CLIP: These Beautiful backgrounds, that I'm adding at the last minute

Hello again. I said I'd be back. This time I just want to share some of the background work on this week's short.

The backgrounds on this one are done by Imoge, who did the backgrounds in Sonic Babies. It's honestly fantastic work. There are a few backgrounds in this one that I hope will knock you dead, like really flip your world upside down. LOL. Well, that's how I felt at least, getting some of these detailed paintings back from the most basic of my storyboard sketches.

In this clip that I just rendered like 10 minutes ago so I could upload it to the project Google Drive folder, there's the shot of Daisy where she has all the anime romance bubbles and sparkles around her. Those I actually just now made. An hour ago probably. This is the first scene! Let me explain what happened.

So, in these Mashed videos, there is a spreadsheet that lists every shot, who is animating it, and also notes for what the background should be, that the background artist then follows. Some of these notes just say "ANIME BG."

When I first saw this on the Clone Chaos spreadsheet, I had no idea what it was. Do I have to draw that? Because I'm the anime-tor? Well, no, not at all actually. That just means the compositors at Mashed will plug in their own assets to use as the background instead of drawing new ones. This seems to be mostly for stuff like splash screens or reaction shots or gradients.

Anyway, in the Daisy jogging scene, I had the very specific visual in mind of those anime romance bubbles. And the spreadsheet just said "ANIME BG." I got paranoid they wouldn't have the exact effect I had in mind, so instead of waiting for them to get active so I could ask about it, I just decided to make the effect myself. Last minute decision! It came out really good, though. And now I've taken a job away from someone else.

There were a few other last minute decisions I made tonight. I'm rendering out the final scenes now, you see, and I just want to make sure I'm getting EVERYTHING right. Here's a lightning round of last minute extremely late night additions:

Fixed Luigi's ear. I forgot to draw the little ear details in it previously. I was letting it slide for weeks but I finally bit the bullet.

Drew this "Closed mouth" cel. In the first clip of animation I shared a few weeks ago, there is a single frame where Luigi's mouth disappears because I forgot to draw this. Again, was letting it slide, but figured it's literally a single line so I might as well freakin draw it already.

Made this gradient BG for this one shot. This was another "ANIME BG" on the spreadsheet that I figured was easy enough to just handle myself. Actually, for an additional bit of context, too, having to account for the Mashed folks putting in their own backgrounds is actually sort of a pain, because I have to render the clips that require ANIME BGs differently so that they're transparent PNGs. It's a whole thing. I like to avoid it if I can.

And for our final last-minute-detail that I just had to divest the wee hours of the night to add would be, of course, the sweat droplets on Daisy's body. Yeah, OK, so, I was having that "Now or never" thought process with rendering the final animation, right? And I just thought... I mean, come on. You gotta have her covered in sweat. This is the first time you see her in this cartoon, this is the glamour shot where you're supposed to immediately understand why Luigi is attracted to her. It's Daisy in all her beauty. I think Luigi would notice the way she glistens in exercise, and regard it as a point of transcendent beauty. You have to understand where I'm coming from here, right? I need people to feel what he feels. The sweat couldn't be forgone.

So uh yeah that's it, new cartoon in just two days now.