#how much do the files exist diegetically?

[cogandstar]

also, based on the neostigmine file, i'm guessing i just unlocked that lock where dio blackmails us with the axelavir

[cherryistired]

god i hope this is coherent. i’m just a little tired and under the weather n i don’t wanna proofread.

the thing is, i get why people assume spamton and jevil know they’re in a game. it does seem like they know, at a first glance, and if you’re gonna make fandom content around them, it’s a good trope to reference without having to dig deep into the lore. but like, that’s never been how meta stuff works in ut/dr?

i recently watch a video essay that talked about why that specific person liked undertale, and one of the main points in that video was the meta elements of ut. i won’t go too deeply into it (it’s a good video but also super long and dense), but one thing that stuck out to me was the basic description they used for most “meta” media and how ut differs from that. they said that while most media assumes that the real world isn’t real and that the fictional world is real (one of the main parts of suspended disbelief - you have to pretend a fictional world is real to get invested and enjoy the story, and the story does the same), most meta work does the opposite, acknowledging the real world as real and the fictional world as fake (think doki doki literature club). whereas undertale does something completely different - it acknowledges that the real world exists, but it also asserts that its own fictional world is also real.

this is a pretty significant difference i think. like with ddlc, the horror came from these characters being warped because they were in a video game. whereas in ut, all the “meta” elements were non-diegetic game elements (save files, the player vs the player character, etc) being diegetic, existing within the underground. and the characters that knew about these things didn’t know they were in a game, and interacted with them like they were facts of reality, studying them and taking control of them and using their knowledge of them to their advantage. the world of undertale is real to the people inside it, even with all the video game elements! taking all these meta elements and integrating them into the world lets ut tell a much more unique story, but people keep reducing it to “it’s just a game” because... it’s easier, i guess?

and like i said earlier, i do get it. it is easier to just say “sans get depressed because he’s in a video game” and move on. there’s a lot of interesting stuff you can do with the premise (see ddlc again - i’d cite other examples but i’m tired and also probably a little sick). fanworks can diverge from canon and explore different themes, that’s the whole point of transformative work. it’s just not what undertale does.

and deltarune is shaping up to be basically the same, at least in terms of meta stuff. like, you, you reading this, are canon to deltarune. you are not kris, you can just control their soul, and because you are, canonically, only in control of their soul, they can fight back against your control in really interesting ways (see the end of chapter 2)! and that’s just one example of this stuff (like, the first time you boot up ch 1, you overwrite kris’s save file. the implications).

but then we get a mad clown that likes to play games and a computer program that wants to gain his freedom and like. everyone looks at those two and goes “oh they know they’re in a game” and. i just. sigh.

the really interesting thing with spamton and jevil, i think, is that they’re some of the first characters that might actually know about our world. jevil i’m a little less familiar with (i don’t really. like clowns. so i never got into his lore) but as for spamton, the way he talks about “heaven” is different enough from the way he talks about the light world & to kris that it seems like he knows about our world & wants to go there.

but again, going off of what i previously discussed, deltarune definitely asserts its own world as real, even while acknowledging ours, so jevil and spamton knowing they’re in a game is pretty much out of the question. and (iirc) they never really had any dialogue about their world being a game, so it’s safe to assume that they don’t know about that, even if they do know about our world.

and that’s interesting! thinking about what they might know about our world, what they might not, and how they might interpret that is fascinating to me. i’d go into it more but this post is already long enough. maybe later

[goron-king-darunia]

Annon-Guy: Hopefully someone will get Tumblr on it. BTW, I know you wanted to wait until you got the video on your page, but what did you think of the Emil X Marta video I made?

