x I hired a DJ to do a radio drop for the game, but I wanted to go way farther now that I had more budget.

In December 2018, Extellus emailed me offering to make a short clip or drawing for the channel for free so that  he could practice. I had actually seen his work recently in Shrek Retold and a few of his Gondola pieces, and after browsing through his channel I knew he'd be perfect. I wouldn't work for exposure or dare pay an animator in it so I properly commissioned him once I was sure I wanted his work for URW.

The animation would have two purposes. The first is that it's hard to quickly convey atmosphere in a game in a YouTube video, and UnReal has an interface and visuals from 90s hell. Trying to make an argument the game could be immersive and engaging from a few short clips of a lumberjack wiggling could make me look like a crazy person, so the animation would establish the setting and tone the creator of the game was imagining. The second would be that the animation would be atmospheric, without exciting music or action, to really let people soak in the world. Then it would end with "sorry the game doesn't look like this" and smash cut into the hell interface. A highly produced, high budget section to say that the game looks horribly dated.

I was the director for the animation, which meant telling Extellus how I wanted everything to play out, the backgrounds, and the movement of the character. This meant sending lots of reference materials and some MS paint story-boarding which I'll spare your eyes from. Not only did it have to look nice, but it also needed to be something that was feasible to be animated. It turned out that it was, and then Extellus sent me a rough animation of the sequence.

After this was completed, we needed to do some character design. Since Extellus was already really good at animating armored figures it was a no brainer to make it the channel avatar (Knightguy?) but he still needed some reference materials. Luckily, I keep an imgur album of the ludicrously good and baffling number of fan art pieces I've gotten over the years so I was able to send him that to draw some inspiration from. A few days later he had some options.

We ended up going with his first design. I'm not actually sure about the logistics of how warm it'd keep you, but the covered shoulders and more rough texture of the cape would probably help convey it's fucking cold a lot better. We also ended up going with the original proportions he drew since it made the most sense for a woodsman-type person. As much as I love the gremlin proportion stuff Turbo Trex draws, it wouldn't work for what I was going for if it was already funny from the get go.

After some more back and forth, we had our guy.

A while after this, Extellus created the animatic that's at the top of the post. More changes were made here, including the wolf being added to give the character a reason to be suspicious of his surroundings. When we had everything nailed down, so rough animation work begun.

Other slight changes were made at this stage. Probably the biggest one being the character turning their head slightly to the right upon arriving at the cabin so it wasn't so static.

After all this came the line work animation.

Backgrounds finalized.

Finally a finalish rough cut was made. Extellus made a good call in changing the sequence of two of the walking scenes, which ended up flowing a lot better. The only part changed here was adding some more stuff to the left because the negative space made me think something was going to appear there.

That got done.

When it was visually completed, I got SirMeowMusic (David from the podcast) to do the sound for it over a week period. It's a lot of data to show the rough sound for a big enough Patreon post, so just assume it got all fixed up fine since he did a stellar job from the start.

And finally, it was completed! 

So while I don't show everything I work on for bits here, I can guarantee that when it's all said and done you can see some more of what was happening. It'll definitely be a while before another animation like this will be in a video since I definitely don't have the time/budget to make it a regular thing and I absolutely don't want to set expectations to be having a high quality animated segment with every video. It'll only be a thing for a select few games, and the next is already being brainstormed up for the far future.

In the meanwhile, I decided to make a video for Paratopic since I already have all the footage and it'll be much sooner than usual.

Thanks again for all your support! You guys make this kind of thing possible.