00 Gundam Finale Arranged Battle Scene WIP Part 2

No video for this WIP post, but rather it’s a rant on my progress and some challenges I’ve had to face so far.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my time making these videos is that screen time is extremely precious. I completely understand the idea of a “Director’s Cut” when it comes to movies now – basically there were things that the director wanted to show, but due to time constraints had to be left out. Sometimes these scenes are things which add no value, but other times they’re a key moment – but it just had to make way for something even more important. And it can be really annoying because some of these cuts can be really good ideas too.

I made some pretty good progress on the weekend but this is the issue I’m running into right now. When you’re trying to cram 25+ Gundam units and 4 boss kills into one video, every last second counts. The current scene I’m working on is where the Gundams fight the army of Mass Produced Gagas. The idea is that there’s a “Big Team Battle” between the Innovators and the Gundams and also building the hype before ZEXIS takes them down. After nearly finishing choreographing it, I’ve had to extend the piece of music (and the scene itself) by almost 50%, since I felt the battle wasn’t quite big enough. Extending music presents a bit of a risk though – I’ve only done this once before and I hope that it doesn’t sound a a bit repetitive.

I’m also running the danger of making a video that’s almost too long and can potentially bore viewers. The Mazinger Z finale was 15:10 which was my longest video yet, and I thought that was already pushing it, but this 00 Finale may end up blowing that up by a minute or so. Is it too long? Maybe, but I sure as hell want to avoid “Director’s Cut” syndrome.

There are two things which I’ve found can help stop people from getting bored. First is having lots of variety. I’ll be using as many different attacks as possible, and they happen very quickly. When I do reuse stuff, it’ll be for ‘story’ purposes and cut to as short as possible. Every last spare second counts.

Secondly, I’m hoping the story I’ve penned is enough to keep things interesting. The variety of cut-in’s I’ll be using has allowed me to take the narrative to the next level and make things a bit more personal between the characters.

Anyway, issues solved on the weekend:

Getting Ribbons to parry Setsuna’s attack. Normally I modify Skill stats via cheats to guarantee parries, but somehow Setsuna’s Innovator skill overrides the cheats (yes it’s that powerful). I solved this by modifying the PP bonus to a negative amount instead of the actual Skill stat.

The Gadessa’s TRANS-AM attack attacks from behind at a certain part of it’s animation, but for story purposes I had to flip it around. This was done by creating and allied version of the Gadessa, recording it firing towards the right instead of left, then pasting Revive’s portrait and sound effects over it. This is also something I might experiment with more in the future, flipping footage and creating new attacks which hit from both sides (such as Kallen and Suzaku vs Bismark).

That’s all from me for now. If you guys have any questions or want more teasers, let me know in the comments!