During our partnership, Razbuten approached me with an idea for re-writing the second season of a somewhat contentious animated show called The Legend of Korra. Most of the suggestions involved moments that weren't possible to stitch together out of the main criteria of the footage from the original series. So I decided that the best approach was to create new art assets, a way to animate those assets, and a style that was cohesive enough to get his point across while still feeling somewhat authentic to the show.
Boy was that a bad idea.
For someone that had never really drawn before, I drew a lot of stuff:
And that's just the characters! This doesn't include the set-pieces and props, which I think all combined came to like 100+ drawings. Kind of insane for, again, someone that before this never really drew.
I also needed a place to put all of these characters, and so I used a recreation of the set of the Ember Island Players episode from Avatar: The Last Airbender. This was kind of my inspiration for the whole idea:
With all the static pieces ready, all I had to do was make it move, and this was kind of the hard part. Since Razbuten and I were operating on close to shoestring budgets while making these videos, I had to really use a lot of elbow grease. We couldn't do a fully animated thing, even with the simple chibi style drawings that I'd made.
Instead I opted for the style you see in the video, where characters are animated as though they're stick puppets. The style was definitely a discount version of Derek Lieu's work on Battleblock Theater's cutscenes.
In retrospect, there's a lot I could have done to make the style a little more appealing - it's good for what it is and it's simple enough that it gets the point across without being overly flashy, but looking back on it, the animation is oddly the weakest part of the whole thing. It's very stiff since I'm doing all of it by hand, keyframing in After Effects. Future me (current me, depending on when you're asking) would have just filmed a ball on a stick in front of a green screen, and then tracked the motion in After Effects to get a more realistic and fluid look.
If I were to change anything right away, I'd definitely add more of a theatre stage style lighting effect to the scenes to give them more depth. As it stands it's all just drop shadows - which looks fine, but is kind of flat and doesn't allow for any real drama or intensity. Quick before and after:
Of course, the only reason I'm thinking this way is because of the years of experience I've gained since making this original video in that style. While this was a very stressful and tough (physically, and mentally) video to create, that has lots of flaws looking back on it, my work here did teach me a lot about editing and motion graphics in general that I still find myself doing to this day.
All in, it took me roughly 5 weeks to make this video. 10 hours every day. It was... a lot.
