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nicksvenssonanimation · 2 years

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The precision of slicing vertically in front of everyone is not to be underestimated, you know!

This has a bit of an overlap in sources with the last post, well not necessarily an overlap moreso a continuation of the little that I mentioned about demo reels or show reels or demo show reels reels and such. I’m going to elaborate on what I found out, what I understand about what I found out, and how it makes sense but the execution is probably tougher than I initially expected it to be.

The first thing is to define what a vertical slice is.

“The vertical slice is a small, self-contained chunk of the game that allows someone to play through it and see all of the major systems of the game working together.” ("Game development glossary: The vertical Slice," 2014)

Now, obviously, that’s part of the production of the game, however if we were to generalize the concept, it then becomes…

“A vertical slice is a small, self-contained chunk of work that allows someone to see what the potential is”

See? Now it’s relevant for everyone everywhere in every profession. A resume is a sort of vertical slice, in a way, considering it’s a small, self-contained example of your capabilities, except in that way it’s a list of achievements and maybe some recommendations.

Anyway, for me and for you and for creative professions, vertical slices are clips or sections of something you’ve made or been a part of. These vertical slices are cut up and stuck together in whatever video editing software you can get your hands on, and what results is a show reel or a demo reel or a show demo reel reel.

This thing, the reel, is supposed to showcase the best of your current ability to a potential employer. So of course vertical slices go here, and from that point it becomes which ones you put in there and how you show them.

Reels should be no more than 4 minutes ("Creating your Reel - Pixar," n.d.) because if they’re longer than that, the viewer is going to get bored and move on anyway so there’s not really much point. Better to have a focused showing rather than an overwhelming amount of things to see, and to that point it should only be your best work that makes its way into the reel, and that best work should be first (Meroz, 2019). After all, the first 5 seconds of your reel will determine if the person watching said reel will keep watching rather than switching to the next one (Chang, 2022). Along with that order, the reel should either have basic or no music at all, again in the effort to have it be as focused as possible. Each slice should also be presented separately, no inter-cutting annoying flashy editing jazz, it’s confusing and gets in the way of your actual work.

Labeling efforts in the reel should be limited to a title card at the beginning and end, with your name, phone and email ("Creating your Reel - Pixar," n.d.).

Where you put or post it depends on who you’re reaching out to. In Japan, it’s incredibly helpful nowadays to have your reel on your YouTube, or as your pinned tweet on your Twitter. This way, it’s easy to send links out, and it’s easy for potential producers to see your work quickly, and help you get work. (Chang, 2022)

There’s also the idea of tailoring your portfolio to where you’re applying to or what specific job you’re applying for. You wouldn’t necessarily fill your reel with animation if you were specifically going for the storyboard artist position, would you? Well, unless you storyboarded that sequence (but then it’d be more beneficial to show your storyboard rather than the finished scene). You wouldn’t show something with simple stylization if you were going for a studio known for their dramatic realism either.

Sometimes studios can be upfront about the kind of work they want, other times you’ll have to pay attention on your own to what you believe they might be looking for.

An example of a studio being upfront is, oh hey look at that it’s from the previous post but it’s worth repeating, MAPPA’s call for freelancers / potential trainees.

Ryu Nakayama, on his FANBOX post about searching for new trainees, mentioned that the aim for these trainees (and by extension, any freelancers who wish to work with them) “to be able to draw the LO original picture of the quality of Chainsaw Man PV on your own in the first few years” (Nakayama, 2021). Let’s have a look at that again.

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So that’s a pretty clear picture of what specifically they’re looking for, yeah?

To summarize what we’ve talked about so far, be very precise in choosing and creating your reel, and don’t send an ill-fitting reel to the place you want to work.

Let’s talk about the types of things you should have in there.

Everything in the reel should be showing off your animation ability, whether that be student films, professional work, or even exercises you’ve done on your own. An example of your ability to animate walking or running is a must, along with having characters handle heavy objects and an acting scene with dialogue (you need to be able to show you can work with audio and make acting decisions). Adding an action scene of some kind also couldn’t hurt (Chang, 2022).

As for your portfolio, it should be supplemental, supportive of the main reel. It should show your drawing ability, should have examples of drawing characters in environments (it’s important to showcase that you can draw layouts), and should also, much like the main reel, focus on quality over quantity (Chang, 2022).

That leads us to what I’m doing right now, what I mentioned last week, and how that fits into this.

Well, it’s a piece of work that I’m creating, and I can take a slice from that and put it into my reel as an example of my specialized practice. It’s a showcase of mostly the acting side of things, working with dialogue, making acting choices, along with also showing that I can draw characters in environments and my ability to compose a storyboard.

Recapping again. Precision is key in creating your reel, have a portfolio as supplemental material, make it easily accessible to people quickly, be very mindful of what your employer will want from you, and make sure above all else to show off your ability to animate (if you’re an animator).

Reference List:

Creating your Reel - Pixar. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/a/nv.ccsd.net/pixar/working-at-pixar

Meroz, M. (2019, March 25). Creating an animation demo Reel - The complete guide. Retrieved from https://www.bloopanimation.com/animation-demo-reel/

Nakayama, R. (2021, August 18). スタッフ募集について｜なかやま｜pixivFANBOX. Retrieved from https://r-nkym.fanbox.cc/posts/2623524

Chang, D. (2022, March 31). Making your First Animation Demo Reel (And showing off my first reel) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZt8Wh9p2LM&t=55s

Game development glossary: The vertical Slice. (2014, February 21). Ask a Game Dev. https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/77406994278/game-development-glossary-the-vertical-slice

Crunchyroll Collection, MAPPA. (2022, May 17). Chainsaw Man | OFFICIAL TRAILER [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96zmDlWCBk

#Youtube

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nicksvenssonanimation · 2 years

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People who are looking for people, look at me!

Oh, it seems things are getting to this point already. This particular post is going to be about investigating what employers are looking for in regards to you.

This is not so easy, as I have found. Things aren’t always clear, and the general idea is that you create the best portfolio showreel that you can out of what you have.

Anyway, to explore this in as thorough of a way as possible from the perspective of a university student, we need to separate things into two sections. Section one will be looking at specific places and what evidence I’ve found on how they’ve hired in the past, and section two will be looking at some general things in creating a great showreel.

Alright first, because I can, I looked into the Japanese industry. What I found was Ghibli (from 2017, to be clear), Toei (2023 graduate program), Kyoto Animation (2022 graduate program), and MAPPA (for Chainsaw Man) all saying very similar things and having similar requirements. Of course, the two graduate programs required you to have… you know… graduated recently. Ghibli had a test that needed to be done, a drawn picture of a background with a person in it. MAPPA was the odd one out there, with a specific section to talk about overseas animators and clarifying something that, in hindsight, should have been obvious. To be an employee you need to live there, otherwise it’s freelance work for you, which specifically needs a portfolio and a resume. You see, MAPPA and Ghibli were the only ones I could find any information on specifics of what you had to send in. Now, this could be down to having run all of this through Google Translate (certain information was backed up by the Crunchyroll articles that led me to these places), and therefore not being able to actually find what to send in, but it stands to reason that you need evidence of your work, and therefore a portfolio, to send in. How else would you show that you’re capable of work?

Let’s talk about what specific information I managed to get then, starting with Ghibli because that’s the most straightforward. Studio Ghibli’s 2017 call for animators on Miyazaki’s latest project at the time were asked to submit a drawing of a background with a person on it, done in pencil, not digital in any way. Then there were 2 interviews before you’d know if you got in or not. Now, it also states that nationality was not a concern, but that you had to have enough of an understanding of Japanese in order to work effectively (Takai, 2017). Straightforward test and then round of interviews (even if the test was vague).

Speaking of whether or not you speak Japanese, or live there, here comes Ryu Nakayama’s FANBOX post about recruiting for Chainsaw Man, in which we had a little aside for us overseas animators. He mentions that, if you’re an overseas animator, you should “please send us your reels and portfolio. After seeing that, we will contact you. If you wish to participate as a freelancer, please send the portfolio to the contact email address in the application guidelines below instead of DM [I’m assuming that means, don’t DM him on Twitter]” (Nakayama, 2021). It also detailed the main program use they were looking for, which is Clip Studio Paint.

He also mentions that the scouting for trainees would be based on “if you have the basic skills of painting and animation, even if you are an inexperienced person who has no work record in TV animation” (Nakayama, 2021). I know that’s just for the trainees, but that’s not to say it doesn’t apply to freelance portfolios as well. Obviously you’d need to know how to animate to get a job animating somewhere.

He also mentions that what the trainees should aim for is “to be able to draw the LO original picture of the quality of Chainsaw Man PV on your own in the first few years” (Nakayama, 2021).

For reference, that is this.

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(Crunchyroll Collection, MAPPA, 2022)

Certainly a goal.

Anyway, moving over to opportunities in the west. This was more difficult, likely due to the fact that positions keep being filled and then new ones come up and it’s a cycle of new stuff and you have to be ready at the right time and all. Disney was no help, so I looked elsewhere.

I found two places, Titmouse and Powerhouse. Titmouse had a general portfolio application section, and Powerhouse only had a 2D compositor role open at the time of writing, but I was able to pull together some common things and some things that seemed reasonably general. Things such as needing “excellent knowledge” of the tools and workflow, the “ability to take direction positively”, being “responsible for creating high quality”, “understanding and following production guidelines”, and “receiving and implementing feedback quickly and effectively” ("Powerhouse animation studios - 2D series compositor," n.d.). There’s also the question of what to submit, which comes down to a resume/cv, and a portfolio (in a number of different ways, such as a website, LinkedIn, or Twitter) ("Titmouse - General submission (LA, NY, Vancouver)," n.d.) ("Powerhouse animation studios - 2D series compositor," n.d.).

If I were to summarize all that, I’d say that being able to show your capabilities is key, and obviously showing that you can handle what the specific studio is good at or known for, or whatever the particular project needs. Therefore, a portfolio of some kind is key. Let’s look at some ways we can make one of those as good as it can be.