Sorry, mate, I know I kept you waiting on this one. =w= I'll link the video at the end because if it had gone through normally it would have posted with the ask anyway. I do very much like the image selection, but I do think (and this is just my opinion and NOT common practice with fanvids so it's not something you missed or forgot!) that even the official art should be sourced because it's always painful when you see cute art of your faves and then you can't find it online, especially because, with DotNW being part of a multilingual fandom, some of the results won't show up in Google images if you don't know what you're searching for (a lot of art I have of Richter, for example, is stuff I only found on the JP side of Google or after meticulously searching with reverse image search and SauceNao [a godsend since it even shows results for art that is no longer being hosted. {RIP all the JP artists having to take their art down for insane copyright reasons sometimes.}]) Again, that's just something I'd like to see done more often and not something I really expected you to do, and definitely not something you did wrong because you sourced your songs and that's more than some people do, honestly. Sourcing the fanart was a great move though, and I definitely appreciate that! 0w0 Nappo deserves all the love. The music selection is also great! Again, Emil/Marta isn't really something I actively ship and I mostly just admire art of it at a distance, but the song "Hero" definitely suits their dynamic. Or at least the dynamic the game probably intended for them, even if that isn't what all the players interpret from their experience with the game. As for individual images, and this is more just about the images than your use of them: 1. A lot of the images are from the post-game credits scene/gallery in the PAL version (god I'm jealous of the PAL version, they got a gallery and costumes and USA got the game and NOTHING else until the chronicles edition where we got... a mediocre novella [I appreciate the novella of course, but either the translation sucked or was deliberately dumbed-down for kids playing because it is written very blandly. XD]) One of the images is the picture of Emil and Marta riding on a Simurgh.

Do you think Emil is actually enjoying himself? Looks to me more like he's hanging on for dear life? I know the ending cards are supposed to be silly because there's also one with Emil getting chomped on by an Axe Beak and I think these are more to make the audience smile at the end of the game than actually be interpreted as canon but... if they are diegetic, do you think Emil actually chose to ride like this or did he just almost fall off and Marta hasn't noticed yet? 2. In the image with Emil, Marta and the Fenrir, do you think the Fenrir is accurate to scale or exaggerated? There is an implication that these are drawn by the characters rather than photographs, so if they are drawn, who do you think drew the Simurgh picture above? If they're meant to be stylized but not representative of drawings, do you think Fenrirs are that big because if so, Richter didn't stand a chance. Fighting with a wolf that big is unfair, Emil! XD

3. In the following picture, Tenebrae is stealing food that it seems Emil was trying to offer to Marta. Tenebrae himself said that he absorbs mana naturally so that he doesn't have to eat and seems to consider that more sophisticated than how Emil chooses to get his mana (it's implied Emil could also survive without eating if he wanted to.) Why do you think Tenebrae is suddenly interested in eating? Do you think he's doing it to pass himself off as a weird dog at the festival or do you think he's doing it to bother Emil? Or something else entirely? He is called spiteful by Aqua a lot, so I think he might just be doing it to harass Emil. XD

Anyway, I know that's a lot of questions for someone without an account here and a lot of them are more about the art than the actual video, but yeah! I'm just wondering if you have opinions on some of these! I think if you want to answer, the submit box would work better since I don't think it has a character limit and the ask box has a limit to how much you can type. If not, you can still answer and type it up in sections of asks and I can slap them all together in response. Other than that, I think it's a cute fan video. My only real critique is that the images from the JP novels look a little out of place since they're black and white, but I know you can't really help that because that's how they were printed and that's how they're shown wherever you can get them online, and if a color-version exists, it's probably in an unreleased master file for the novel production. Still, it's a very nice selection of art! Better than a lot of the unsourced fanart piles I've seen in fanvids/VGMVs.

[kayrd-blog]

Digital Concept Art

For this task I was required to produce a piece of concept art responding to my group project. I decided to combine some photobash and digitally painted elements. Throughout the process of creating this piece, I still had to bare in mind the art fundamentals, specifically: composition, colour, light, perspective and volume. Making sure that my focal points were drawing the viewers eye by using these fundamentals.

