It's been a little more than 2 weeks since I posted the animation, and since I was absolutely dead silent besides a couple of teases during the entire process I want to go into some things. Get ready for rambling!
I have wanted to do this one since like a few months after it aired. It's an episode where every player gets a chance to shine, every scene is a vignette, it doesn't contain any big spoilers, by virtue of the game played it's not hard to edit, and the scale was jussstt in reach. This one was a desire when I was doing the Twilight Mirage 67 Intro Animation -- it wasn't a realistic desire, but it was there -- and so after I got that one done I had it on the brain. I knew that the main challenge was going to be figuring out a way to model all the characters.
I do not have an art background. I'm going to point up to my user name for a second. The 'games' part is from my eighteen year long drive to tinker with small games, and never actually get much done. I learned programming and music early enough in the process to be reasonably competent with them, and most of my art skills prior to seven years ago was for making shitpost images to make my friends laugh. I learned Blender as I was trying to putter around in Unity in 2015, and I am to this day not good at trying to make people or mechs look good in it. Finding out that people have spent a lot of effort building a community around doing lego things in 3D was the thing that finally unlocked this as a possibility.
I started work on the Sangfielle 21 animation on June 2nd, had a test screen posted in the Fans at the Table Discord on the 4th, 16 seconds of the intro posted on the 5th, and the entire intro portion done on the 6th, Pickman's section done on the 8th. I started prepping and packing to see my friends in the States on the 9th, and as I was returning from seeing them I had an extremely bad experience trying to get back home on the 21st-22nd, and so I took about a week off to recuperate. Lyke took me 3 days, finished very early on the 1st of July. Though, that was the holiday long weekend, I got so much done. Duvall and the majority of Es was also finished on the 1st. Marn was finished on the 2nd. Virtue was finished on the 3rd. Chine was finished on the 4th. Some finishing touches were added and the credits on the 5th. I started uploading on the 5th, but I am not used to posting big things to Youtube so I didn't realize how long it was going to take to process, it posted early on the 6th.
That's the raw timeline by numbers. My anxiety that I am doing something wrong by posting so much of an episode starts on June 5th, and doesn't end until I am work at 2pm on July 6th and I see Austin's Youtube comment. I want to be clear, I am a little attention loving gremlin, the comments of people opening the video expecting an intro and seeing a 47 minute video added untold years to my life. I'm going to live to 160. But it is fucking scary to be putting the amount of work I put into this with my brain constantly going "this is pretty good, but you're a little X-COM character and a polite 'take this down' email is sitting at 47% odds of hitting you." I knew I had some good ground to stand on, I'm not monetized, I'm doing this for fun, I'm doing this to challenge myself. Still, I would recommend not having anxiety, it kinda sucks. For my own sanity if I try this again I'm probably going to ask for permission up front.
Things I am unreasonably happy with in no particular order: #) The Zevunzolia reel scroll marks along the sides of the video #) In Duvall's scene he never sees any of the bugs from his own point of view, this entire scene is the same exact animation rendered from different angles, and I'm not even claustrophobic but when I rendered out a test reel of the edit I accidentally gave myself this deep set sense of all the space closing in on me, I took it as a good sign #) Every single imagination section for each character is animated slightly differently, but Marn's were my favorite to work on.
Things I wish I had done better: #) In order to do this quickly I did a lot more 'directing' than 'animation', and while this is natural (I am more of a director than an animator, I am better with the camera than I am with proper animation motion) I feel like some of the scenes would have benefited from a little more character movement #) I could have tried a bit harder to fit a bit of post-play conversation somewhere in the end, Friends at the Table isn't just in character stuff, it's the ... well, the friends! #) I could have skipped ahead when I got to Es and came back when I had a better idea of how to do the scene. I don't hate it, I just think I might have been able to do it better.
Final thoughts: Extremely happy. I did a lot of things that if you're listening to Youtube tutorials you're not supposed to do because they don't result in perfect work, and I really want the main message of my success in this entire endeavor to be that it's a lot of work but it's all work you can do when you're not an expert. I am not an expert by any means. I'm not trying to put myself down, I'm just saying the tools are out here to do big things. Blender is free, you can make 3D stuff, it's going to take you a while to learn but it's doable. DaVinci Resolve is free at the level I'm using it, you can edit videos together, some of the paid features would have been helpful for this but I figured out workarounds.
Maybe take a few more breaks than I did though? I am pretty bad at not throwing myself into things too hard.
Ramble over!
