The Making of 100 Epitaphs. Part 2: Video

Behind the Scenes 02.2024

Unused Yura animation frame.

Time to talk about the part of the process that caused me equal pain and joy, the making of the music video. Just like the song, it went through several iterations. And just like all of my other videos, it resulted in a bunch of cut content.

Let's dive right into that.

The original storyboard

Since I tend to do things in parallel, I started making PV storyboards when the working version of the song was still 100 Years of Solitude. Yeah, the sucky one.

Some of the shots from that version made it into the video, some didn’t. Here are some of the ones you may find in the final version:

And here are some that got removed:

From left to right these are:

• Katya laughing in front of a cityscape;
• Nikita patching Olya up after the Grinder incident as seen through a half-open door;
• Sanya sulking at Nikita’s (was actually repurposed into the two below, now from her POV);
• Sanya flipping a coin;
• Sanya fighting with Sergei after Katya’s capture (both of the bottom shots).

Sanya’s outburst with Sergei was one of the parts that I would prefer to leave in, but it didn’t quite fit the flow of the song’s new version. Another animation I was going to include was a polished version of this:

It was just something I sketched for fun a while before I even started working on the video, but I thought it might’ve been cool to include. However, since the camera’s focus was plainly on Yura with Sanya just kinda to the side, it didn’t fit in terms of cinematic language.

On the whole, I don’t particularly mourn the old storyboard. This one shot looked so silly…

100 Years of Solitude was supposed to have a different colour palette, which is apparent in the only two shots I managed to draw in colour. You should’ve seen them in the previous Behind the Scenes, where I talked about the episode's musical component.

The last one was actually a reverse shot of this Yura. Though, at that point the latter wasn’t supposed to be animated at all.

Crazy to see how much the aesthetic has changed.

Swapping to AviUtl

The lovely multiwindow interface.

As I remade the song from scratch, I decided to use the chance to also remake the video in a new program for me at the time. All of my previous stuff was done in AfterEffects, but I heard great things about AviUtl – and lemme tell ya, it lived up to the hype.

Despite looking a bit off-putting at first, it ended up being so much easier to use compared to anything Adobe. Huge shoutout to PonkanSoup for helping me get the hang of it at the start!

In general, it made a lot of things far less cumbersome: typography, effects, layer management. The whole editing process became much more enjoyable.

The mines

Framing

The assets image folder ended up with 252 elements not counting individual animation frames.

My goal for 100 Epitaphs was to add as many animations and individual shots as I could. I wanted to kinda bombard the viewer with images, maybe even overload them a bit. Doing it in a way that still allowed the eye to travel naturally between all the different frames was a pretty fun challenge.

That especially concerned the segments at the start, where static shots are flashing rapidly one after another. Take the first flashback sequence, for example.

• The eye naturally snaps to the point of focus between the first three shots. The points of focus are placed at alternating sides of the screen. It’s the kind of shot - reverse shot alternation viewers are used to. So despite the eye travelling a fairly big distance, it doesn’t feel jarring. The lack of background distraction helps a lot.
• The Nikita shot both breaks the pattern and doesn’t. The problem here is that the point of focus (his face) is a little higher up in the shot compared to the previous three. So the eye movement would be a bit awkward here – it would first snap to the side of the frame and then have to readjust a bit.

Or that would be the case, if the neck of the violin didn’t guide the eye from the middle right to the upper left of the screen. Placing it correctly took me some time to figure out, but it ended up working quite well.

• The sequence of shots after the violin just gradually follows a line from the upper/middle left of the screen to the bottom right, before moving slightly upward when the grown up Sanya reflection appears.

I had to do a fair bit of trial and error to figure the best order out, but the two little rapid fire segments taught me a lot. It definitely helped with future video and comic storyboarding.

Animations

I really like doing animations. I don’t use a lot of frames or details, so I’m able to finish them fairly fast. However, I’m not exactly skilled at animating, and I’ve had some trouble making animated cuts that actually fit the flow of the video at first.

Take these two, for example:

Both look weird and awkward because they don’t have any settle frames: basically, frames where the movement winds down and slows as it’s coming to an end. These move at an even pace, which makes stuff look uncanny.

I didn’t like them when I made them, but believed that I could make them work with the magic of video editing. It was really, really difficult – honestly, just remaking these animations from scratch would cause me less pain than trying to make them look semi-decent in the PV.

Still, they were left in the video all the way up until the incident. But we’ll get back to that later.