According to Bloop Animation and PIXAR, good demo reels:

Should be absolutely no more than 4 minutes ("Creating your Reel - Pixar," n.d.)

Should only include great work

Should have your best work first (Meroz, 2019)

Should have basic or no music

Should have a breakdown of what you did in the clips, as well as progress increments to show how you did what you did

Should include a title card at the beginning and end with your name, phone, email, and even address in some cases ("Creating your Reel - Pixar," n.d.)

Should have each shot presented separately (Meroz, 2019)

Should have had the time taken to be polished ("Creating your Reel - Pixar," n.d.)

And now that we know that, we can start to create and curate as exceptional of a portfolio as we can. You might have to take some time to make things for your portfolio specifically, and that’s okay. That’s good, even. Obviously you can’t use previous examples of industry work you’ve done if you’ve only just graduated, or are almost at the end of your education. Point is, you know a little bit more about what employers and recruiters want now. Cater to what they want from you, but also show your own personal flair through the work you present to them. They are your target audience for your portfolio after all.

Last part now, what am I doing right now for my portfolio? Well…

SPOILER ALERT for NieR:Automata Ending A.

The thing I want to focus on is character acting in 2D animation, so I’ve picked a scene I really liked and am going to re-animate it from scratch, effectively adapting it from 3D to 2D with various adjustments in an effort to learn about and practice more of my focus.

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(Shirrako, SQUARE ENIX, 2017) (if the timestamp doesn't work, it's about 2:30:00)

This is the scene from the end of the first third of NieR:Automata, where 2B has to strangle 9S to death in order to end his pain due to the corruption that has spread from the machines to him.

It’s an emotional scene, and I want to improve my ability to capture things like that. The character designs will be simplified, the shot compositions will be altered to varying degrees. The idea is that I use the movement and acting present in the original scene as a base from which I develop my own interpretation of it, all the while improving my own craft.

Exercises like these, essentially a form of study, can be extremely useful in creating a portfolio, along with showing potential employers that you can adapt to different styles and forms of storytelling, as well as the obvious benefit of furthering your animation skills through practice.

Reference List:

Chapman, P. (2017, May 19). Hayao Miyazaki seeks helpers for his final feature film (Really). Retrieved from https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2017/05/19-1/hayao-miyazaki-seeks-helpers-for-his-final-feature-film-really?utm_source=community_cr&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=news&referrer=community_cr_twitter_news

Creating your Reel - Pixar. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/a/nv.ccsd.net/pixar/working-at-pixar

Crunchyroll Collection, MAPPA. (2022, May 17). Chainsaw Man | OFFICIAL TRAILER [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96zmDlWCBk

Harding, D. (2021, August 19). Chainsaw man director looking for new animators to train up at MAPPA by offering full benefits. Retrieved from https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2021/08/19-1/chainsaw-man-director-looking-for-new-animators-to-train-up-at-mappa-by-offering-full-benefits

Meroz, M. (2019, March 25). Creating an animation demo Reel - The complete guide. Retrieved from https://www.bloopanimation.com/animation-demo-reel/

Nakayama, R. (2021, August 18). スタッフ募集について｜なかやま｜pixivFANBOX. Retrieved from https://r-nkym.fanbox.cc/posts/2623524

Powerhouse animation studios - 2D series compositor. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://jobs.lever.co/powerhouseanimation/50269058-4148-4b13-a211-cac0976d30fd

Shirrako, SQUARE ENIX. (2017, March 6). Nier Automata - All Cutscenes / Full Movie (All Characters) ALL ENDINGS [Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/m0Cj8-0lHXs?t=9029

Takai, S. (2017). 宮崎駿新作長編アニメーション映画制作のためのスタッフ（新人）募集. Retrieved from https://www.ghibli.jp/info/011243/

Titmouse - General submission (LA, NY, Vancouver). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://jobs.lever.co/titmouse/cb5f7498-a3e8-4a6a-9286-f36d2a689420

#Youtube

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nicksvenssonanimation · 2 years

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What is the point, exactly? And how is that going to work with a bunch of people walking around in the centre of the city?

The point of something is incredibly important to keep in focus throughout the entirety of production, can’t let it get away from you or it could bring the whole thing down in a messy heap of things that don’t quite work together. The meaning could be lost, the visual choices could feel incongruent, the music might feel like it’s from something else.

This project, Escape, is overall characterized by its aesthetic choices, and how they convey the meaning I wish to showcase. That meaning is, of course, that escaping from overwhelming pressure is perfectly alright actually, taking just a moment to relax is okay. The people who I want to see this, who I want to have the meaning sink in for, are those 16 to 30 year olds who are in the midst of stressful times (particularly on the younger end of that scale) who might think they don’t have the time, or that it wouldn’t help, to step away and relax even for just a moment. The choice of a school setting helps this, being a largely shared experience, as does the choice of having music be the mechanism behind the escape, something that most people have on hand on a daily basis.

In trying to figure out how this fits into everything, particularly how it fits into the suite of content displayed on Yagan Tower, it’s important to note visual influences. The reason for this is that the visual aspect of an animated project is one of its most defining, and in the case of this tower in particular (on which the sound has to compete with the abundant noise of the city), the single most important thing in conveying anything at all.

I am heavily influenced by the works in the anime industry, in particular those of production company Kyoto Animation. The studio, over the years, has cultivated a process and a style that has led them to create films such as A Silent Voice (2016) and Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) (both directed by one Naoko Yamada), and series such as Violet Evergarden (2018). In particular they are known for their precise storyboards/cinematography and general visual style, which incorporates a manner of post processes, along with the intricate drawings and movements underneath. It’s these things that have influenced my development, and my focus, as an animator and storyteller, and in Escape they show up through the shot choice and through the post processing.

(Campaign Brief, 2021) (Screenwest, n.d.) (Hooper, 2020)

It was important to bring all that up because, well, the tower is suited for very crisp and brightly colored pieces of art. “On the giant screen, you could find anything from abstract graphics, to visual artworks, live-streamed events and community pieces. You can also witness how the screen can respond to movement in the space using interactive weather, pedestrian and train movement sensors.” (DevelopmentWA). As you can see here, it’s also built to advertise, and interact with the surroundings in real-time. Visual artworks themselves are only a small piece of the rotation.

Escape is not those things, it’s soft instead of crisp, it’s not blindingly bright with primary colors everywhere. It doesn’t fit completely with the popular rotation of pieces chosen and shown year-round. That in itself is certainly one way in which it stands out, it is different to what’s usually there, but more to the point it follows the best way, I feel, to convey the message I want to get across. It conveys the isolated pressure turned relaxing breeze, it shows the use of music as a means to create that turn, along with the important visual character beats. It clearly communicates these things, and given how short some people may stick around for, that is incredibly important.

I wasn’t necessarily actively thinking about how I could make my specific project differ from what else is on the tower, mostly because I was set on a visual style from the onset, and I wanted to stick with that and figure out a way to make it work on the tower. The restrictions of a cylindrical screen that should hide the seam are not to be taken lightly, or ignored. I came up with a theme, a composition, visual influences, musical influences, and a plan to go about doing each piece of this puzzle I’d made for myself.

Along the way, it turned out that it’d stand out through these pieces anyway, what with each theme being unique, the composition being carefully constructed to work with the tower’s limitations, and the visual and audio design differing from the other pieces of art on the typical rotation (not to mention being different from advertisements and real-time interactive events).

I’ve got a plan to achieve what I want to achieve as a storyteller and animator in this particular project with the time I have left, and I’m going to stick to that until it’s over and it’s up on the screen (hopefully more than once).

Reference List:

[Photograph]. (2021, September 2). Campaign Brief. https://asset-cdn.campaignbrief.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/09/02110843/perthisok-x-yagan-square-exhibition.jpg

DevelopmentWA. (n.d.). Digital tower. DevelopmentWA - Shaping our State's future. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://developmentwa.com.au/projects/redevelopment/yagan-square/digital-tower

Hooper, D. (2020, April 1). Yagan Square Digital Tower [Photograph]. David Hooper Art. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0315/0508/8652/articles/Screen_Shot_2019-12-19_at_6.10.23_pm.jpg?v=1585707232

Moore, D. M. (2017, October 20). A silent voice shows why Kyoto animation is one of the top animation studios. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/20/16482234/a-silent-voice-kyoto-animation-kyoani

Mother's Basement. (2018, November 9). Liz and the Blue Bird - KyoAni's Musical Masterpiece [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr-s7c_WY60

Screenwest. (n.d.). [Photograph]. screenwest. http://www.screenwest.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mel-McVee-yagan-crop.jpg

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

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Accidentally stumbling upon a target audience is fine, actually.

A target audience is “a group of people with specific interests and of a defined age, gender, interests, etc.” (Red Rock Entertainment Ltd, 2018).

It is an incredibly important thing to consider during the planning stage, it becomes a very large factor in any and all decisions made about how the final product will take shape. Part of it is setting a boundary for things you can do, how far you could push the amount of blood for example, but it can also mean things other than restrictions. If you’re going for a younger target audience, you may need to be more direct with how you handle the subject matter than if you were to go for a young adult target audience, and the subject matter itself might be better suited to different audiences. It determines how you go about doing things in a way that the target audience can both understand and accept.

