#watched only first season of tlovm honestly

[liltaireissocute]

first kisses

UPD: sorry to disappoint but it's actually Vax not Vex

[mysteryanimator]

Watch it here :D

(heads up for any odd grammar, Grammarly cannot save me from my dyslexia)

I was originally not going to do a breakdown of this because a lot of my breakdowns and thought processes were getting really repetitive (also i was getting embarrassed by them HAHSDASHBDS). BUT boy oh boy this time around I can actually go "wait i can yap without being repetitive here, maybe, idk, we never know until i write it out."

STORYBOARD/ANIMATIC:

It was really fun to adapt AquliaofArkham's fic into a visual format! This is the specific section I had set out to visualize!

(Yes I only did thumbs for that section and freeballed the rest whoops, y'all do not follow by example, i didn't think i was getting this far tbh)

When translating this from written to visual, there were some key points I wanted down:

They are really really close to each other and the barrier between each other is SO thin, but the air is still super thick

visual eye breathing room compressed???

Is having stillness a way to convey that ???

We are following Mizrak's POV, ergo focus on what Mizrak is focusing on, where is his mind going

hold shots for longer???

limited movement due to Mizrak's hyperfocus???

Make shots intentionally heavily detailed ???

Zoom into details???

As much as I am passionate about storyboards, I do tend to get ahead of myself and end up locking myself into lots of close ups HAHAH. I like having each shot matter to me a lottttt so i end up reverting to reusing a lot of super common shot archetypes due to their attached meanings (I'd love to attend/watch some workshops on this, but uni ;-; i'll be free soon dwdw).

By the way, you will notice the animation is longer then the timed storyboard/animatic. This is because I retimed to placeholder dialogue (which y'all will NOT HEAR THATS EMBARRASSING, i dont need ppl to hear me yell clatter lol). Fun fact I originally had it in the first storyboard to help me with timing and then removed it half way through? Not sure why I did that, but regardless I came back around and retimed it so that the length of each shot feels believable enough to hold dialogue and has enough time to be visually digested by you guys.

ANIMATION:

This was a doozy, not because I found the animation hard, this time I actually was satisfied-ish with most of the end result and started implementing different approaches to the animation from all kinds of media; which was my issue LOL. My understanding of animation changed midway through. I can super distinctly see two different approaches, probably because I slipped into that naturally while having animated shows/movies while doing this and I can probably pin point to you which shots was influenced by what show.

First all dialogue and walking forward: rewatched TLOVM b4 season 3 dropped, which by this point is already out, (uh also Nocturne. again HAHAH)

WHICH, you'll see here, two different set ups were taken LOL (also oof you're seeing my setup). Personally, I like keeping my animation folders to the utmost minimum (so like the right! Olrox's folder is a whole character, separate moving bits like lips or even earrings will be in that one folder) because scrolling through can get a tad overwhelming and daunting, BUT, Olrox walking forward had so many small moving pieces with different timings that multiple animation folders was the best way to handle itttttt.

I feel like I only really care abt this BUT FILE MANAGEMENT IS IMPORTANT AAA. You should've seen my file management this time last year, actually horrific, but I'm so glad I figured out how to be cleaner, in turn speeding up my process. (which honestly was just thanks to being thrown into a studio environment and going "Oh my god so that's what I should be doing" and picking up things I noticed from other animators, which genuinely my learning comes from picking me up and throwing me into the deep end)

Secondly, Olrox arm and a scrapped walking scene: I was watching Prince of Egypt (literally that whole week, planning to rewatch again lmao), Sinbad, Road to El Dorado, and then work from Modernday James, Toniko Pantoja, Edward Kurchevsky

Fun fact, the very first walking was intended to be animated, and i redid it about four times before scrapping it completely. The first three iterations i didn't save because they were sooo clunky . It made me realize I gotta revisit my principles again I'm rusty (and i do LOLOLOL). I scrapped the anim because it did not flow into the next shot nicely but, It was good practice regardless HAHA

While mentally I feel like none of the shots match each other, they still do have some cohesion to one another

COMPOSITING:

The new thing, finally manually did the edge shadows in CSP HAHAH.

