You’ve watched the video, now you want to know how it was made? Well here are the production notes for ending #1 to Innovation, I am Gundam!
The Video
The Plan
A common complaint amongst fans of Gundam 00 is that the game never had the decisive showdown between Ribbons and Setsuna in their 2nd hand Mobile Suits, probably because Banpresto wanted to avoid making a 0 Gundam sprite for 1 battle. I sought to rectify this by doing my own take on the ending.
Basically the clip begins with the post-battle scene from the anime. Reborns Gundam is in bad shape, so Ribbons needs to find a replacement. What does he find? The Nu Gundam. I set this scene up at the end of the previous video by having a triple KO, unfortunately I couldn’t find a clear way of explaining how he managed to steal it from Amuro. Regardless, I felt it was fitting, because of that “this is fate” line.
Setsuna, of course, comes back in the Exia, and Amuro as well, I’ll explain why I chose the Tallgeese for him in the next section.
Music
I chose Envoy from Jupiter for the music. It’s got a version of “Fight” that’s faster and catchier, but also much shorter than the 00 Gundam OST version. I had to extend it by a minute or so to get enough time to show what I wanted to.
Anime cut-ins
Most of the cut ins from this AB came from the last episode of 00 Gundam 2nd Season. This caused a problem – my first version of the clip got blocked for having too much, so I had to cut back by a bit.
Special Effects
Making this clip posed a few technical challenges, and it almost couldn’t and didn’t happen until I managed to work out a few things at the last minute. First is the actual location of the battle. In the anime, Ribbons and Setsuna fight on the surface of the Celestial Being ship, which somewhat resembles the surface of the moon. To replicate this, I had to film the battle in Stage 23 Space Route, which, no surprise, takes place on the moon. Once again, credits to BQR for sending me his savegame.
The next challenge was getting the characters and mecha I needed to that early stage of the game. I had massive troubles with this…until I finally got the Pilot Change code working (I had been pressing the wrong combination of buttons all along). I had to create allied versions of Amuro, and Ribbons, along with their corresponding Mobile Suits. Once the mission starts, it was as simple as changing the allies or enemy units to whoever I needed to film.
The final challenge was, getting Ribbons to do the Fin Funnel attack. I almost didn’t include this because I originally thought it would not be possible. Fin Funnel requires the Newtype skill to perform, which Ribbons does not have (hurr)! To get around this, I first levelled my hacked Amuro to level 99 via a Sub Order cheat, then changed an enemy unit to Amuro/Nu Gundam. I then got the enemy Nu Gundam to perform Fin Funnel, and pasted Ribbons’ portrait over the top. The Fin Funnel line comes from SD Gundam G Generation Overworld.
Finally, the big question everyone is asking…
Why the hell does Amuro come back in the Tallgeese?
Having his Gundam stolen, Amuro has to come back in something. I had a lot of trouble initially deciding what this unit would be – first it was the Hyaku Shiki, then it was the Zeta Gundam. I decided against the former because it didn’t have the animations I wanted, and against the latter because it was already featured heavily in the main video, even though it would’ve probably made the most sense.
I scanned through all the Gundam units in the game and the remaining choices were few – I wanted it to be something that I either hadn’t shown in any video for a while, or never, and had some decent animations. This list ended up being Wing Gundam, Tallgeese I and Tallgeese II.
At first I picked the Tallgeese II, because I never did the Wing finale, and also because it has that nice punch/kick attack that I used to kick Ribbons down to the surface. In fact, I actually almost finished the video with the Tallgeese II in it. In the final revision, I switched back to the Tallgeese I – it’s got a better Dopp Gun shooting animation, but in doing so, I lost the Tallgeese II’s saber dynamic kill animation.
That’s all for the notes on this one, look forward to the next batch of notes where Super Sentai Celestial Being kick some ass!