As my project currently is, it’s a free display in the middle of the city that people can walk past and view at their leisure. It’s not complicated, it’s very restricted in terms of how it can present itself, and it needs to be read and understood extremely efficiently, as I cannot rely on people necessarily sticking around. My target audience is also relatively simple, an age bracket of around 16 to 40, and a particular subject matter that appeals to a certain group of people. That subject matter of course being the overwhelming nature of things, and the need to escape from it for even a moment. It’s something many people have experienced, and in the age bracket I’ve determined, that experience is either pretty fresh or still ongoing. The knowledge of this target audience is based on my own experience, and the experience I’ve seen of those around me. This is why I’ve set it in a high school too, to get closer to one of the most stressful parts of a young adult’s life. Of course, that’s only part of it. As I said, I cannot rely on people sticking around long enough, so there’s also the visual aspect itself to consider. It has to catch people’s attention, but not so much that it distracts the traffic, and it has to be pleasing, while also feeding into the subject matter. So, given the specifications of the tower and our client’s advice, not that I’ve been able to test this yet, bright colors work best, and so do daytime scenes. To that end, it is a daytime scene with bright colors, and that brightness expands over the course of the focal character’s mental escape from the world around them, a sort of freeing feeling coming over them as they finally relax. While the colors are bright, they are soft, and to bring it all into one cohesive image, I’m employing various post processing effects such as camera blur and a radial fading effect accomplished by a growing mask with a lot of feathering. This accomplishes a very controlled camera effect with an edge blur that I’m also using to hide the seam, since the tower is a cylindrical display. The last part is the audio, which cannot be heard so much in this busy part of the city, so while it is incredibly important to the project, I still have to treat it as less so than every other part. The audio, in this case, is also soft, and features sounds from the area depicted, along with a focus on piano accompanied by various other instruments. The audio, in accordance to the tower specifications, is quiet in order to not distract traffic. A large part of the process of refining your project with a particular target audience in mind is “identifying where the target audience might be, and inviting people to test it” (Red Rock Entertainment Ltd, 2018). To that end, this project will be tested on the tower itself every two weeks as things progress, seeing if each of these aspects that are being crafted around the tower’s specifications are functioning in the way I intend them to.

The aesthetic choices I’ve outlined are a combination of what I’ve been told by the client will work best on the display we’re creating for, and my own personal subjective preferences. I’ve been able to deploy those preferences to heighten the subject matter, which is another point in which the target audience has been considered, particularly how they connect and relate to it in a personal sense.

If I were to turn it into a more commercially viable project, then as I talked about in the previous post, I’d consider fleshing it out into a short film, which wouldn’t require much change in the subject matter. Or, alternatively, I’d bring it into something larger and make it an important character moment or arc. In both ways, it would not be under the same restrictions enforced by the Yagan Tower’s nature. It would feature more filmic elements, such as changing camera angles, more complicated animation, a more involved story, clearer character acting, more focus on the music. However, the target audience would only change slightly. It’d still be the same age bracket, it’d still be the same emotional connection, the only thing different would be that the engagement would be much stronger, given that it’s not relegated to passersby in a busy part of a city who might have places to go.

So, the target audience is incredibly vital to going about producing or pitching absolutely anything in any creative context, even if you’re just doing it on your own. It determines how you go about the production process, it determines restrictions for content, it determines how you convey what you want to convey. This project’s focus has been determined by its target audience, even if at first I wasn’t actively considering it in that way. The subject matter connects directly to the 16 to 40, or young adult, age bracket, and the aesthetic brings this forward while also working well with the tower’s specifications and viewing statistics. It should catch people’s attention without causing disruption, and it should get the point across efficiently. I’ll be testing it on the tower itself soon enough, so we’ll see how I need to alter it to best suit the perspective of my target audience.

Reference List:

Red Rock Entertainment Ltd. (2018, December 12). How to uncover the proper target audience for your film [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://red-rock-films.medium.com/how-to-uncover-the-proper-target-audience-for-your-film-bfbb101d078

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

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Success on a large cylinder is different to success on a small rectangle.

Marketability and commercial success don’t always have to be about releasing a product in a way many people can access at their discretion, like a game or movie. Sometimes, it can be something like an advertisement. People don’t actively seek out advertisements, but they come across them anyway, and if they do their job, they’re successful.

My project isn’t an advertisement, it’s effectively a short film, but the method in which it will be shown to people is not entirely dissimilar. In fact, it’s being shown on a tower that many advertisements also use. The big tower in Yagan Square. So, in this way, people don’t necessarily seek it out, but they’ll certainly see it when walking around the city in that area.

Success, then, is measured by continued engagement with the product after the initial eye-catching. The project’s only marketability is itself, and how well it is presented, and how people talk about it or stick around to see it. So it’s not a typical situation for narrative-based content. It’s more of an open exhibit than anything else.

Appeal

“Appeal is the most important principle of animation” (Hurd, 2017). When something appeals to someone, it resonates with them in some way shape or form. That can be character design, general aesthetic, the narrative, how the whole thing is presented, the score, etc. Whatever it is, the audience latches onto it, and it brings them in.

Animation has many different rules and guidelines, and of the main twelve that everyone talks about as “the basics”, appeal is one of them. It can be broken down into two parts, the order and the interest. Order, in this context, means what you’re actually trying to do, and interest is how you keep people… well… interested (Hurd, 2017). That is to say, order can be all of the different animation guidelines, and the physical restrictions of the action, but the interest is how you break those guidelines and the restrictions to make something that feels better, in whatever way you want it to feel.

What is my project anyway?

It’s about escaping the overwhelming nature of the world, particularly school, in order to calm down and relax. That’s the simplest way to put it.

More specifically, it’s about a high school student breaking off from a crowd of other students to go sit down on a bench, put on her headphones, and be transported to another world as an escape from the pressure. It uses music to set the tone, and it changes during the different stages. It has a focus on composition and compositing, and a soft colored aesthetic.

The appeal of this project is then based around these aesthetic elements in particular, as the tower is… well it’s a giant screen in a busy area where sound isn’t extremely likely to be heard, even if it’s still an incredibly important part of it.

Appeal is each piece of a project, but also how they all come together. All of these pieces, the soft colors, the choice of composition, the music, the character design, the compositing choices, they all come together to create a specific kind of feeling and tone. Not too intrusive, almost pensive in nature. These pieces of appeal also lend themselves to traditional 2D animation very well, as has been seen with the constant developments of compositing and how they’ve been used in media such as Violet Evergarden and Liz and the Blue Bird (KyoaniChannel, 2018).

Along with that, there is also narrative appeal, which I haven’t discussed yet. Narrative appeal is how the audience connects to your story, how they empathize or sympathize or understand what’s going on and why it’s happening. They might connect with characters, they might connect with the story itself, or the themes, any piece of the product really (Young, 2018). That connection is vital in keeping an audience’s interest and engagement, and if you’ve made that connection well, then you’ve succeeded. This narrative involves a high school student taking a moment to escape from the pressure of life. The overwhelming nature of life is something that many people experience, and setting it in a school adds to that further by not only expanding the target audience, but also being more specific to a feeling that even more people have had.

How would I potentially expand this?

This is a narrative-based project, for me anyway, and therefore if I wanted to take this further than Yagan, it would be down the path of turning it into a short film, or incorporating the idea into another, larger project. Perhaps someone might see this short version on the tower, and become interested in my work, but that’s a sort of ideal situation that isn’t based in any sort of realistic reality. Obviously, if this doesn’t happen, you need to either fund this independently, or secure it from somewhere else. Some avenues available are pitching conventions (Archer, 2018), or kickstarter, or just putting it up on a social media platform and showing it off that way. Many independent animators, or people just starting out in an independent fashion, use social media to become more present in the industry. I could use an expanded version of this project as part of my portfolio to potentially get more work, using the project as a way to market myself if I wanted to.

Conclusion

A product’s success is determined by its goal. If it accomplishes the goal it set out to achieve, then it is successful. This particular project of mine was built and designed for the Yagan Tower, and its goal is to illustrate the idea that it's okay to take a minute to relax and escape the overwhelming nature of life. If I can use the appeal I’ve created through my design choices to catch people’s attention and also convey this point in the very distracting environment the Tower is in, then I’ve succeeded, then the product has succeeded.

Reference List:

Hurd, E. (2017, July 9). Appeal: The 12 basic principles of animation. AM Blog. https://www.animationmentor.com/blog/appeal-the-12-basic-principles-of-animation/

Archer, L. (2018, November 9). The art of animation success. IBC. https://www.ibc.org/trends/the-art-of-animation-success/3435.article

Curry Udon. (2019, April 18). The Making of Liz and the Blue Bird, Vol. 13: Photography (Digital Compositing) [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4RKqtnt7rQ

This is an English subtitled version of 『リズと青い鳥』メイキングVol.13 撮影編

KyoaniChannel. (2018, May 25). 『リズと青い鳥』メイキングVol.13 撮影編 [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4RKqtnt7rQ

Young, R. (2018, March 4). Writing about the audience in ‘Narrative and ideology’ [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://media.codes/writing-about-the-audience-in-narrative-and-ideology-f9fa735e0759

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

Text

The Japanese animation industry, and how it's a bit unstable right now.

The Japanese animation industry has, over the past couple of years, become infinitely more accessible to those outside of Japan. We have many animators from the west that work on these projects, and information is more widespread than ever before.

Given all that, it’s best to take a broad look at where the industry stands right now, where it may be headed, and how you, a young animator, may be able to start getting into the industry.

Part One: Mess

The Japanese animation industry has some very large cracks in it, and it’s barely holding itself together sometimes. It’s common knowledge at this point, that scheduling is poor, that pay is poorer, and that the conditions are somehow even worse than that. But what does that actually mean? Why is it this way? What specifically is causing this? How could it be solved? Is it because of the budget? Is it because everyone outsources, and that makes it bad?

Let’s start with what this scheduling thing is, really.

Some things about TV anime production that you need to know; it involves multiple teams “rotating” between episodes so that the production is overall more efficient, the scope of the project is determined by the production budget, pre-production is key, studios work with various different partners, and project schedules can very easily overlap or encroach upon others.

Having a rotating set of teams is pretty self explanatory, it allows the staff to have multiple episodes in production at any one time, meaning that the overall schedule has more room to breathe than if there was only one in production at a time. These episodes are said to typically take three months to complete each, though this is rarely the case. There are too many different factors, early episodes may have more dedicated to them because they’re first and the deadlines aren’t looming, priorities of which episodes are more important than others can shift if it wasn’t decided beforehand, and anything unexpected could happen at any time that throws it all off. There are ways to use this system of prioritization to a project’s advantage, say, like Mob Psycho 100 II putting their most intense episode at the front of the queue so that the director they got for it could start and finish it before leaving for the military, as one example. That sort of flexible management is invaluable, and is a somewhat rare occurrence. “The production schedule of an episode is rarely stable, or at the theoretical average anyway” (kViN, 2021).