I will say this too, I got really nervous atp about the overall "quality" of the anim + the backgrounds. I was getting super hung up over it because I was alr worried abt the animation due to the safer choices I made (but also, I don't have to reinvent the wheel LMAO). SO, when I got to comping it was like "oh actually its actually fine LOL".

i stayed pretty sketchy with these since i was getting way too worried about it and wanted this to stay as a fun side project, also these are without comping- they become way more purple with compositing LOL

I feel like here too I ended up doing less then what I normally do, which I think mighttt be on part to finding more efficient ways to go about compositing things together (and faster too).

Also, I definitely got pushed into trying to lower the layer amount when I saw a tweet about layer efficiency/layer stacks and them mentioning applying Mattes and CC Composite. Actually a godsend, I didn't realize I could combine my effects like that to lower the amount.

Also, I swear no amount of precomping can save me from this. There's probably a better way to go abt this um LOL, everyone is getting a peep at my file management.

Also, I'm realizing I could've done a tad more with the actual composition itself, like the placement and movement of Olrox in the scene where he's walking forward. For now I have to leave it, because also, the intent for this one was to have fun rather then making every anim an exercise or else I'd burn out so fast LOL

Side tangent but, I've been digging my heels into the animation school club workshops on youtube rn due to having a moment with the scrapped Olrox side walk. Which holy shit, things have clicked for me, so I'm going to try and do more rough exercises b4 i do another finished anim again. It turned a light bulb in my head LMAO, and it pushed me to do the recent maria anim and mizrak and olrox kiss which has a massively greater understanding of timing and confidence LMAO

Ok now this is To Love a God finished! Another animation done :DDDDDD I'm super happy to be adapting a fanwork, it's always really fun and super exciting to bring other people's stuff to life, which what made this more enjoyable then anything else.

Will I do another polished anim before next year/before s2? Time will tell but for now i rest and speed to finish another semester of uni (there is a high chance for another anim because of a joke tweet i did not expect to get traction lol)

Thank youuu if you stayed this far, this was really lengthy and i think i went into different unrelated tangents, so i hope you enjoyed me pulling you into different directions HAHAHA

p.s i uploaded this to youtube and theres an age restriction BECAUSE OF THE FEET. Not because Olrox tells Mizrak he would fuck him, no it's his FEET. I've tried to appeal it but cant do much LOLOLOL

[hayleysayshay]

oh god, im so excited for the new season of tlovm. i am HYPED. saw the IGN review and the worst thing they said was the many liberties with the source material and that it's tropey. i love tropes, and i already had guessed this season would have large departures, only confirmed by the reorganisation of the episode order.

like a massive appeal of the first season (once it got going past the first two) was the tropeyness of it. when i was an actual kid i used to watch cartoons and wish for more real stakes, i hated how things were undone. My favourite episodes of doctor who were the ones where the doctor or companions were in very serious peril. And tlovm has the stakes but it's also pretty fun and feels like an epic adventure, it's adult whilst still feeling like a fun cartoon, whereas most adult cartoons are just funny jokes. I really enjoy that aspect of that. So yeah full on tropes please I want that.

and place your bets on what the changes to campaign 1 will be (other than just rearranging the order a bit). unhinged take is vax causes vex's death not percy's (which i don't think they'd do as it would honestly gut percy out of anything to really angst over in season 2 and vax has enough angst already).

[rhyske]

I am the youngest of 5 siblings. I have 3 older half-sisters that I'm not really close with because we have different moms and didn't grow up together. there are only 3 years between me and my brother and yeah we're quite close. we have always played games together oh and we play with my mom as well, she is a gamer too but she mostly plays Elder scrolls online these days lol.

I don't think I'll be saving up for a PC anytime soon, I have a lot of financial problems so it's not really a priority TT_TT. Luckily Xbox has some cross-platform stuff which is nice and I have game pass through a friend so I'm pretty satisfied at the moment. you take what you can get I guess ^^

as a writer, I see issues with both XIII and XV but they have so much potential so I kind of love that about them and the characters are great in both! Though I thought the concept for Stella in XIII-versus was better than what we got with Luna. Luna is fine but it could have been better. I'm not a hater though. I do like VII and X as well but I have never played them.

honestly, I don't remember when I started watching CR but it was ages ago, like pretty early in campaign 2 if I remember correctly. I have started campaign 1 and 3 but I'm not as attached to those characters but I still like it. it's just more work somehow? I don't know how to explain it. I didn't think they were gonna do animated Might Nein before TLoVM had ended either, I CANT TELL YOU HOW HAPPY I WAS TO HEAR THAT. It kind of makes sense since TLoVM was a massive hit for amazon prime though.

