I made a fan animatic and it took me 2,5 months
SO. Fan culture.
It started as all great (horrible) ideas do: at 3AM while browsing YouTube when I could not sleep.
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I should state now that there will be SPOILERS for MY HERO ACADEMIA, more specifically DABI’s BACKSTORY in the video, I won’t go into detail in the text or images, but you have been warned not to watch it/read this!
(If it’s even spoilers anymore. If you actually know about My Hero Academia, you've probably already gotten spoiled. It’s pretty much everywhere you go on the internet but yeah, just in case!)
TRIGGER WARNING is also needed for flashing lights, glitches, and dark themes (It’s about a child going INSANE after all)
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But before
you go ahead and read the blogpost, here is my project! That's what this post is about, so yeah, shameless self promo! :3
Link to my project: https://youtu.be/bd4qEsnoevY
And now onto the unnecessarily long blogpost. But seriously, it’s long. Get some tea and biscuits before we start.
I'm going to include some of the stuff I posted to my Instagram stories, because I found some funny stuff there! :'D So the images will mostly be memes (once again) and those story highlights! I hope you enjoy!
The backstory for this project
I was listening to a Vocaloid song and my massive brain made the connection:
It fits
with his backstory 1:1, and I’m going to die on that hill. (If someone has any idea about either of the things I'm talking about, hello there, I'd love to talk)
This meme is also 100% how I will explain my video to anyone who will listen
Dabi is a character from a very popular anime/manga, My Hero Academia, or Boku no Hero Academia. The fandom is known for being very over-the-top and toxic, I'm going to talk about that a bit in the final blog post, along with other toxic and weird behaviour in popular fandoms, so look forward to that!
So this is the original music video that my fan video is based on, Abnormality Dancing Girl: https://youtu.be/SDt2OOdWR-Y
Disclaimer: In my work I take no credit for the music, and the art style I used is very, very heavily influenced by this original!
So yes, after my brain ever so kindly provided me with the undeniable connection between this song and Dabi’s backstory, I certainly could not sleep after and immediately started making the video. *sigh* why am I like this
I immediately hopped into YouTube, Google and Bilibili, looking both in English and in Japanese, but no one had made this before. Not even fanart, let alone an animation. I deemed the lack of it to be a crime against humanity and I knew what I had to do.
Let the hyper fixation begin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The first two weeks this was literally all I did and my poor, poor Instagram followers would know. (I am so sorry. Not really.) I have my progress recorded in my Instagram story highlights and some on Twitter if you’re interested what it’s like to suffer, but I’ll summarize some of key points (keyframes if you will. Yeah, okay, I AM sorry for that one) of the rollercoaster that creating this animation was!
Programs I used: Photoshop, Premiere, Unity
Notes: I did not know at the time how to use After Effects and it would’ve made certain things easier, but all in all I 100% prefer how Premiere looks and feels, so there’s that too. Layers are just weird in After Effects and the keyframes don’t snap to where the cursor or other layers are. But maybe there’s a setting for that and I’m just dumb.
TL;DR learn from my mistakes, because I won’t :)
I learned so much and it feels so rewarding finally seeing it on YouTube. I also talked with amazing supportive people along the way, and I am so glad I did this! It’s an experience I’m going to remember for a long time! <3
Now that I have the most important experiences covered, let’s get back to what creating this video was like!
The Process
The most fun I had with the drawing of the characters. I don’t typically do this much lineart and it was super relaxing!
I’d like to say I started with storyboarding but hmmmmmmmmm that’d be a lie!
I immediately jumped into the most interesting parts (I have no self-control, and it was 4AM), drawing the characters! Because this entire project is based off of an already existing Vocaloid video, knowing what I needed was easy enough. I made most of the lineart before jumping into colouring and I was very methodical with the way I went through everything because I wanted the style and colours to be consistent.
That one Tatsuki Fujimoto quote that goes like “0 days of storyboarding, 3 months of inking” is relatable.
Don’t be like me, kids.
I honestly felt like I knew pretty much everything I had to do from the start, so I didn’t need that much planning. Would not recommend that route, though! :’D I had the big picture planned out in my head, and all I needed now were the details. But of course, I encountered plenty of things *cough* James S. *cough* that I couldn’t predict.
My storyboard, when I did finally make it, ended up looking like this:
I am so organized. I’m sure you can tell. (Weeks later, heck,
even hours later, I had no idea what was going on with it)
Yet my digital one is in relatively good shape:
I do not know what is up with that.
The hardest parts, on the other hand…
- Premiere had its issues (check out my blogpost for why James S is my mortal enemy for an idea of those!)
