Elincia and Micaiah's models are by Simplyachair on Deviantart

This one wasn’t supposed to be quite this long. I think when I started on it, I had the general idea in mind, but I don’t think I really understood just how long it would take to include everything I wanted to. In the end, this ended up taking somewhere in the realm of 2030 hours to finish, which is probably about twice as long as anything else I’ve ever made. That said, I also think it’s easily the best animation I’ve made, from the really really clean action of Micaiah throwing the arrow spells, to the characters actually talking and exchanging dialogue between them.

I love all the action in this one. The first shot of the video with the light flashing I think is a really neat way of setting the scene. It’s sort of an establishing shot, as it gets across the general location, as well as that there’s a battle, while also being very easy to animate. Then Micaiah flying into the door looks good (if you look closely, the door actually shakes a bit when she hits it).

I think the sequence of her doing the arrow stuff is my favorite part though. The motion as she reads the book is great, and the way she lays out each of the arrows while moving her hand in that arc is beautiful. It’s not an action that has impact or anything, but it just looks so clean, and it’s such a cool concept.

Then the way she throws the big arrow at the end is amazing too. It’s such a strong pose, with a super exaggerated form, that it just has so much power and impact behind it. The rings that shoot out when the arrow passes through them help to sell the power too, but I still think the pose being such an exaggerated version of a normal pitching pose is what really gives it the impact.

Elincia’s sword strikes are decent, but I’m less happy with them overall. The flying spin attack was a cool concept, but I don’t think it ended up looking that great in action. It is a reference to Ike’s quickdraw though, (I actually looked at the pose for reference) so that’s kinda neat. I guess in “The Lore™” she learned it from him, lol.

One thing I’m not super happy with is the fluid simulations. I’ve noticed that in anime, they like to indicate someone’s injury by having them cough up blood, which shows that they’re super badly hurt and probably have bad internal bleeding. So the reason Micaich has to drink the potion is because she’s got those really bad injuries from getting thrown into the wall at the start. There were a few other ways I could think to show blood, but having a fluid simulation for it sounded like it would be the coolest. Unfortunately, I don’t think it ended up looking that good, which is a shame because it took like 3 hours to get working. At least it does a good enough job of representing blood (I think), so it achieves its goal at least.

I’m super happy with the sound effects I used here too. Micaiah’s magic sounds sick, and it’s mostly from Zelda’s attacks in Smash bros. Elincia uses a few from Ike too. I wasn’t sure how I was going to design her dashing spin attack, but I ended up using the dash part of Ike’s side B, and the sword spinning noise on his up B, and it ended up sounding pretty good.

The character voices are a bit of a mixed bag. The yells and exclamations they have are pretty good, like Elincia yelling as she does her sword attack, or Micaiah grunting when she slams into the door. But the voices just don’t sound all that great. Since I knew that I wanted the two of them to say very specific things to each other, I knew that just using english voice clips from one of their games just wouldn’t cut it. No matter how you splice the lines together, you can’t get them to say complex sentences like I have them saying.

Anyways, I used Caeda’s voice for Elincia, and Corrin’s for Micaiah. I used Corrin for Micaiah because that was what I did in the previous animation with her, and I used Caeda for Elincia because I thought they might sound similar to each other. I tried to get voice clips that didn’t have recognizable names or anything in them, but I think I still ended up having Elincia say “Marth” by accident a couple times.

The lip sync is also really bad. I ended up doing it by hand again, and just moving the character’s mouths slightly every time they spoke, but it doesn’t look very good because I only moved their jaw instead of moving their lips when they spoke. It looks kind of unnatural and not very good, but I’m hoping that people are reading the subtitles while the characters are talking instead of watching them.

And one last thing, I think the camera work is actually pretty decent here. I’ve been paying attention to how they use the camera in anime, and looking up stuff about how to frame shots, and I think it made a huge difference here. The action is much easier to follow, and the cuts end up feeling way more natural.