I do have a couple of cut animations which I kind of like.

This very bouncy and ugly Dima was meant to be there in place of this static asset:

However, the movement was way too extreme for what I really intended and it looked quite silly. Also it was hard on the eyes in context, and the shot wasn’t long enough to fit the animation in its entirety (which is kind of a common problem for me lol).

Another shot was the initial version of Olya’s turnaround. Here’s a comparison of the two:

Now you may say, hey. The old one looks so much better and more detailed, what the hell. And isolated, yeah, it kinda does.

But it didn’t blend into the video AT ALL. I tried really hard to make it work, yet the movement simply felt wrong. I asked Lon (lonionjon) for help with finding a reference, and he got me one that was just perfect.

So, I reanimated the shot with the help of that ref. While the individual frames may have looked rougher in a vacuum, the overall movement felt significantly better and fit nicely into the master reel. Funny how things work.

On the topic of references, the white choking hand at the end of the first verse was rotoscoped, same as the hand in Comfort Zone.

The crunch

Just animating the silhouettes ended up being a huge time saver.

I was dead set on releasing the video in autumn. I thought it was doable in September, but the workload I was dealing with ended up being far greater than I had anticipated. So while I felt bad about not releasing the song when I initially said I would, I wanted to at least manage it before winter.

As November rolled around, I was still confident I could pull it off if I worked hard enough. But weeks passed, and it started to look like it wasn’t going to be feasible with my normal work schedule. I really didn’t want to put it off again. I hated the idea of making people wait even longer.

So in the last 2 weeks of November I went into overdrive. I think I averaged about 16 hours of video work per day in the last week of the month – that’s how I managed to complete the entirety of the video’s final segment (starting from “Draw a thousand lines…”) in 7 days.

Another animation that was initially planned to be in full colour.

It’s funny how much immense stress that self-imposed deadline has put on me. But hey, it was a strong motivator. I don’t think I’ve ever drawn this many assets in such a short timespan before. I still had to compromise on many parts of the video because of that time limit – I’ll talk about those later.

Regardless, it looked like I would be able to make it after all. I just had some touch ups left to do, some minor editing to figure out.

And then one day before the end of November, this happened.

I had a huuuge breakdown. Obviously.

But thankfully, like I wrote in the community post, I did have a bunch of old exports I made to check how the video flowed. While the old snippets lacked some of the later fixes in their editing, I could overlook most of that – and in the end, they helped me restore large parts of the video.

There was still a lot I had to redo from the ground up. And frankly speaking, this did the video a lot of good.

For example, remember those weird Yura and Sanya animations from the start? I couldn’t bring myself to completely delete them from the original cut, because I put so much work into making them not look awful in the edit. 

But since they were gone anyways, I replaced them with a completely new sequence with Sanya and the clock. And thank god for that. The new one is actually meaningful for the song (instead of just kinda being filler footage) and references the unused shot from 100 Years of Solitude, which makes me happy.

Drew this part on the day the video was posted.

I fixed up some other parts in a similar way, though the differences are not notable enough to mention. All in all, despite the panic this whole incident has caused me, it was ultimately for the best.

The compromises

Finally, I think it would be fun to list some of the parts I had no time to execute in quite the way I wanted because of the time limit.

1. This panning shot was meant to have character animation.

2. This shot was supposed to cut between different characters playing musical instruments (Sanya’s dad playing guitar, Nikita playing the violin, etc.).

3. This shot was supposed to have slight character animation.

4. The entire Strike 3 reprise until the line “Your hollow call to the winds of change” was meant to be animated in a simple style (just white lines on a black background).

5. The whole final sequence was supposed to take place in the rain, which is the reason Sergei’s hair droops after he jumps off the balcony.

Now his hair gel just sucks, I guess.

The reason rain was removed was that I didn’t really like AviUtl’s effect preset for it and it added too much flickery movement to the scene. It was tiring to look at, so now the rain is there only in spirit.

6. Sergei’s walking away was supposed to be animated.

Other minor compromises include slight fixes that just made some of the existing animations look smoother. Those got wiped, but they didn’t make enough of a radical difference for me to re-edit them.

Conclusion

100 Epitaphs fucked my wife and killed my family. But I liked working on it, it was interesting.

The most important lesson I learned from this is to back my projects up like crazy. And not to set arbitrary deadlines for myself that I will take too seriously.

Hope the next video won’t tear me a new one 😏 (clueless)