When you are listening to your own music/audio and someone else has a different music/song/audio playing at roughly at the same time and volume and your brain struggles to differentiate/separate them but can’t so your face goes like
jane austen was so lit because she wrote about men the way men typically write about women i.e. her stories just centered around women and men were only there for the sake of women, and her books could have been all bitter and sad about the state of women in that century, but instead they’re sweet honest observational stories of friendship, family and love *sighs* what a lady i am sorry i ever doubted you cos I was bored in high school
no seriously her books do not pass the REVERSE bechdel test and it’s perfect
Jane Austen never wrote a single scene without a woman present.
This shot was far and away the most technically demanding shot in Hellbent
So here’s how we managed it.
Even from the animatic it was pretty obvious it was going to be hard. The camera was moving dynamically past an animating background with a SFX element in focus.
It was pretty clear to me this shot was going to need to be partly or fully 3d.
We’ve used 3d reference in the videos before. But this was the first time it would be IN the actual video, so I needed to convince Ben
it could be done and blended in a way that wouldn’t stand out awfully against
Kressent’s beautiful backgrounds.
I was able to get started on this shot pretty early but that turned out to be a double sided sword. I had time to try things but I didn’t have character animation or even final background reference until much later.
So I started blocking it out in 3d.
(old bg colors from the con preview)
Matching the 2d truck and van in 3d would have been near impossible, so I opted to use the 2d flash asset we already had.
Then the flash asset match moved manually to the 3d reference.
The shot was slightly re-timed from this version
(rendering the background to a video format flash can play turned out to be a real pain)
Next up was set dressing
Heilos got me a ton of nice little assets to throw around the scene
and starrrrsssss
I used blender and cycles for rendering. Lots of janky tricks. but here’s the main one for getting alpha textures to work nicely on the 2d billboards.
For weirdos who are into that kind of thing.
Then it was just a matter of animating the Fire moving through a windscreen and a complex 3D camera move.
Easy!
At this point I had the 3d render of the background
And a folder of swf files for each element in the shot. (using PBnDumbexport)
And it was up to AE to glue all this stuff together
Over all I’m pretty happy with how this shot turned out, few problems, some I didn’t even notice until doing this write up.
Kressent was literally killing herself with backgrounds so there was actually another shot that used this 3D background
software used flash cs6, after effects cc,
blender 2.7
Here’s a discord I’m on a lot if you have any questions:
One friend (that’s not in the fandom but has observed the screenshots/fanarts) described the shown depictions of Rayla as a “Lost/Confused Puppy”. I must say that now thinking about it that’s so true and it makes me cry I love this elven daughter so much.
Age differences is one of those finicky things when it comes to creating a relationship between two characters. Especially if you’re going into supernatural entity territory i.e. a centuries old vampire with a younger partner.
Oh yeah that is definitely one of the trickiest things to balance in such stories (makes me glad that 100s of yrs old Raven and even older Saka are not placed in such an equation or I’d have an aneurysm; they stay single for the end of their lives and I’m relieved that they are so).
That’s not even factoring in other complications like experience (something I need to balance especially carefully with Dema/Riivar); A sheltered inexperienced rural bumpkin x a very experienced urban expert are a coupling that has to be written very carefully if one wants to write it as a healthy relationship; it could be far too easy to have the experienced character take advantage of the inexperienced character, and as this distinction is moreso written improperly vs properly in the majority of media, it can be quite a challenge to do it right.
Me in HighSchool: Demauria will be 17 and Riivar will be 30ish, that’s totally fine for a couple.
Me in Mid College: Nononono, Dema needs to be at least 18, Riivar will be in her late 20s at most. We’re not involving minor/adult coupling in this, that’s beyond a no-go. That’d be gross.
Me Now @ 27 yrs old: HEEEELLLLL NO, 18 is still too young, she’s still a child at that age!! Dema can be a few months younger than Kayla (so 20-22), Riivar can still be older than Dema/Terra/Kayla but only by 4-5 years tops! (so 23-25)
Weather: *cycles between blazing sun, freezing winds, soaking rain, stingy hail, fluttery snow, and back to sun again at random in a single day*
Me being subjected to it: Nature…. Plz….. STAHP!!!!
Kihaku-Gato's Garden Blog (tumblr import) 