Eirika's model was ported by sorcerousprince/Leo

Notes:

Production started on this animation almost exactly as I finished Duel. In fact, I think I actually had the general story pitch while I was still finishing up Duel. Unfortunately, exams took up pretty near to 100% of my time after thanksgiving break, and I wasn’t able to work on it again until recently.

Even though I took a big break in the middle, this is still a really huge project though. Just like with my last one, I really didn’t intend on it being so long, but I really underestimated just how much time I would need to actually get all of my ideas across. I was thinking maybe 1.5 minutes would be enough, and then it ended up being nearly double that.

So the general pitch is based on the idea of shrunken people fighting a normal sized person. I couldn’t really think of a reason why they’d be fighting, so I went with the oldest trick in FE’s book and threw in mind control as a plot device. (Yes, Eirika’s line near the end pokes fun at that too.) The reason that Eirika and Lyn start normal sized is because I wanted to show off that the shock sticks could shrink people without having to explicitly say it. So Celica using them on Lyn and Eirika is a good way to get the point across. (And it helps distance this from GTS stuff a bit more, lol)

The grappling belts they have seem a bit random, but they have a few reasons for existing. 1: I needed a way for the little people to actually fight the giant without just getting trampled. 2: This whole animation is sort of an homage to a similar media with people attacking giants’ necks with grappling belts and swords. And 3: I think they look really, really cool.

The bit with Lyn at the end where she hangs on the wall and backflips off of it is probably my favorite part just for how smooth the flip looks. It wasn’t even in the original idea for the animation, she was just supposed to hang off the wall for the whole thing. But I realized that I needed her to be close to Eirika and had her drop off and do the flip to land close to them.

Speaking of Eirika, she actually wasn’t planned to shrink a second time. Her shrinking again because she’s being held by Celica is an idea that I had basically right before I actually animated it. At first Celica was supposed to drop Eirika when she got shocked, but I didn’t feel like animating Eirika falling and just decided to have her shrink with Celica.

Unfortunately, I think there are quite a few animation based shortcomings with this animation. For one; the rope on the grapples look really bad. I had such a hard time getting getting them to the right spot and they just moved around way too much when a character was moving. Sometimes they look good, like when Eirika jumps off the ground, but most of the time they’re pretty bad. At least they’re small and hard to see.

And probably the biggest shortcoming is just a big conceptual screw up on my part. Lyn’s attack that comes at the climax of the work, is completely blocked by Celica’s hair. I don’t know why I never thought about it until literally as I was animating it, but because the idea was to slash across her neck, there would be no way to see what Lyn was doing. I settled on just supplementing it was particle effects and noises, but I still wish it could have been better.

I think in general I did a good job with the camera work in this one. The two scenes with the close ups of Eirika as she’s flying on the grapple were really fun. The shot where Lyn looks up at the nowgiant Celica was fun. And in general I think it’s easy enough to keep track of everything.

The sound design is okay, but I think it could have been better. Stuff like the grapple just doesn’t sound quite right. It loops too obtrusive, and I couldn’t find a balance between it being too loud and overpowering, and too quiet and unnoticeable. Or the electricity sound effects on Lyn’s final hit just don’t feel like they line up exactly with the blow. Or when Celica’s blade folds out it sounds too sharp and not mechanical enough. Little things. I think there were a lot of really good sounding moments, but there were also some bad ones.

Youtube puts limits on the number of characters in descriptions, so the rest of this is in the pinned comment.