Production scope is something else that affects this, as it determines the overall resources available, and how much time can be put into it. The budget is a large deciding factor in this scope, as you need funding to actually begin work. However, there is a large misconception that people have when it comes to the budget of a project. The idea that a higher budget equals a higher quality product, and that a lower budget equals a lower quality product isn’t entirely true, but it is a concept that many people hold onto. While yes, budget is a large factor in how a production turns out in the end, it’s not an automatic good or bad result depending on the price. Budget changes the scope, which then changes the time and the schedule, and where the project lands on the list of priorities for the studio, and changes how many people can be brought onto the project. But then you have really talented people working extra time and extra hard on things they are paid no more for than normal, you can have a smaller team with a smaller budget turn out something amazing, and a large team with a large budget turn out something less than. People are now shifting towards a more accurate, but still unsure and unclear understanding, that of the scheduling being a more influential part of the quality.

Speaking of scheduling, no project exists on its own, and all these different productions butt heads with each other constantly, if not overlapping entirely. A good example of scheduling overlap is Cloverworks’ current and upcoming slate of projects. Here we have Kerorira, who put enough work into 2021’s Wonder Egg Priority for Sakuga Blog’s kViN to call him “the WEP hero”. Kerorira is currently drawing all merchandise illustrations for My Dress-Up Darling, while at the same time preparing for his debut as character designer for Bocchi the Rock. And he showed up in the production of Akebi’s Sailor Uniform for good measure, which is being produced by Yuichi Fukushima, who is also working on the early production of Spy x Family. All of this is at one studio, Cloverworks, and bar Wonder Egg, it’s all for this year. (kViN, 2022)

That’s the internal staff overlap anyway, and it’s certainly an extreme example, but it illustrates the point clearly. Of course, there are also external factors with schedules coming up against each other. If one studio is working on two different projects for two different production committees, and the one that happens to be releasing earlier needs a delay, the committee behind the second production might not allow their project to be pushed back, leading to rushing and crunching on the former. Studios like BONES can brute force the issue due to their pool of staff, but other studios aren’t so large or so lucky.

Of course, one way to relieve the stress on your core staff is to outsource some work to other studios or freelancers. Outsourcing is, of course, the act or “process of subcontracting part of the work to other studios. Partial outsourcing is common, but there are instances of full outsourcing, in which an entire episode is handled by a different studio” (Sakuga Blog)

If you’re not Kyoto Animation, most of your episodes, if not all, have bits and pieces outsourced to staff outside the studio. The ideal point of outsourcing is, as I said, to free up the core staff a bit, or to keep overall production on schedule and running smoothly. This can be done in part, or in full, and people tend to latch onto the fully outsourced episodes when discussing the topic. This leads to another misconception, that there’s a qualitative difference between an “in-house” episode and an outsourced episode, which isn’t the case because episodes that are mainly produced in-house also involve much outsourcing, and there are fully outsourced episodes that involve more of the core staff than the ones in-house in order to keep everything cohesive. Another misconception on top of that is that outsourcing is done to cut costs, when it is in fact more expensive to hire an entire new set of people for a specific period of time.

Outsourcing isn’t inherently bad, many studios start out as only doing work for others, some stay that way and grow into integral “support studios”. It’s a vital part of keeping the industry functioning.

We haven’t even talked about pay, and the staffing issue.

The industry has functioned on a pay-per-cut system for a very long time, and it has not had an effective way to account for the difference in cut complexity or work required, only being concerned with the quantity of work you hand in. The average pay is about 2000 to 5000 JPY ($17US to $43US) per cut. It’s only recently that a way to circumvent this issue, that of binding and semi-binding fees. These are amounts of money paid to artists to entice them into a long-term commitment to a project, either exclusively, or a higher priority. This can work, but it runs into a large problem of its own. If the money is paid in advance, and the production balloons in length, that initial payment may not get increased, and therefore the artist in the contract now has to work much more for the same amount of money as before.

It’s not the norm to be very careful with production schedules and how they’re paced, and it’s certainly not the norm to have salary pay. But then, that’s what Kyoto Animation is doing, and they’re well known for putting out incredible work after incredible work, and they’ve been doing things this way for years. More recently Ufotable has been running Demon Slayer through their in-house team, and Mamoru Hosoda’s theatrical studio Chizu is small and tight-knit, and their work has also been consistently impressive (kViN, 2022). So things are changing, albeit slowly, as the problems become too big to ignore.

The issue of staff, then, is that there’s a tremendous need due to overproduction, but not enough people to go around. There’s a lot of want, on the part of distant producers, to achieve the highest levels of production humanly possible, even when the people actually doing the production would know it’s unreasonable given whatever resources they have. There are many many productions that are trying to achieve this same high production-value, and they’re happening so frequently that artists are spread thin across them, and so projects are scrambling to gather the best team possible while facing all those other projects trying the same.

So, right now, the industry is in a state of overproduction, of low pay, and of instability. There are things that are beginning to surface that will help, or at least start the process of digging it out of the hole it’s in, but that will take time, and acceptance on the part of the people who run the whole thing.

Part Two: Where do we go from here?

Ever since the early 2000s, really the late 1980s, the Japanese industry has been moving more and more towards a digital pipeline, whether it be the integration of 3D technology as a supplemental addition to the 2D animation, or moving the 2D animation process itself to a digital environment. So far, it’s been a smooth but slow process, with most of the industry still working with physical materials. However, great strides have been made with the software used in the digital pipelines that do exist, and digital work is now a major part of the overall production process across the industry. While animation may still be handled mostly on paper, compositing, visual effects, and those 3D integrations are all handled digitally.

Digital 2D animation got its start with webgen back in 2004. To explain, webgen was a term coined for animators without typical industry training who worked digitally and posted on the internet. Some of these animators were scouted and brought in to work on BECK by Osamu Kobayashi. They didn’t end up using digital for that production, however. (kViN, 2018)

Digital production wouldn’t be used heavily until 2005, with Noein setting the foundations for its use in the industry as a whole. Director Kazuki Akane and their team wanted to incorporate three dimension camera work, along with all the different unique animation styles among them, and they found this was the best way to do that.

Three years later, in 2008, Akane would return to digital production, this time making it a major part of his project Birdy The Mighty: Decode. This decision paid off, as each of the animators’ personal styles came through in the portions that were produced digitally, leading to a very kinetic and flowing animation style throughout the two season run.

Since then, 2D animation production has slowly integrated itself into the industry, even faster than it would have without the success of Birdy and the newfound confidence in the medium because of it. A major milestone of this process was the first episode of Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta, which was the first ever anime episode to be entirely animated digitally.

Now, we have studios like Colorido, who have worked hard to create an entirely digital production pipeline, one that has gone through changes as the company’s evolved.

This brings us to software, how is all this being done anyway?

There are many different options for what software to use, and different studios use different software combinations for each of the different stages of production. The most common one for storyboarding is Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, which is used by Toei Animation (One Piece), David Production (JOJO), OLM (Pokemon) (先を見据えて挑むデジタル作画プロジェクト（事例『ポケットモンスターXY＆Z』：オー・エル・エム）, 2016), and by Makoto Shinkai for his films (Your Name.) (電子システム事業部, n.d.). The most common one for the layout, 1st key animation, and 2nd key animation is Clip Studio Paint as of 2019, the next most common being either Flash or TVPaint. CSP has had Toei work on it to the point where they developed a feature that exports a timesheet of the animation, for example, and TVPaint has Colorido using it in theri entirely digital pipeline, and WIT STUDIO developing a timesheet plugin for it, along with making a YouTube channel explaining how to use it for animation. The in-between stage is still mostly paper, but Retas Stylos is the most commonly used digital program, used by Colorido, Toei, ufotable, and MAPPA). For the scanning process, if it’s done on paper, it’s scanned in and then imported into Retas Traceman and Paintman, which separates the different pencil colors into different layers in order to color. OpenToons is also used for coloring. As for the rest of the production process, After Effects dominates compositing, with OLM developing several plugins for it (OLM, Inc., n.d.), Maya, 3ds max, and to a lesser extent Cinema 4D are the main programs in the 3D asset space, and Premiere Pro dominates editing (Tonari Animation, 2019).

Now, back to the future, but this time with the 3D technology being brought in to elevate the 2D animation. Many productions use things like 3D backgrounds, or 3D mechanical animation, a 3D camera (combined with the background), and the technologies that are used have only improved over time. A recent example is the film Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (or Hathaway’s Flash, depending on where you live), which saw studio Sunrise switch to 3D modeling and animation for the mobile suits for the first time in such a major way. They were one of the last remaining studios that had held onto traditional mechanical animation, but the switch was made due to younger staff not having experience with that traditional method, and therefore they just couldn’t get a team together who all knew how to do it. “The number of animators who can draw mecha is dwindling, especially among in-betweeners. There are not many young people who learn how to draw mecha, and the veterans are aging to the point where drawing an intensive amount by themselves could lead to health problems.” (Sunrise producer Naohiro Ogata, Anime! Anime!, 2018).

The future is one of bringing everything together, and moving to entirely digital pipelines as the normal. This switch to digital in particular will be a great step forward for the industry, as the whole world is connected digitally, and as studios move to that same software, their pool of talent suddenly grows substantially bigger.

Part Three: How do I get in.

Anime is a worldwide phenomenon now, no longer confined to the smallest conventions, no longer frowned upon (as much) to watch. Because of that, many more people who see these pieces of media are inspired, and want to become animators, or background artists, or storyboard artists, etc. And they want to go work in that industry. So, all of us who want to get in, how exactly do we go about doing that?