I knew that I wanted a kind of prison feel to my piece immediately, but as I was doing some research into concept art already out there, a lot of them were relatively similar, so I decided to change my idea up a bit. Instead of just a prison, also a dungeon and abondoned cave too. I’d drawn up some composition sketches and was finally happy with the look I was going for.

Firstly I began to acquire some images of caves, as this was going to surround my subject/main focal point. As you can see, from the white light in the background all the way to the brick wall in the foreground, there are cave-like walls. In the screenshots below you can see what the images looked like before colour correcting and other editing. I also wanted the classic stone look for the floor of the dungeon, so I found an image at the my desired perspective and colour corrected it to fit in with my scene.

Now it was time for me to create my main focal point, the girl. This piece is portraying how the main character in my group project is feeling in her head, chained to the expectations of a teenage girl, and having to stick to those guidelines produced by society. I found the image of the girl and masked around her, then stylised her, and colour corrected her to fit in the scene. To make her appear trapped, I thought a chain and ball would be appropriate, so I drew them into the scene by hand. I also painted in the shadows on the girl by hand to emphasise the darkness, and also correlate with the one light source in the far background. To make her stand out I used the lighting technique used in film and tv and lit the back of the girl so she stood out from the background, making the focal point much stronger.

To finish off, I wanted to frame the piece with something. I decided to find a stone/brick wall that looked like a castle. I then cut out the middle of this image to allow the girl to be seen. After colour correcting this I realised it just looked a bit flat in the scene and didn’t really add anything, then I realised it wasn’t reacting with the light source, which is why it stuck out like a sore thumb. I took the paintbrush and set the opacity to about 3 and colour to white, starting to add white to the brick wall the way the light would’ve hit it, also to make it appear more 3D within the scene, giving it some depth. The final piece featured above.

Imagined Sound

Taking the concept image I had already completed, I was then required to design the sound to accompany it. I had to think about what I would expect to hear when looking at this image, as an audience member who has no idea of the context behind this image. 

The cave itself I thought would bring about quite an ambient and echoey sound, no matter what noises were coming out of it. To convey a more believable sound, I edited the sound effects increasing reverb and delay to try and recreate the space in audio form; how the sound would react in the environment seen. This means the feedback coming from the audio file should be like you were standing in the cave yourself. Bringing back the topic of ambience, I decided that it was important to always keep that playing in the background, creating an ominous and uncomfortable vibe throughout. 

Something that the character deals with after applying makeup within the short film is caring what others think of her, this is why I chose the whispering. It’s inaudible, conveying that it doesn’t really exist because we cannot understand it, just noise her head is creating to raise her anxiety. This is also why I included the screaming, partly as a reaction to the whispering, but also the sheer feeling of constraint and restrictions forced upon her by society.

The final part to the sound design was incorporating the chains and heavy dragging of the stone ball. They are present within the image so therefore should be heard too. It again emphasises constraint and also conveys the real battle she is having to try and achieve freedom and happiness.

Diegetic & Non-Diegetic

There are two different types of sound; either diegetic or non-diegetic. We can distinguish one from the other by analysing the source of the sound. For example, a diegetic sound is one that comes from something shown on screen, this could be anything from characters voices, to any noise made by objects present within the scene. However, do not get this confused as it having to be within the frame to be classed as diegetic, a greater definition would be actual sound coming from a source within the film environment. Non-Diegetic sound is anything that we perceive as being created from a source out of the story being told, something that isn’t visibly created. For example, any sound effects or music added over the top of a scene. Both can have completely different impacts on the viewer. For diegetic sounds are put in place to create a believable story for the audience, so that anything we see occur matches what we can hear. Non-diegetic sounds however can have more of an impact, they can completely change the dynamic of a sequence, creating tension and setting whichever mood they are trying to create. A horror film wouldn’t be half of scary without the heart racing music and some freaky Waterphone playing.