- Animating the text to move in the chorus took me forever. I used 40 minutes to animate 3s. AND THAT WAS JUST THE TEXT.
- Animating the legs and head to move in the very last chorus took me 4 hours. It’s 4s in total. I did it all in Unity because I trust Unity. I’d recommend my homie, Unity. <333 Not sponsored. Sadly :(
- I left the backgrounds last because It seemed overwhelming for no reason and then it was hard to come back into.
Backgrounds...were something else
Details were my favourite part
But I don't really mean in the literal sense of what you see. There's a lot I did, like hiding character lore into scenes and rechecking information so everything was canon. (And it was a bit hard, because the source material is not 100% linear.) It sounds a bit torturous to be so strict about it, but I absolutely loved it. Doing research is always fun.
I also kind of went crazy with the amount of it. There is something that flashes in the scene with the eye, a 4-frame flash after the 1st chorus ect ect. I went and paid for a translator to translate the diary entries that are on screen after the 1st chorus and 2nd chorus and they are so FAST you CANNOT EVEN READ MOST OF THEM. I also made English subtitles and included the English diary entries in the comments, because I love stuff like that.
I needed it to be perfect, it’s all or nothing!! >:33
SPOILERY BIT HERE so please turn back now or skip until the safe-zone if you don’t want to get spoiled!
I just wanted to talk a bit more about the specific choices of chorus transformations, since I haven’t in my Instagram stories! I got the idea very fast that I needed to implement his hair colour change (from red to red-white to white) and the colour change of his flames (red to blue) in the choruses and I am seriously super glad with how it turned out, not only because of how it looks but because the events are in a canonically accurate order.
There’s also a flashback in the anime that has the hair colour wrong compared to the manga story-line, and this is a well-known fact (and debated whether or not it was a mistake or on purpose), so I wanted to include that and make it manga accurate! Just a treat for the manga fans, I adore stuff like that <3 (It’s the scene where the kids are playing with the ball before it zooms into his brother)
So yes. I went very deep with this. I just hope some Dabi fans will find it and love it. :’)
SAFE ZONE HERE ONWARDS!
Here are some stats because those are fun!
This folder includes everything but the Unity project and some video drafts, because they were taking up quite some space :’3
- Rendering the final video took 2~ hours and CUDA could not handle it, R.I.P to my shitty laptop </3
- I made 19 drafts in total + the final version (some of them were just for social media as I was making it, and highly cropped)
- My instagram story highlights became a full 100, I was posting that much :'D
Seriously though, name your files. That's like the one thing I wasn't lazy about. 100% worth it when you have hundreds of them.
The final weeks
Towards the end I started to procrastinate and there was a 2 week break in between, that was not due to school deadlines as I’d like to convince myself, but because making this project became so intimate and dear to me that I did not want to see it finished. I wanted to continue making it and the TO-DO list that kept getting shorter rang alarm bells in my ears.
But I did want it to be released latest this week, because the episode most important to this character’s story arc is airing this Saturday. (It’s called Dabi’s dance. Do you see now why Abnormality Dancing Girl is a perfect song? XD) So I did manage to put my thoughts back on track and finish it.
Final rendering certainly could be called a challenge
Seeing that the best solution to your problem is to buy a new computer is FUN
And finally...
I have projected so much personal meaning into this project and to this character that I do not know if I’m even comfortable sharing them out loud, but you probably can tell from the work itself. I put so much love into it, and I hope it shows! All in all, I am really happy I did this because I didn’t only learn new skills, but more about myself as well and that is something I’ll treasure dearly.
I started this as a passion project because I absolutely love these characters and this song and put as much thought into it as I could. That alone gave me all the motivation I needed, but I am super thankful for all the extra that I found along the way!
So, like, share, comment, and subscribe, as all the YouTubers say, I can now pretend I am one! :’D It really means a lot to me! <3
FINAL TL;DR
How it started
VS
How it's going
Sincerely, someone who is still not tired of the song and is surprised it wasn’t #1 on Spotify Wrapped and has a fully self-made Dabi cosplay project on the way (Is anyone surprised? I'm not, that's for sure.)
^I posted this when I was only a week in and it's still true
Ps. This blog is also almost over and I’m kind of sad about that, I really love writing, and this has been so much fun! Thank you for the support and reading these! ^^ I know today’s post was extra long but I wanted to write all of my thoughts out while they’re still fresh. It will be fun to return to eventually!
Pps. And yes, my hair is dyed like Todoroki’s :D
Ppps. Also this
here is dedicated to Anette due to what she commented under my video <3 (It's from the original video, I thought it was funny-)
And final one:
Pray for me that Saturday will be good.
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