Recently, some select few productions have been sourcing new foreign staff, freelancers, from Twitter and other online platforms. The one that’s been in the public spotlight the most out of these select few, is Cloverworks’ Wonder Egg Priority, from 2021. The production of Wonder Egg was a mess, and they needed assistance to get episodes out, so the team contacted new production assistants Blou and FAR through various means. Blou was brought on after helping one of the freelancers already hired, ani, and FAR was already translating materials for them (Morrissy, 2021). Blou was the main PA, and had to find animators who would accept to do key animation for the cuts he had to hand out, while also explaining anything necessary and, afterwards, checking everything was done correctly and then organizing it (Morrissy, 2021). To find new animators who want to work on anime, where better to look than Twitter? Throughout this series’ run, each week you’d see posts about artists participating in the production of that week’s episode, often for 2nd key animation and layout work. Wonder Egg still ended up being a far from perfectly managed production to work on, however, with it all being summed up by Blou with “sometimes we want to do our very best and forget about the consequences” in response to the stressful production situation.

That animator Blou was helping initially, ani, talked about their experience with Wonder Egg, which was the first anime project they worked on. They were found through Twitter, and even though they knew the opportunity wouldn’t have been extended to them if the schedule wasn’t already in a frantic and stressful state, they accepted the offer. (ANI: Animator of wonder egg priority | Exclusive interview, 2021). They talked about episode director corrections, which they then send off to the animation director to fit it back to the character sheets, and that time management with this sort of job is absolutely key, and it’s necessary to be smart and prioritize. You can’t always give special care to every cut you’re given, oh and “References are very important, don’t be afraid to use them because many big artists also use them!”

(ANI: Animator of wonder egg priority | Exclusive interview, 2021).

There are some things to be aware of, or to ask yourself, when trying to enter the anime industry. In the article I pulled from earlier in this part, How Foreign-Born University Students Became Animation Coordinators on Wonder Egg Priority by Kim Morrissy for Anime News Network, Blou and FAR had some things to say to those people. Blou stressed that you need to be aware of the conditions and bad times, that “nowadays, production assistants are quite desperate and can offer anyone who can simply draw some work. You might be happy to receive an offer when you aren’t ready, but the truth is that it’s a poisoned gift. Take your first job only when you’re (more than) ready”, and manage your schedule well at all times because “after your first credit, you’ll likely start getting a lot more offers. It’s important to decline most of them and manage your schedule, both for yourself and the staff” (Morrissy, 2021).

FAR put forward some questions to ask yourself before accepting a job request, which boil down to “Do I have the level of skill and knowledge of the notations to do a decent job? Where I live, is it really possible to make a living with unit prices like 2500 yen for a single layout? And do I know which animation studios use outdated methods to pay freelancers, and which ones use PayPal or something similar?” (Morrissy, 2021). There are more details to those questions, but that’s the overall set, and if you can answer all the questions with an affirmative, then you’re ready to accept your first job, and if not, do what you need to do to get to an affirmative answer.

If you’re looking into getting into this, I’d recommend you read the whole article, as it has much more detail.

Once foreign freelance animators, who are essentially this generation’s webgen, get into the industry, they’ll learn things they hadn’t before, and couldn’t without some sort of formal and hands-on guidance (kViN, 2021). It’s how the older generations of webgen learnt on the job, and it applies now too. Foreign animators have been working in the industry for a while now, but over the past few years, and especially over the past year, it’s become an increasingly larger part of the discussion. This is due to the state the industry is in right now, where everything is more accessible through the internet, and people communicate a lot more about it. And the opportunities have increased because of the problems that have plagued the industry for decades, and will soon get too big to ignore or sidestep anymore.

Conclusion: Where does that leave us, right now?

It’s gotten bigger, the Japanese animation industry, and with this massive size and reach, the problems that were always there have been magnified to the point where anyone can see them. With that, and with the internet making things more accessible and more open, those problems are now beginning to be solved. The pay is still low, but they’re coming up with ways to get around that. They’re still understaffed, but now their talent pool is worldwide thanks to online connectivity and digital tools, and people who want to work in the industry have a chance now. The technology used to put these projects together is improving, and they’re finding ways to make it more efficient and more friendly. Everything is moving forward, and while there are still many hurdles to overcome, many problems with the industry as a whole still unresolved and becoming harsher, signs of improvement are there, and there’s now a lot more eyes on it too.

For now, we are able to participate in something we weren’t able to before, but always hoped to.

Reference List:

ANI: Animator of wonder egg priority | Exclusive interview. (2021, March 26). Sakuga Brasil. https://sakugabrasil.com/ani-animator-of-wonder-egg-priority-exclusive-interview/

Barrett, R. (n.d.). CV-artsmart: Download and install. Cineversity. https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaylist/cv-artsmart/artsmart_download

CACANi [@CACANiAnimation]. (2018, April 5). Captain Tsubasa - Powered by CACANi! [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/CACANiAnimation/status/981702432563408896

Fabrice. (2016, July 12). TVPaintの日本語ユーザー専用フォーラムへようこそ！. TVPaintの日本語ユーザー専用フォーラムへようこそ！ - トップページ. https://forum-jp.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?t=9

Kojinaoya. (2015, October 16). Visiting studio Colorido: Up-and-Coming digital animation studio. JapanAnimeMedia. https://studiodomo.jp/wordpress/visiting-studio-colorido-up-and-coming-digital-animation-studio/

kViN. (2019, November 23). Pokemon sun & moon production retrospect: Animation as character and tone. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2019/11/21/pokemon-sun-moon-production-retrospect-animation-as-character-and-tone/

kViN. (2020, March 21). A colorful LEAP into the next age of anime – 5 years of studio Colorido works. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2018/10/21/colorido/

kViN. (2020, March 18). Independent Japanese animation & the commercial industry in 2020: Blurring the lines. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2020/03/18/indies-megamix/

kViN. (2021, July 13). Mobile suit Gundam Hathaway’s focused excellence and the state of 2D Mecha anime. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2021/07/13/gundam-hathaways-focused-excellence-and-the-state-of-2d-mecha/

KViN. (2021, November 28). The complicated relationship between anime production schedules, working conditions, quality, and exploitation. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2021/11/28/anime-production-schedules/

kViN. (2021, May 4). Blurring the lines between fan communities and professional animation producers – Interview with studio Tonton producer Blou. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2021/05/04/blurring-the-lines-between-fan-communities-and-professional-animation-producers-interview-with-studio-tonton-producer-blou/

kViN. (2021, June 9). What actually is anime outsourcing? – The historical context and current reality of anime’s life support. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2021/06/09/what-actually-is-anime-outsourcing-the-historical-context-and-current-reality-of-animes-life-support/

kViN. (2021, March 13). TV anime, a deadly landscape even for high profile productions: SK8 and wonder egg priority’s struggles. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2021/03/13/tv-anime-a-deadly-landscape-even-for-high-profile-productions/

kViN. (2021, February 27). The advent of digital 2D animation in the anime industry: 10 years since Birdy the mighty decode. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2018/07/31/the-advent-of-digital-2d-animation-in-the-anime-industry-10-years-since-birdy-the-mighty-decode/

kViN. (2022, February 22). The anime industry bottleneck: The unrewarding nightmare to assemble a high-profile team. Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/02/22/the-anime-industry-bottleneck-the-unrewarding-nightmare-to-assemble-a-high-profile-team/

Major animation update for clip studio paint, now with camera actions and timeline export. (2018, November 29). CELSYS. https://www.celsys.co.jp/en/topic/2018112901

Morrissy, K. (2018, December 23). Sunrise producer: 'We're the only studio that can make hand-drawn robot anime'. Anime News Network. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2018-12-22/sunrise-producer-were-the-only-studio-that-can-make-hand-drawn-robot-anime/.141134

Morrissy, K. (2021, June 28). How foreign-born University students became animation coordinators on wonder egg priority. Anime News Network. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2021-06-28/how-foreign-born-university-students-became-animation-coordinators-on-wonder-egg-priority/.173639

Nishimura, T. [@taiki_nishimura]. (2021, October 7). Three months become eleven [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/taiki_nishimura/status/1453057359740211211

OLM, Inc. (n.d.). OLM digital research and development. OLM Digital R&D. https://olm.co.jp/rd/technology/tools/?lang=en

Tonari Animation. (2019, February 25). Software Use in the Anime Industry [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DSnKa--aMM

Tvpaint Wit [YouTube Channel]. (n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiT0Di_03OKokFYYb0u5dlw

TWIN ENGINE. (2016, July 29). スタジオコロリドアニメーションができるまで [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWrWcydZHi8

ガンダムブランドを支えるDNAとは？サンライズ設立46年の歩み、今後の展望小形Pが語る【インタビュー】. (2018, December 25). アニメ！アニメ！. https://animeanime.jp/article/2018/12/20/42241.html

先を見据えて挑むデジタル作画プロジェクト（事例『ポケットモンスターXY＆Z』：オー・エル・エム）. (2016, January 27). CG・映像の専門情報サイト | CGWORLD.jp. https://cgworld.jp/feature/cgw209t1-olm-2.html

山田井ユウキ. (2015, October 22). アニメ制作のデジタル化の波は「絵コンテ」にも - 作業をどのくらい効率化できるのか? TECH+. https://news.mynavi.jp/techplus/article/20151022-tb/

怜欧, 遠. (2018, September 21). Storyboard Proの強みはひとつのソフトで絵コンテを完結できるところ【竹内良貴監督インタビュー】. Toon Boom Blog. https://blog.toonboom.com/ja/storyboard-proの強みはひとつのソフトで絵コンテを完結できるところ-竹内良貴監督インタビュー-

映画館からオリジナルアニメ映画が消える…？厳しい現状と今後の在り方について考察する. (2022, February 17). ウォッチムービー！. https://taroimovie.com/original_anime/

電子システム事業部, ダ. (n.d.). デジタル絵コンテ作成ツール storyboard Pro事例｜映画「君の名は。」. ダイキンITソリューションTOP ｜ダイキン工業株式会社電子システム事業部. https://www.comtec.daikin.co.jp/DC/prd/toonboom/kiminonawa.html

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

Text

What am I actually doing?

I’ve talked about some aspects of the commercial success of indie games, I’ve talked about how to draw the attention of an audience, and I’ve talked about what the point of a “walking simulator” is. These have all been about the industry on a larger scale.

