Desperate Endgame – Stage 52 Arranged Battle Scene Production Notes

You’ve watched the video, now you want to know how it was made? Well here are the production notes for the Stage 52 Arranged Battle Scene, Desperate Endgame! Contains Code Geass spoilers!

The Video

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video:

The Vision

My plan for this video was to show the following:

A Large scale battle between Schneizel’s forces and ZEXIS

Some kind of combo attack between Kallen and Suzaku

The strategic battle between Lelouch and Schneizel

Combo attacks from the various Black Knights

Lelouch’s reveals he’s actually been sandbagging and unleashes some Super Robots

Production took about 20 hours over 2 weeks. This video builds upon the Tokyo Final Battle one by incorporating even more anime cut-ins to tell a better story overall. Being the Geass finale, I wanted to show off as many of the Black Knights attacks as possible, excluding some of the rather lame slash harkens. Also sorry for those expecting Heero or Setsuna to show up, but I had to resist the urge to use them with two Gundam finales coming up.

Music

The majority of the music is from the 2010 A-Team movie remake, which is scored by the legendary Alan Silvestri. After browsing through the Code Geass OSTs, there were a few tracks I wanted to use but CG music is notorious for being extremely short (1 to 1 1/2 minutes per track) which was too short for what I wanted.

Two tracks which I really wanted to use was “Beautiful Emperor” from Code Geass and “The Battle” from Gladiator, unfortunately I couldn’t find any way to fit them in with the rest of the music.

After a lot of scanning I finally came across the A-Team OST, which had the track “Flying a Tank”, from said scene in the movie. It was exactly what I look for in a piece of music, which tells a story in itself, is suspenseful, and ends on a high. For the intro I found another piece of music “The Docks Part 1” which I though which has a really cool intro, then a really fast-paced section for action.

Finally the video ends with the iconic “I love it when a plan comes together”, which I think is perfect for Lelouch unveiling his trump card.

Special Effects

This video almost didn’t happen due to various technical hurdles. Thankfully thanks to using some anime cut-ins (and alot of cheats), these were managed to be overcome in some way or rather. There are quite a few so it’s probably best to list them out:

Enemy deployments. All the initial Britannian enemies on the ZEXIS route must be defeated in order for the Damocles to show up, which then the enemies are replaced by generic DAMONs. I wanted to keep this a DAMON-free video, so to circumvent this, I had most of the filming done in the Normal route version of this stage, which has a lot more variety in enemies, as well as the Damocles always being present. I also added Sutherlands and Gloucesters using cheats to add a little more variety.

The map itself changes halfway during the stage, when Mount Fuji is ruined. I was originally planned to have the entire battle take place after Mount Fuji was ruined, but guess what? Bismark can’t appear in the ruined version because a) he gets blown up automatically in the normal route, and b) you need to defeat him in order to change the map to Ruin in the ZEXIS route. So somehow I had to incorporate both versions of the map in the video.

This presented YET another challenge, because Suzaku, C.C., Jeremiah, Lelouch, and Rolo don’t appear as allies in the Normal Route! To bypass this, I had to keep most of their scenes prior to Mt. Fuji exploding or shoot random Logres class ships in the Ruined map.

To transition the map from start to ruined, I used the Mt. Fuji explosion cut-in from the anime. It’s not Lelouch who presses the button, but rather Nunnally. Another disappointment was that the Damocles F.L.E.I.J.A. attack is a MAP attack only with no animation. To get around this, I used various cut-ins from the anime to show F.L.E.I.J.A. launching, as well as VF-25 and the Sturmvogel Nukes.

Lelouch/Zero cut-ins. Most of the orders Zero barks out are when he is actually Emperor Lelouch, which never happens in the ZEXIS route. To get around this, I had to combine the audio with other cut-ins of Zero, mainly when from the episode when he is fighting the Chinese Federation.

Using cut-ins from anime is not without it’s limitations though, because any BGM from the anime is extremely hard to erase or drown out with other music. This was extremely annoying when trying to the the F.L.E.I.J.A eliminator sequence.

Okay enough technical issues aside, so let’s talk about some other specific parts.

Kallen X Suzaku

What better way to celebrate SRW friendship by having these two work together in an epic combo attack? The Guren SEITEN and Lancelot Albion are pretty well animated so it was a rather simple job. Parts I added were Kallen’s “kick”, which is actually the Lancelot Conquista’s kick from it’s harken attack, and Suzaku’s kick, which is from Timp’s mecha (I can’t remember the name). Finally, Suzaku’s Twin MVS attack used is actually the version from the Normal route, where he is on the left side of the screen, giving the impression that it’s an attack from both sides. I also had cut-ins between Kallen and Suzaku as they passed Bismark to each other (took me ages to find suitable ones!).

Why the hell is Lelouch in the Sol Gravion?

He borrowed it from his good friend Touga! It’s actually a voice actor in-joke, since they share the same VA.

And Gino X Kira?

Again, another VA joke, and a request from BQR. Gino calling Kira out is actually a line from the game itself, which I pasted over some random cut-in of Gino from the anime. Kira’s cut in is also the same one in which he shreds Saviour Gundam to bits, ironically.

Also, I substituted Gino’s Tristan for the Tristan Divider, since I’ll most likely never use it again in another video due to it’s HORRIBLE animations.

What’s the deal with Esther X Alto X Tieria?

Okay, so this kinda was a mash of ideas which kinda just worked out. I wanted a “battle of the beefcakes” between the Seravee and the Modred. I also wanted the VF-25 Tornado to somehow explode and come back as the vanilla VF-25. And since I wanted a combo attack somewhat like the Alto X Gamlin I had in the Zero vs Zero video, so I threw in Esther because I haven’t used her in a long time and her Iota circles the enemy much like the VF-25’s gun pod attack. Last minute escapes are a favourite move of mine, and Alto is pretty used to friendly fire too, Tieria and Michel share the same VA as well, coincidentally.

What’s with the Not-satellite cannon ending?

It was an idea I came up with a long time ago. Basically Aquarion would Mugen Punch someone/thing into the path of the microwave beam causing a large explosion. It’s too bad the angles don’t quite line up or it would’ve looked much better.

Possible Improvements

The main constraining factor in this video was the time available, due to the length of the music. The nine or so minutes in which the main battle goes on for is not a very long time for the amount of things which I wanted to show. Basically every battle in the video I wanted to make slightly longer. Here’s what I would add:

– more random cuts of battleships shooting/getting hit
– a longer ground battle between VOTOMs units and Britannia/MDs
– more random cuts of various ZEXIS members getting kills
– a Dragonball style beam battle between Tieria and Anya
– EVERYONE pounding the Damocles with firepower before it goes down

Also what didn’t make the cut? Originally I had planned that after Kira defeats Gino, a random F.L.E.I.J.A. would target the Eternal. Kira of course support defends and gets nuked. I mean, the guy somehow always manages to survive, yeah?

And finally, I had the Raiser Sword in there somewhere, but then I realized that Setsuna would feature heavily in the 00 finale so I decided against it.

There you have it. As I said in the Stage 52 post, I probably can’t top this video until the 00 finale as I don’t have the same level of knowledge about GL/Getter and Wing that I do with CG and 00. So sorry in advance for any disappointment caused, but I’ve got to manage your expectations somehow :). Other than that, I’m extremely happy with how this video turned out, because it’s the idea of the Arranged Battle taken to it’s utmost limits.