I have a list of games I am working through because I haven't really played a lot of single-player games, to be honest. I used to play more fps games like Halo, Destiny 1 or Apex. I played through dragon age 2 earlier this year. I played it before when it first came out and quite liked it but I struggled with it because there was a language barrier (English is not my native language). At the time I was around 13 I think so yeah. I finished it now and I am obsessed. though I am currently working on DA inquisition and might go back and give Origins a try if I'm feeling like it. Then I plan on tackling mass effect!~💜

Oh dang, that's a lot of siblings! And that's really cool your mom plays games too! Mine never could figure them out 😆 Not for my lack of trying.

Oh well that's good! I'm glad you're happy with it (: I wish you luck and good karma for your money situation. Figuring out financials is always so stressful.

See, I think Luna was terrible and useless as a character 😆 I definitely think Versus had good potential too, and I'm sad we'll never know what the plan was for it. No story is perfect, but some are definitely better than others. Mm, I recommend VII Remake. It has some pacing issues, but I actually really enjoyed the game even with that. I played the original VII all the way up to the final dungeon and just never got around to finishing it 😆 I don't know why.

I feel that. I've watched both seasons of Vox Machina and while I like that group, they haven't taken a place close to Mighty Nein in my heart. I don't know much about Campaign 3 except for Sam's "she named all her creations after all her favorite smells" clip 😂

Oh yeah, they decided to continue with a season 3 even though it was just planned for 2 seasons, right? I'm happy Vox Machina is so popular and they're making more! Man, the Mighty Nein trailer picked out such good and memorable lines from all the characters! It makes me so excited!

Oh man, Dragon Age 2 is my favorite (: I hate Inquisition, so I hope you at least like it and don't have my experience! ^^' I enjoy Origins too, but man does it have some coding issues that can really bog down the game. On PC, Origins has a memory leak so you literally have to restart the game every couple hours or your loading screens will get soooo long.

English is your second language? That's amazing! Learning another language is so damn hard, I'm so proud of you! I've been trying to learn another language on and off for years cause it gets so overwhelming. Was it self taught, taught in school, or a bit of both?

[delilah-briarwood]

Sage, edelweiss, Jasmine?

Sage - What ‘medium’ of art (poetry, music, fiction, paintings, statues etc) is the most touching to you? Why do you think that is?

Considering how much I write and how much of a bookworm I am, I think some people would be surprised to hear that it’s music. There’s something about a good or impactful song where you can just… put it on, not concentrate or even have to think that hard and just lose yourself to the world around you.

Edelweiss - How’d you think of your url/username? What’s it associated with for you?

Evil women hot. But fr, I only initially changed it as part of the hype just before TLoVM season one started and then I just… never changed it back. Honestly I’ve adored Delilah since the moment she first came in in campaign one. Fucked Up Fictional Women, my beloveds.

Jasmine - Do you have a movie or book you loved but will never read/watch again?

Honestly probably a lot of the shitty YA books I read as a teen because I know how much I adored them at the time and that the writing probably won’t hold up well. I do have a song I adore that I can’t listen to anymore. One More Light by Linkin Park is one of my all time favourite songs. I haven’t listened to it in full since 2017.

[gr3y-plays-ttrpgs]

Before watching tlovm I wasn't sure if having watched/listened to only a little vox machina (currently on ep11 aka in the middle of the beholder fight) would be good but honestly I'm so glad

I've seen enough to already love the characters and setting and everything, but I also have no fucking clue what is going on with the Briarwoods arc so I get to enjoy that for the first time

I'll prolly reconsider and see if I feel the same after watching the whole season but I am loving the existence of watching tlovm so far

[mell0bee]

the past few days i’ve been reading a lot of posts addressed to new fans saying stuff like ‘c3 contains MAJOR SPOILERS for campaign 1/tlovm, so if you care about spoilers don’t watch it’ and like, respectfully, i don't really think this is true?

also spoilers ahead for c3 and a bit of c1/tlovm and like one sentence for c2 (from the wrap-up) under the cut. the rest of the post assumes you have seen everything.

the non-spoiler tl;dr is i think it’s fine as a new fan to watch tlovm and then start with campaign 3, you’ll be relatively unspoiled as of all the episodes so far (ep 11) so long as you avoid the comments section ect, and i imagine that'll continue into the future. if you’re really really averse to spoilers, wait until you finish this first season of tlovm (the briarwoods arc) to start c3 and you should be fine!

