#this is gonna be even more whinging but like. im fully expecting this animatic to flop actually

[astranauticus]

post mortem for my orv animatic bc i have lots of thoughts and yall are gonna hear all of them (that is a threat)

first is the obligatory special thanks/plagiarism declaration section but a lot of the shots in this are inspired by the original changgwi lyric video which like. please watch it there's a reason this song is a classic animatic song on bilibili like the music is good but the video definitely helped. also speaking of bilibili, special shoutout to this arknights chongyue animatic that introduced me to the song that will haunt the next 8 months of my life!

the original inspiration was the thought that the verse of the spirit telling the story of its own death felt very yjh coded but it took like another week of stewing on it to have the idea of using the final chorus for the dkos arc which was the moment i decided i have to actually make this thing

going strictly by when i started putting pen to paper (pencil to ipad screen? whatever) this took almost exactly 5 months since i created the first drafts in february but the first 3 months ish from february until may were also my school semester so. most of the progress (id say about >60%) was done in the last two months of me working on this every moment i wasnt at work (or playing project sekai, for some reason)

also! funny little detail but counting the drafts and some discarded frames my procreate stack for this thing has exactly 49 artworks in it! neat little easter egg i guess (yeah 51 wouldve been more fitting but whatever)

this fully slipped by both me (at 2am) and my friend whom i sent the finished version to (fighting the flu) but in the final edit i didn't actually include the second half of the last lyric?? it's 'i will take you to the mountain god' i apparently just wrote 'i will take you' and never finished the rest LMAO

speaking of the lyrics i dont speak korean and im not a huge fan of most english translations of this song that exists so on multiple occasions i was so tempted to just use the chinese cover someone on bilibili did because then i'd at least be confident i know where the fucking line breaks were (there's one line at the end where im pretty sure i didn't edit on the line breaks correctly but that was more of an intentional compromise because the timings would've been off otherwise. anyway) tbh the only reason i didnt do that is the atmosphere and delivery of the original song is. really unbeatable like the cover's also pretty good but it doesn't quite achieve the same effect

also speaking of things i fucked up im aware i drew sys in the wrong outfit for the dkos fight but like. ok full disclosure my orv reference folder is a complete mess (theres like 400+ images in there. for some reason) so on net ive gotten character outfits wrong while working on this thing like at least 3 times bc id just grab a random webtoon screenshot from my folder and go w it. it's just that by the time i realised i fucked up i'd already finished drawing all of sys's frames and i was too lazy to go back and change all of them LMAO

anyway yeah some other random things i wanted to whinge about:

there's a lot of effects i wanted to do that didn't quite come across due to. lack of skill/time/patience/all of the above but the one im really annoyed about is the yhk postchorus bit with the 3 circles bc. first off i think i drew those while halfway dozing off on the train to school once because uh. yeah

anyway poor drawing aside id really wanted to recreate the sort of. drawn-in effect on the circles and lines that the original lyric video had but i could NOT for the life of me figure out a way to execute that in capcut so. here we are (also you cant put transitions on overlays in capcut so that's why those also looked so bad. youre welcome)

honestly my timeline for this in capcut looks pretty ridiculous bc if you want to do word by word animations/effects you need to pay for the pro version so my workaround was just to have like five thousand text layers with 1-2 words on it each (do not recommend btw)

speaking of the text im a moron so i kinda forgot to account for the text when drawing frames and wow you can tell. yeah next time im just hand writing the text fuck this

and i have some more thoughts that are. mild to moderate webtoon spoilers so past this will be the spoiler warning line

__________________________________________________________

actually my original plan was to upload this the day dkos dies in the webtoon but a. i genuinely did think it was gonna be yesterday like i dont pay for the early access episodes so i was just kinda going off orvtwt LMAO b. i could feel myself burning out on this like the last few frames i drew for this were fucking dogshit so i figured either i finish it soon or i wont finish it at all

i will probably still draw something for dkos' death day though for those who celebrate (basically when i was thumbnailing for one of the frames in this i ended up with one that didnt fit the video aspect ratio at all but still looks pretty good so im promoting it to a full drawing. so look forward to that)

like for an idea of how fucking sick of this shit i was by like. last week pretty much like for the last few frames of the dkos fight i straight up forgot to draw dkos' wings and had to add them in halfway through editing last night. like that's how fucking out of it i was by then lmaoo

looking back its actually kinda funny cuz the whole put this up when dkos dies thing was my plan since february but i had literally no way of knowing when that would be especially since the webtoon stopped going with the novel chapter numbers exactly (i could.. guesstimate but my original estimation was in june so yknow. real useful) but like i can find evidence of me panicking about that deadline since may. why did i do that

given that deadline i knew i cant really include stuff from the novel past the dkos arc but man. the amount of times i wanted to use something from later (ESPECIALLY 1863 arc). i actually have another idea i want to test out thats like full epilogue spoilers partially because working on this for so long made me realise i really want to make more epilogue content <- what

yknow how i mentioned discarded frames yeah i had to draw dkos' death 3 times because the first two compositions just never quite panned out. i mean the current one is also pretty unreadable with the colour scheme but trust me the previous ones were way worse christ alive