However, now, I must talk about the small scale. The very small scale. The doing a small project at a university over the course of thirteen weeks in a group scale.

I’m studying at a place called the SAE Institute at the moment, which focuses on the creative arts. I, myself, am studying 2D Animation. This, for me, means hand drawn animation digitally, with the main influence being anime.

This term, however, has us in groups making an interactive experience in Unreal Engine 4. My job here is still to provide 2D Animation, along with being the project and narrative lead, but it’s implemented in a different way than what I’ve done before. We’ve set it up so that the narrative is delivered in a similar fashion to a visual novel, while still taking place in a 3D environment, and therefore character portraits are needed to go along with the on-screen text. That’s me, that’s what I’m providing in relation to my specialised study. Along with that, partway through, we decided that the characters within the 3D space would be 2D as well, so that was added to my responsibilities.

Why is it this way? Why have we decided to combine 2D storytelling with a 3D environment? Well, it’s mostly because my group consists of both people who work in 2D and people who work in 3D. It’s an accommodation for me so that I can actually work on my specialised area of study. Other than that though, it’s a perfectly valid method of conveying a narrative, allowing for more dynamic facial expressions and poses, although in this case they’re all very somber anyway.

Why is it somber then? Well, our project takes place in an abandoned city where the playable character helps spirits to pass on by listening to their stories. It’s a very lonely feeling thing. It’s my work that will convey these spirits’ emotions as they tell the audience about their lives.

So, what have I got to show at the moment?

Well, our project was scaled back to just one character for me to work with, so I’ve been working on who we call “The Grandfather Remnant”. He’s an old spirit who died of an unspecified illness in his home, surrounded by medical equipment.

At the moment I’ve roughly designed five of twelve expressions, though two of those are really just variations of each other, and I’ve done a rough proof of concept animation for the laughing expression.

That’s all I really have to show in terms of animation, but I have storyboarded the opening cutscene (which is a stretch goal of sorts)

(example of said storyboard),

laid out the full environment on a map (most of which has been cut now)

(example of said layout),

and I had redesigned the original three characters in order to make them easier to deal with when animating (two of which were cut).

(the ones that were cut).

It’s been a hard lesson to learn, that sometimes, things that you’ve worked on don’t end up in your final plans, but it’s certainly an important part of working. There’s always a chance the stuff you do won’t be used for whatever reason, don’t feel too bad about it, move on, and do better next time.

Anyway, where does this leave me?

I’ve seen once again where I am in terms of skill, and I realise I’m still not where I want to be. I want to improve to the point where I can work in the 2D animation industry, obviously. But what specifically? I suppose it’s time to talk about my inspirations.

SSSS.DYNAZENON - Episode 07 - What's Our Reason for Coming Together?

(Miyajima & Hasegawa, 2021)

I want to get to the point where I can pull something like this off.

I like anime, that much should be very obvious by my example there, and I want to work within that particular industry if possible. I know a bit about the production methods and workflow they have over there, enough so that I know more than the average viewer, but not as much as someone who’s had personal experience. I know that they use programs like Clip Studio Paint (or in some cases, the industry version by the same developers) rather than Toon Boom, as evidenced by the requirements I’ve seen to work in CSP when doing freelance work for some studios, and that same requirement being applied to new full time applicants (according to Ryu Nakayama, the director of the upcoming Chainsaw Man adaptation at studio MAPPA) (Lazic, 2021). I’ve been working with CSP for years now, and it’s a program I’m now pretty comfortable with. Of course, that’s not to say I’m comfortable with my skill level. Practice, hard work, and careful study are the things I need to do. I need to keep breaking down the things I see that I like, and try to understand how they were done, then do them myself. This is, of course, not to say I’m limiting myself to just working in the Japanese industry. No, I’m learning Toon Boom Harmony at the same time, which is the standard across many productions in the US, just to have that skill should I need it. There are other pieces of software that I can look into, but Clip Studio is the one rising in popularity. (Tonari Animation, 2019)

As for the things other than animating itself, I’m becoming more confident in my storyboards, though again, I still have a lot to learn, and I will never stop learning, and I’m aware that I need to get better at character design consistency and creation, which again, is something that requires practice and study.

Back to where this leaves me, right now.

I have a long way to go, I know that. I have the things that inspire me, and I have the steps I need to take to reach that level of skill and quality. Practice and study are those steps, and I’ve repeated that here because it’s important, it’s learning. Of course there’s also the matter of actually getting into the industry itself, but we’ll worry about that when I’m ready.

References:

Lazic, T. (2021, August 18). MAPPA to hire and train animators for chainsaw man and future projects. Anime Corner. https://animecorner.me/mappa-to-hire-and-train-animators-for-chainsaw-man-and-future-projects/

Hasegawa, K. (Writer), & Miyajima, Y. (Director). (2021, May 14). What's Our Reason for Coming Together? [TV series episode] In SSSS.DYNAZENON. Tokyo MX, BS11, MBS (https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/f24f4c5ec599773b6615f9d8f19787ed.mp4)

Tonari Animation. (2019, February 25). Software Use in the Anime Industry [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DSnKa--aMM

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

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The simulation of walking is a complicated process (what’s the point of this, anyway?)

“Walking simulator” is a broad term that’s come up with increasing frequency over the past decade, and because it’s so broad, there is a wide range of experiences that fall under that genre. However, they all have one thing in common. Their narrative and presentation are their key features. A “walking simulator”, then, is a game that functions as a narrative-based experience, where great care has been put into the presentation in visual, auditory, and interactive forms. The draw to these experiences are those two things and their execution.

Let’s start with one of the quintessential Playstation 3/4 games, Journey.

(Thatgamecompany, 2012)

Journey is a game about life, presenting it as a cycle, a journey with an end goal that sends the spirit right back to the start. The narrative has a point, but it isn’t directly conveyed to you, only implied through various ancient pictures and visual symbolism throughout.

The visual style has a very strong and simple color palette that changes based on the environment. It’s yellow and orange out on the warm sand, it’s blue in the underground cave, and when the world gets cold. It has this very neat reflectivity on the sand when the sun is in view.

However, if I were to point out one single thing that makes this game what it is, that holds it together, that attracts people to it… that would be its musical score, by Austin Wintory.

According to his website, across 2012 to 2013, his score for Journey won 34 awards, including the British Academy Awards for Games/Original Music and Games/Outstanding Achievement in Audio.

So, Journey has its narrative and presentation working together to draw people in and create an outstanding experience, one that most people agree on. Let’s move onto something a little more… divisive.

(Kojima Productions, 2019)

Death Stranding. Yes, this counts.

The broadness of the term “walking simulator” allows for all manner of experience to be classed as such. It is a narrative-based experience with presentation at the forefront. So, Death Stranding, a game with a clear narrative, and presentation at the forefront on all levels, is a “walking simulator”. Especially when the main gameplay is walking very specifically, so as to not drop the cargo.

Let’s talk about that first. The game’s presentation, in terms of interactivity, is that of the player character having to deliver cargo and packages to many different points on the map with as little damage as possible. The controls are based entirely around this, you have the triggers to stop yourself from swaying, you have the ability to drink Monster Energy. There are, of course, action sequences, but they use this interactivity system too. So, it is quite literally a “walking simulator”, in the way that the game simulates walking across great distances and difficult terrain.

Of course, the other elements of our definition of a “walking simulator” are there too. The narrative is at the forefront, there are over 7 hours of cutscenes, and it forms around the idea of communication and connectedness between people, and how important interpersonal relationships are in the world. There’s that driving statement.

The music is presented very uniquely, well, more of an extension of a previous game the development lead, Hideo Kojima, worked on. It works in two ways, the music score, mainly done by Ludvig Forssell, and the music soundtrack, which is a compilation of music from various artists Kojima likes, and what he thought fit. This compilation plays at various points in the travel sections of the game, much like a delivery worker would listen to music on a long drive. Unique.

Oh and the visual style, which is photo-realistic. And what they’ve accomplished there is no less than incredible. The environment is rendered with such incredible detail, and the performances are captured with the same care.

So, while not what you’d think of when you think “walking simulator”, Death Stranding still counts, and goes to show the wide range of the term.

Now it’s time for an experience widely believed to be the best example of this genre yet.

(Giant Sparrow, 2017)

What Remains of Edith Finch is an anthology of sorts, wherein the playable character, Edith Finch, navigates her childhood home, finding and reading the stories of her family members who died due to a mysterious curse set upon them. In reality, it’s a sequence of extremely unfortunate, and sometimes very sad, deaths brought on by various reasons. In the narrative, this curse, these deaths, are framed as a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the stories themselves are causing all these things to happen because it’s been ingrained in them that the curse is to blame. That’s your narrative draw, an anthology of unfortunate death.

The presentation then. You navigate the house, solving puzzles to get into each room, then you experience the stories from the perspective of the person they’re about. Sometimes they’re first person, sometimes they’re in a comic book. There are words that appear within the environment, handwritten versions of the narration Edith is giving, then they disappear as the next ones appear.

That leads into the visual style, which is simplistic and soft, but with many different items within the environment. It’s a mid-level of detail with simple shading, it feels like a painting. The style of the objects is… odd is the best way to describe it. It’s improbable, the house doesn’t follow physics too much, and the environment feels visually dynamic with a considerable amount of variety inside the house, almost contrastingly so.

The music is subtle, not ever forcing its way to the forefront, but not really leaving either. It’s a guide, and it feels quiet and calm. It’s actually Jeff Russo’s first videogame score.

The very best and clearest example of a “walking simulator”, reflected in its established place in narrative-based games.

So, after looking at all this, it still comes down to those two things. Narrative and presentation. If you have a unique narrative, or a unique execution of the narrative, and it’s done well, your experience will stand out.

I’m working on one at the moment, one that functions in a similar way to Edith Finch actually. It’s an anthology, framed by the playable character navigating an abandoned city. In this city they’ll find the spirits of people who used to live there, listen to their stories, and allow them to pass on. The point of this is to discuss the things and feelings that we as people leave behind due to our actions, and how they can remain long after we’re gone. So, already, there’s the narrative question. The whole point.