(also in the meantime if what’s turning you off from watching c1/c2 is the absurd # of episodes, exandria unlimited is super short and takes place before c3 w/ some of the same characters!)

ok. list of spoilers you’d get for c1/tlovm by watching c3 and not engaging with old fans who’ve seen everything:

keyleth becomes the leader of the ashari, which considering her character arc of doing her aramente is not a surprising conclusion to reach at all (it really only spoils the premise of her character arc, which i assume must be brought up eventually in tlovm, and that she survives until the end of the campaign + completes the aramente, nothing about the resolution of her character arc)

the briarwoods take over whitestone and are eventually defeated by a surviving son. orym knows this so we assume keyleth has some connection to it (or maybe he says keyleth told him idk). again not a crazy conclusion to make, obviously they’re gonna beat the bad guys. laudna knows this so we assume the briarwoods had some spooky undead magic that raised her somehow. which spoils that… the briarwoods had spooky undead magic. which tlovm viewers would know.

there’s no way someone watching c3 blind would be able to make this connection unless they’ve also seen tlovm/c1 or someone tells them, but maybe MAYBE they figure out delilah is laudna’s patron somehow. which again idk what that tells them about c1/tlovm besides the fact that delilah dies?

OH ALSO I COMPLETELY FORGOT. bertrand exists. claims to have travelled with VM. ....that's pretty much it lol i really don't think bertrand is like a walking spoiler at all.

this doesn’t account for possible spoilers in the future, but i imagine there’s not going to be anything major At All except for a possible whispered one reference re: delilah, which like, has already been foreshadowed in ep3 of tlovm. if in c3 delilah mentions working for him, tlovm viewers will be like “ohhhh right that’s who the briarwoods had items for in tlovm right!!” idk if they’d need any more context than that.

if we get Vecna Pt II The Vecnaing, then nevermind lol, but i kind of doubt that the BBEG of a previous campaign would return as a main BBEG again (unless it’s tharizdun, who we had 0 idea was behind that whole operation until the wrap-up). and even THEN. if he does show up again (which i do not think that is the direction we are going at all but ANYWAY) it really only spoils that… he exists, and vox machina super duper killed him too.

the only other thing i can think of is if Orym Dead Husband Theory is true and the possibility that keyleth sent orym on this mission because she knew it would help him get over his grief (thus spoiling vax’s fate) but i honestly really doubt that. orym has been super vague about information that he gives out about keyleth/vox machina. i have no idea how much he knows in the first place, and even then idk if he would give out something that private about his leader. i don’t think it’s gonna be explicitly stated, just kind of implied, and critters who know c1 would be able to piece that together. but again we’ll have to see. (we don't even know if Dead Husband Theory is true i just think the majority of us are operating under that assumption hfsjklh)

but like, if you think about it, the only characters who have strong ties to VM are laudna and orym, orym's part being pretty spoiler-free once keyleth's character gets a bit more established. the more major spoilers in c3 for c1/tlovm would be. in the briarwood arc w/ laudna. which we're getting in tlovm. i personally think it’s unnecessary, but if a new viewer is REALLY spoiler averse i’d recommend just waiting for the full first season to drop of tlovm before starting c3. either way watching them nearby each other is gonna have some super cool compatibility (imagine a new viewer being able to connect the dots all on their own with the laudna + delilah situation!)

i think this overall plays a lot into like. how we're so avoidant of spoilers, as if that will detract from out enjoyment, which is a whole other post. but as it stands c3 really doesn't spoil a lot at all, and I think it's very new viewer friendly. i have a friend who started with exu + c3 and besides me minimally explaining things to her when she asks (this is what residuum is, keyleth is marisha's character from c1, laudna may be referencing the briarwoods ect) she's been completely unspoiled.