Makoto Part 1 shot talk

Let's start with the vibe of this video. It's gonna be VERY different than all of my previous with setting place within the Metaverse in Persona 5. On top of that, I wanted to mix in Daredevil, Sifu, and The Batman. The reason it's a bit lower contrast is to make sure the darks are bright. Admittedly it requires some tweaking but also more environmental color instead of just blacks and red.

Is this gonna still be like a usual giantess video or is it gonna feature more combat?
Oh this is gonna be right up there for giantess stuff, but it's built on VENGEANCE! Part 2 extremely picks up the size as this first part was a taste to get used to different things. But I also want this to not be something 100% domination like a usual vid. So i'm adding instances where it's earned and Makoto needs a breather and all that. Grounding aspects.

And yet I cannot escape my nature for comedy. These doors will never open correctly! Also Persona 4 reference that helps with the lighting.

Seeing this was the first sign of maybe I should cut the motion blur setting in half. Anyways, the scarf is actually pretty massive here and custom animated to flick just right, but the camera pans up a bit late. Might fix that later. Wanted a cool landing pose after a flip kick. The needle on her arm is meant to be a growth drug thing. I'm still putting the story together but growth drugs and serums being crafted in the Metaverse are a huge part of it.

It's quite tricky to find a good shot where you can see the character's scale before and after their growth. I still feel like this is a bit far but not that bad either.

I knew I needed to start adding BE and AE at some point for my videos. I'm still a classic body kind of person but the little amount that i'm adding are gonna have a huge focus so it's not missable and disappointing.

I may not be an ass man, but this scene makes it easy to reconsider. Also latex pull snap is always great!

I did research into Makoto's fighting stance a bit. This scene takes into account how she transitions into it and everything. I don't think she actually practices Akido.

The first genuinely creepy entrance. No emotions or anything and intimidatingly tall. Ah shadows. Well I tried looking for normal civilians but Noooo. People only created 1 bone with a few poses for them. So I opted to "corrupt" side characters by muting their everything and giving glowing red material for the eyes. WORKS GREAT!

Another reminder to make sure Makoto looks at the camera instead of to the right of it.

Wanted that Terminator effect with the eyes turning on in the background.

It's kinda freeing to animate something creepy. It's like anything you do works. Even Makoto is clutching her chest out of gutted response. Forgetting her new assets are there.

There's not too much noticeable jiggle in this part but I hope next part becomes much more obvious.

This side shot is interesting. I had to hide the wall and rooms that used to be there in order to get it. Actually might've been THE hardest shot to do since it also includes that damn first broken bottle. NOTHING WOULD WORK for a whole day while trying to do destruction on that thing. And when it DID work, the bottle would just fall straight down most of the time. I think I got it though as the next one wasn't bad at all.

This over-motion blurred shit right here that i'll fix later. This shit took a whole day to animate. If the character would simply parent her neck to Makoto's arm it could've gone faster, but no. Bugs. So I had to manually animate their positioning with each other each moment. There were a lot of double shots this time and I think entering this might be the most jarring one. But despite that I was READY. 2 cameras in a master sequence is the way to go! Having everything in the animation be able to be cut and moved around the timeline made double shots a breeze. And the 2 camera setup completely removed the motion blur 1st frame issue as I swapped whenever there was a cut.

But the palette destruction turned out pretty nice as well as the manual scarf animation. The palette, if I remember, was imported, then mesh was duplicated and saved all transforms once unparented from the empty placing it there. Then parent it back into the original position. Then pray RBD Labs would stop teleporting it away or making it disappear when adding destruction to it. Then it worked and I was able to add a single bone for all the pieces to parent to.

After some study, i've learned that I cannot kick up bottles. Also, there's a sphere collider in front of the shadow's body for the physics to collide into. Because the broken bottle destroyed the original's animation, I re-used another bottle and parented it to the object in UE5. Then a swap of hide and unhide to make it look right.

This is the glitchiest kick i've ever dealt with. It was during this moment I learned I need to put the ik at the ball of the foot for faster animating and DON'T parent anything ik INSIDE edit mode. Use the ik constraint modifiers. They're far more stable.

The scarf was also somewhat manually animated here. Gravity collider did this cool shit where the scarf spun as she did her kick and I kept it and polished it. It kinda vortexed up and away so manual animation for awhile here.

I was thinking of Dark Souls here with the slow lumbering camera and the ominous movements of the boss. Would love to do more like this. Also this entire video had a plan that went right out the window multiple times AS I was animating it. Next time i'm storyboard every damn step. But since I can't draw with that much detail, i'm gonna... i'll figure something out. I finished this part because of taking pictures in Sifu as my storyboard.

Something I learned about cinematic camerawork lately is that they cut to make the story and reactions make sense. Not missing ANYTHING. There's a huge difference between animating in Blender without a camera to get the timing right. Because it makes me focus on VR so they can see everything wherever they choose to look. Cinematic camerawork is the exact opposite of this method. You're shown exactly where you NEED to look every single time without missing a thing. I still love wide shot fighting though. But that's choreographed for that. This part definitely had me scrambling for what kind of fighting style I want to go for. I think I love how Kingsmen does it. Everything is clearly shown and we're brought through the action. Maybe a mix of Jackie Chan and Kingsmen is what i'll go for.

Here's a new shot that doesn't get too much time to focus on it because I didn't plan camerawork in Blender. Having the monster hand looming closer and closer as the camera goes with it is wicked cool!

I'm currently looking into Fluidninja and particle fx so I can get the fire effects for this part. Usual Persona stuff.

Unlike the other Personas, Makoto's doesn't fly!

Makoto goes through like 5 different faces in one moment so I wanted to spotlight 3 of them.

Now this right here is making me second-guess and want to figure out what the hell i'm gonna do with facial lighting. I just don't like how the light hits here. It might be easier to solve if I use one of those cel shader lights to customize this exact moment to soften the face lighting.

This is both hit and miss to me. I LOVE the idea, but what is she gonna do with those elongated claws? Scan her? Giver her a papercut with the broken outline?

Now this you can probably guess i'm practicing my Kill La Kill expressions. Nailed it.

Oh yeah, the railing. So this first broken railing actually went pretty ok with RBD Labs! No idea why! It just worked pretty well and I could carefully place the glue of how things separated.

BUT FUCK THIS SECOND RAILING. Disappearing piece of shit motherfu-. No idea why it wouldn't work right, but I switched to fracture iterator and the difference is massive in how it gets destroyed. Nothing is connected. Felt like UE Chaos. So what I did here to make it look fine was really slow down the camera for a moment and then burst the speed as Makoto hits the railing! Looks totally fine! Also the rolling wood down the steps is actually pretty damn sweet!

I was gonna have him struggling again, but I felt tired and he just got squished so maybe them both just sinking down the couch would suffice. Looks great though! Especially with that bit of red lighting! I love the depth of Makoto being up the stairs on the right too. Should have more depth-focused shots like this in the future.