The presentation is a third person side scroller, with various 2D and 3D elements, all under one cohesive style, along with a strong sense of lighting and visual composition where needed. So, there’s our visual style.

The music is important to us too, with areas in the experience that amount to small-scale setpieces. The music is melancholic and space-filling, setting the tone for the experience overall.

We’re trying to learn from these “simulators”, and apply their broad strengths to our own ideas, as everyone should. These experiences are wonderful, their narratives are poignant, their visuals arresting, their music stunning. Why shouldn’t we look at them for guidance?

References:

Austin Wintory | Awards. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.austinwintory.com/awards

Birsner, C. (2021, January 25). 10 walking sims you need to play if you loved what remains of Edith Finch. Retrieved from https://gamerant.com/walking-sims-like-what-remains-edith-finch/

Morris, K. (2021, May 20). 10 best walking simulators that everyone should play. Retrieved from https://gamerant.com/best-walking-simulators/

Musical storytelling in 'What remains of Edith Finch'. (2021, October 25). Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/classic/programs/game-show/game-show/12907980

Giant Sparrow. (2017, May 12). What Remains of Edith Finch [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://cdn.nivoli.com/adventuregamers/images/screenshots/31793/20170430205427_1.jpg

Kojima Productions. (2021, July 9). Death Stranding [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/article/2021/07/09/death-stranding_feature.jpeg

Thatgamecompany. (2012, December 4). Journey [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2012/12/Journey-Screen-One.jpg

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

Text

How to be interesting (and how trying to be interesting can get in the way of being interesting).

How does anyone capture attention? What is attention grabbing? What causes people to pay attention?

Show them something interesting.

Interesting things are interesting, and therefore people will take interest. They’ll pay attention. This can be done in many different ways, though ultimately it comes down to narrative, presentation, and interactivity working together in one coherent package.

For example, a mystery is interesting. You can show people something, but only enough to get the basic information across, and just enough to make people want to know more.

Oxenfree is a mystery, a mystery that presents itself in such an alluring way that makes it so people are begging to solve it.

(Night School Studio, 2019)

All the parts of this experience work together, nothing feels unnecessary, and everything is for… well… the experience. The art combined with the music, sound design, and narrative, bring about something that has an incredible initial appeal that gives way to active investment in the story. You don’t know what it’s about at the beginning, but the presentation gives you enough of an idea that things are going to get interesting, what with the very unique 2D backgrounds that the characters navigate paths on up, down, left, right, and diagonally, acting more like a world map than a typical level space expected of what is essentially a sidescroller at its core, coupled with the atmospheric score by scntfc adding to that sense of intrigue.

(Night School Studio, 2016)

The interactive elements tie into the narrative and the sound in different ways, with the visuals acting as a sort of glue between them. There are two main components of interactivity other than directly interacting with the objects, the dialogue choices and the radio frequencies. The dialogue choices affect the narrative, and the radio frequencies affect both the narrative and the audio.

The initial basic pitch for this was to “make a walking-talking game” (Skybound, 2016), and from there it evolved into a communication game where you can communicate using words with other humans, and using the radio with the supernatural. (Skybound, 2016)

(Night School Studio, 2016)

Choice is always something interesting for the audience wherever it’s possible. It gives a feeling of personal investment and personalisation to whatever game or experience it’s included in. In Oxenfree, the conversations happen in real time, and you have four options whenever the prompts show up. Three of them are selectable, and the fourth is to say nothing and wait for the prompts to fade as the conversation moves on. This system is one half of the main interactive draw of the game, the other half being the radio I mentioned earlier.

(Night School Studio, 2016)

Oxenfree uses radio frequencies to do many different things in its world. They can be used to connect to the island radio station, to tune into the rock piles scattered around the place, and later, once you get the better radio, you can use them to unlock certain gates and doors to progress. The nature of radio, being entirely audio, means that it ties directly into the auditory presentation. It warps and sparks and does all sorts of interesting things that flow along with the synth score scntfc provides, it’s part of the reason why Oxenfree is so well known and regarded, along with the other things I’ve mentioned.

To put everything simply and concisely, each of the systems and presentational elements of the Oxenfree experience are both individually and collectively responsible for the interest people have in it. It’s appealing and simple to get into. And that’s not even talking about the ARG that went on around the thing, since that never really made it into the reasons for the mainstream success of the thing, more of the niche for people who wanted to explore further.

But anyway, how can this help us? Well it can help in many ways, and they aren’t as complicated as you’d think, nor are they the result of any secret sauce.

Firstly, and as I said in my previous post, the thing has to be good first.

You have to do your best to make it so that the experience is good. If it isn't, people won’t give it any attention. And if you focus too much on the uniqueness, you can lose sight of making something good, which will ultimately hurt the experience you’re trying to create. Everything needs to serve the story being told, and the experience being crafted.

Secondly, the gimmick needs to compliment the experience, or the experience needs to compliment the gimmick, or really just everything needs to work together, and you need to keep that in mind and keep making sure that it does.

The gimmick is interesting that the audience can get into, but the story ties into the gimmick. The gimmick was created first, and an experience was built around it, but both were considered with equal importance in the final product.

Okay okay, I say gimmick, but I really mean unique system. As I said earlier, Sean Krankel (the co-founder of Night School Studio) pitched this as a “walking-talking” game (Skybound, 2016), which then turned into an adventure game based around the idea of communication, which then turned into Oxenfree, where all these elements came together. So, consider the basic system of the game first so that you’ll know how it works, then craft something that compliments that system. The last thing you want is an experience that feels contradictory.

Thirdly, like any narrative, it needs to have some sort of initial hook, something other than interactivity in this case. For Oxenfree, it’s the presentation, the art, the sound, the music, the acting, along with the narrative itself of course. How to apply this to your own project then? Well, the answer is, of course, ensure that you have a clear vision as to what the presentation will look like. What do you want it to look like? How do you want it to sound? Regardless of the interactivity, though this is something to be considered just as much.

What have we learned today? Well the big takeaway is that there is no secret sauce. There is no trick. You must ensure that you have a clear vision and understanding of what you want it to be, how the interactivity will function, how they can work together in harmony, and that you need to ensure that it ends up being the best thing that you can deliver. An experience like Oxenfree has all of these elements, and therefore they are the reasons for the audience’s attention on it. They were pulled in by the art, by the music, by the interactivity, by the narrative, and by how well it all worked together in one experiential package that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

It might seem like a tall order to ask you to make something you couldn’t find anywhere else, but really, that’s the interesting thing. Everyone has their own ideas, everyone is their own person with their own perceptions, therefore you all have the ability to be creative and create something you couldn’t find anywhere else, regardless of if it utilises pieces seen elsewhere.

So you’ll be fine. Come up with a basic idea, and keep at it.

References:

GDC. (2017, June 9). Building Game Mechanics to Elevate Narrative in Oxenfree [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0QWc9tNJS4

(GDC, 2017)

Night School Studio. (2016, January 4). Oxenfree - Path [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/905c2a4/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x1080+0+0/resize/1486x836!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F25%2Fd7%2F8f8512592a3c1e8ae256e1172ad9%2Fla-la-et-hc-theplayer-oxenfree-01-jpg-20160103

(Night School Studio, 2016)

Night School Studio. (2016, January 29). Oxenfree - Dialogue Bubbles [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1920x1080/public/images/methode/2016/01/28/4e564e3c-c349-11e5-bbaf-0bb83de8b470_image_hires.jpg?itok=SL67FJL-

(Night School Studio, 2016)

Night School Studio. (2019, October 13). Oxenfree - Jonas and Alex [Promotional Art]. Retrieved from https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/articles/2019-10-13-15-07/news-videogiochi-le-vendite-di-oxenfree-sono-aumentate-grazie-a-xbox-game-pass-1570975600297.jpg/EG11/thumbnail/1920x1075/format/jpg/quality/80

(Night School Studio, 2019)

Night School Studio. (2016). Oxenfree - Cave Entrance [Game Screenshot]. Retrieved from http://s01.riotpixels.net/data/01/28/01282080-1efe-41de-bef5-9d337f07eca3.jpg/screenshot.oxenfree.1920x1080.2016-01-15.6.jpg

(Night School Studio, 2016)

Skybound. (2016, January 12). OXENFREE | Part 1: The Story [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzLM-1XN6_0

(Skybound, 2016)

Skybound. (2016, January 13). OXENFREE | Part 2: The Art [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv-cvp9oYfE

(Skybound, 2016)

Skybound. (2016, January 14). OXENFREE | Part 3: Mechanics & Gameplay [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrFDEuRZOM8

(Skybound, 2016)

Skybound. (2016, January 15). OXENFREE | Part 4: Characters & Voices [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttfdFraWspA

(Skybound, 2016)

Skybound. (2016, May 27). OXENFREE: Part 5: The Music [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VKriJeGzk

(Skybound, 2016)

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nicksvenssonanimation · 3 years

Text

Wait, we have to think about commercial success? I just wanted to make a game…

Not really something people consider, is it? I mean, we know it has to happen, can’t just have a game appear and people instantly know what it is and want to give it money right? But it’s not really something that’s thought about any more than that amongst prospective creators.

Let’s make one thing very clear before I start talking. You have to make the game good, above all else. No matter how much effort you put into getting it out there, getting people to see and buy it, it won’t be successful if it isn’t good.

Right, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get to it.

One of the things that make games successful in particular is the execution of their main draw, their main appeal. It could be the story, it could be the gameplay, something about it is so well done that people become curious and attentive about its existence.

Let’s take a look at some previous successful indie games, according to this list: https://gamerant.com/indie-games-major-success-stories/, to explain just what I mean.

(Fox, 2017)

Undertale ("10 indie games that became major success stories," 2020) drew people in with the fact that you chose whether or not to defeat enemies, and you could get through the entire game without doing so once, along with the character writing, designs, and especially the soundtrack.

