A Look At Ep.11's Changes

Hey all! Recently in our Cool Capers channel on Discord, someone asked how I layer my edits, and it made me think that sharing a behind-the-scenes look at this scene would be cool.

Remember that ep.10 preview that was cut from the episode? Obviously Trowa can't be in Wing in the middle of Antarctica, so we altered the script to put him drifting in space when Quatre calls him. This meant we needed to find a shot of Trowa alone in space, and the closest we had was a moment in ep.19 when he's idling on the side of a colony, planning his next move.

The first frame in the gif is a snapshot from the show, but it doesn't suit our needs because Trowa needs to be in the middle of space, rather than on the side of a colony. Further, the screen is WAY too small. So, I found a monitor from a different part of the episode, rendered out its screen, and pasted it over his console, along with hue and brightness adjustments to make it look like it belonged there. From there, it was a game of cutting out portions to be filled, then filling them. Since I'd already made the assets for Quatre's end of the call, that part was easy: just had to resize everything to fit in the new screen!

The second image here shows you what a small portion of this scene looks like, finished. What's pictured consists of only these lines:

Duo: ...isn't that basically the same as black?
Trowa: No.
Quatre: No!
Duo: Oh, okay.
Quatre: Soooooo... what do ya think?

The top half are all the image layers used, including lip flaps, eye movements, screen flickers, and the stars slowly moving in the background. The bottom half are all the audio files, including voices, ambient noise and music (though there's no music at this part). Not every scene we make has this much involved, but this is what it looks like when we make a new screen from scratch like this.

So yeah! That's it. About 30% of Ep.11 is completely finished, with other segments of the episode in various states of "just started" to "waiting on recordings". We have cast recording today and next weekend, and my hope is to have the episode over half complete before the end of January. We'll update you by Feb. 1st on how far the episode is!

Have a good weekend, everyone!