(Matt Makes Games, 2018)

Celeste ("10 indie games that became major success stories," 2020) was successful because it was a challenging platformer with a very pleasing aesthetic, but that on its own wouldn’t have been enough. Super hard Mario levels have the same appeal, but they’re not as successful are they? No, Celeste has a point, a message, extremely subtle and memorable character writing and interactions, culminating in an experience that delves into mental health and the struggles therein. Oh and the soundtrack.

(Studio MDHR, 2017)

Cuphead’s ("10 indie games that became major success stories," 2020) appeal is immediately identifiable and understandable. It’s a platformer boss-rush style game, with the visual design lifted straight from the old style of western animation, dubbed “rubber hose” due to its flow and lack of restriction in movement. It is something that really was nowhere to be found in gaming before, simply because the task of creating such a thing and truly capturing that style was monumental, and as such hadn’t been attempted much before. Obviously, they also had the backing of Microsoft at the start, before expanding to other platforms.

(Picture used is from FNAF: The Musical) (Random Encounters, 2016)

Five Nights at Freddy’s ("10 indie games that became major success stories," 2020) is odd in this case, the one that doesn’t quite fit in terms of the reasons it became as big as it is now. It was an interesting concept, and was a horror game too. But it’s rise in popularity and success is mainly attributed to the fact that YouTube was beginning to gain steam when it was released, and the timing was perfect. It skyrocketed as more YouTubers began to use it to create videos in the “Let’s Play” scene, and has stayed at that level of popularity ever since. Of course, the fact that so many YouTubers gravitated towards it in the first place is because of its simple and effective game design. It has rules, you need to keep the rules in mind so you can last until 6am without the power going out, or without the animatronics getting to you. Also, it mainly featured jumpscares, and jumpscares are something that have been proved to be extremely popular, especially in film. Popcorn stuff basically.

To summarise the point, it ties back to the clarification I made at the beginning… the game has to be good first and foremost. These games all excelled in some way that made them well-known and well regarded amongst the wider media environment, they were all good games, they all had systems that worked well, particular design choices that appealed to people, and used the internet to their advantage.

Yes, the internet is now integral to gaming. Who knew.

Most people get their information through the internet now, no longer is it magazines or newspapers or TV news… it’s all on your phone or computer. Gaming hopped onto this a while ago, when it started making E3 showcases available online, live and on demand. You see, E3 is where people flock to in order to get the big gaming news of the year, though now it’s a bit more spread out across the year. Instead of being entirely localised to June, there are presentations and tweets and update videos all across the year from so many different publishers and developers. Of course, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo remain the most watched, most paid-attention-to, so whenever they drop some information in a well-put together slideshow of trailers, people go nuts. I know I do. And once you watch enough of these, the algorithms of the internet notice and feed you more gaming news, and you read and watch more and more and get fed more and more. That’s how things work now. It’s convenient, and very helpful when trying to get the word out about your game. You can go looking too, just search up ‘gaming’ on Google and you’ll find numerous journalists/news outlets specifically revolving around it. It’s all so much of a feedback loop that even I don’t remember where my entry was.

Let’s make a list of the big ones then, shall we? We have the E3 showcases from XBOX, Nintendo, SONY… oh wait they left that… anyway also Square Enix, Bethesda… no wait they’re part of XBOX now… also EA, Devolver Digital (we’ll get back to that one), Gearbox now apparently too. Then, across the rest of the year, we have the SONY State of Plays (oh that’s where they went), the Nintendo Directs that happen about once every quarter, Nintendo’s Indie World (comin’ back to that one too), and many others that aren’t planned or consistent.

There’s always some news going on somewhere, lots of room to promote. Articles like these: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-12-16-heres-everything-announced-during-nintendos-latest-indie-world-showcase are made, so even people who don’t want to sit through a 20 minute presentation can still see what’s going on, what’s releasing, and what things look like. They pop up in news feeds, and suggested videos on YouTube, or if you follow gaming journalists on Twitter. Somehow, if you’re paying attention to the gaming industry, this information will make its way to you. It gets your eyes on these games, even if for a second, and if something appeals to you, you look into it further.

That’s the thing, you need to see it first so you can decide whether or not you care. All these devs can do is present their game to the demographic, and if you as a person decide you aren’t interested in it, then that’s fine, because 20 others will decide that they are.

(Nintendo, 2021)

(Devolver Digital, 2021)

Now we can come back to the Devolver Digital E3 Showcase and the Nintendo Indie World (and Directs in general) Showcase. These are both geared entirely toward promoting independently-developed games, ones that Devolver themselves publish, and ones that the publishers have direct connections to Nintendo. Nintendo is special because it’s Nintendo, and they have a positive attitude about everything they show off, often including forwards from the devs themselves. Devolver is special because they’re, for lack of a better term, insane.

The Devolver Digital E3 Showcase is called something different every year depending on what running joke they’re going with, or who they’re directly following schedule-wise. I remember this year they happened after the Ubisoft Forward, and as such the schedule called them Devolver Forwarder, only for the actual showcase to revolve around Devolver Digital Max Pass Plus, which is a riff on XBOX Game Pass. Now that might seem like just a quick thing to get attention onto them, but before this year they had a multi year storyline involving robots from the future, a very manic presenter, Geoff Keighley being some omnipotent being with a key, a life size suit of one of the monsters from their games, a lot of gore, only for it to all end up being a pitch to the company board this year, which then resulted in showing off a very odd workplace with people pouring too much coffee into a cup so that it spills all over the floor, some guy banging his head into a desk, fashion, explosions in an awards chamber, and chilli dogs with an egregious amount of hand sanitizer. So yeah, they got noticed.

The point is, Nintendo and Devolver go about showing their indie games in a very different way. Devolver does what they do because they don’t have as strong a presence as Nintendo. Nintendo can relax on that front because even if you don’t care about games, you know what Nintendo is. They make Mario right?

So the indie games in these showcases get noticed, and people talk about them and react to them and buy the ones that jumped out to them personally.

Now, not everything gets into these presentations obviously, but that’s where the wider community comes in. If a gaming journalist sees something interesting, they’ll mention it or write about it or tweet about it. From there, it can gain more attention if people take interest.

Ok, that brings about the matter of how to get the game in front of journalists and others who’ll talk about it. If you have the backing of a bigger publisher, then they’ll get you in the door, so to speak. If you’re self publishing, that’s a little more complicated.

This particular source, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-07-24-a-beginners-guide-to-bringing-a-game-to-market, is only a summary of some important points found in a published book, however it does make clear the advantages and disadvantages of partnering with a publisher or self-publishing. Publishers can allow you, as a developer, to focus on the game itself. They can handle marketing, distribution, any connections within the industry they have apply to you now too. ("beginner's guide to bringing a game to market," 2020)

However, they then get somewhat of a say in how you function and what you can make. Self-publishing removes those restrictions, but it also means you have to market the game, you have to keep track of sales and distribution and licensing, you have to make the connections yourself, all of which are obviously harder to do without support. There are benefits to self-publishing, it forces you to learn so much about the industry and how it works, rather than it all being done for you. But, some people and groups can end up struggling under the weight of all that, and might benefit from partnering with a publisher initially, then eventually moving to self-publishing later on. ("beginner's guide to bringing a game to market," 2020)

It all really depends on the situation, the type of game, and the type of team. For us, we don’t have any experience whatsoever in developing and publishing games, so we may need the support of a partner to assist us in doing the best we can… for now, anyway.

If we were to self-publish, well then, this particular resource (https://clevertap.com/blog/indie-game-marketing/) is a pretty good summary of the things we’d need to do during that process, or at least, the things we could do to make the game successful. The money stuff afterwards will more than likely need some form of support, depending on who’s in the team and how good they are at math.

So then, what… what was all that, exactly?

That was a very short dive into the commercial side of gaming, the basics of the things you, and we, as independent game developers need to consider when eventually putting our game to market in whatever way we so choose. There are considerably more complex parts to this, and with further study and especially practice, they can be understood and exploited to give the game the best chance it can have at being successful.

And, well, of course you’d want to be paid too… it isn’t possible to live on just snacks, ya know?

References:

10 indie games that became major success stories. (2020, September 26). Retrieved from https://gamerant.com/indie-games-major-success-stories/

A beginner's guide to bringing a game to market. (2020, July 24). Retrieved from https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-07-24-a-beginners-guide-to-bringing-a-game-to-market

Devolver Digital. (2021, June 15). Devolver Digital Maxpass Plus - Screenshot [Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://imgix.kotaku.com.au/content/uploads/sites/3/2021/06/13/2021-06-13_080811.jpg?ar=16%3A9&auto=format&fit=crop&q=65&w=1280

Fox, T. (2017, August 16). Undertale - It's You! [Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://i1.wp.com/twinfinite.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/undertale-frisk.png?resize=1000%2C600&ssl=1

Here's everything announced during nintendo's latest indie world showcase. (2020, December 16). Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-12-16-heres-everything-announced-during-nintendos-latest-indie-world-showcase

Indie game marketing: A 2021 approach. (2021, May 25). Retrieved from https://clevertap.com/blog/indie-game-marketing/

Matt Makes Games. (n.d.). Celeste - Madeline and Theo [Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/BhsE8N4Y7U7o8h9gnp8IaA--~B/aD05MDA7dz0xNjAwO2FwcGlkPXl0YWNoeW9u/https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?crop=1280%2C720%2C0%2C0&quality=85&format=jpg&resize=1600%2C900&image_uri=https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2019-09/f5bb6880-d0c7-11e9-9d7f-8cca8390b2a6&client=a1acac3e1b3290917d92&signature=bc7f19652615e0174015ca8a944c2f07e8bf0da9

Nintendo. (2021, April 14). Indie World Showcase 4.14.2021 - Nintendo Switch [YouTube Thumbnail]. Retrieved from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2RNkRaNfCp4/maxresdefault.jpg

Random Encounters. (n.d.). FNAF: The Musical - Markiplier with a gun [Screenshot]. Retrieved from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/c9/00/d5c900194030ef47813bc61ef4c4ffb0.jpg

Studio MDHR. (2017, October 24). Cuphead and Mugman [Promotional Art]. Retrieved from https://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2017/10/cuphead-2-player.jpg

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