RWBY - Volume 6, Chapter 10 Production Analysis
Previous Volume 6 Production Analysis Posts:
Chapters one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight & nine
The first RWBY episode of 2019 also marks what seems to be the beginning of the last act of this volume. By now, this usually means action sequences and coordination and entanglement between various characters. But how does all of that hold up in this chapter’s presentation?
Since the first scene in this episode involves a cooperative operation between the main cast and Saphron’s family, now is as good of a time as any to go into one character in particular. Adrian is... a fascinating character to put simply, though it’s not just because of what he’s capable of but also because of how he exists. Though not common, models of kids and animals have existed before in the show, but never a fully rigged model of an infant. The closest instance there was of one prior was in the premiere chapter of this volume and even then, the model wasn’t really moving at all. Given his body size, it would not be surprising if Adrian’s model was entirely key-animated which can potentially lead to some awkward motion to make a baby’s fidgety nature look and feel right. But not as much has been needed out of Adrian’s animation outside of a few giggles and small gestures, with one exception of course but more on that in a bit. One last note, Adrian has an actual “voice actor” despite not having any audible words named Lucella Wren Clary who is actually lead producer for volume 6, Joe Clary’s baby daughter.
Going back to Adrian’s animation, the whole opening scene with him, Saphron, Weiss and Caroline was animated by Colin McAtee, Alex Hoyle, Vince Cappelluti and Hannah McCravy. Most of these animators, have been mentioned before through these analyses with the exception of Alex, who confirmed to specifically have done the cut with the Nubuck guards trying to tend to Adrian’s fake crying whereas Colin supposedly animated the cuts that came right before and after. Colin also stated that Kerry Shawcross gave them quite a bit of freedom regarding how to animate the characters. Since Kerry became the main director of the show back in 2015, he has been accused of having a draconian grip over what animators are or are not allowed to convey, namely with fight scenes. This has stemmed from some critics wanting a justification to point fingers at someone for not having certain aspects of the show be as ideal as they want without needing to spend time fact-checking. The reality is that Kerry will always have a vision for how he wants a given scene to be expressed, he simply needs to as the director. However, he is willing to let any animators assigned to a scene (as well as storyboard artist, camera layout artists and whoever else involved) to provide their own creative input to depending on the scene. With some exceptions, he’s actually more easy-going with action sequences than dialogue ones, the latter involves the animators being more precise with character acting (and the animators themselves don’t usually mind it either). So to see confirmation that he gave the assigned animators more creative freedom with the Adrian distraction scene is an interesting change of pace.
In the next scene at the cliff side, there is concept art accompanied with a couple of set design notes. First is, “boulders cover path & jut up from rock wall along entire cliff side” while the other says, “Path width: 20-30 ft, tree height: 30 ft”. In the first place, these design notes are likely to provide details for environment modeling team to maintain the dimensions and key features of a given setting. That said, these same pieces of information can also help give an idea as to what is in store for the story from here on. Between the boulders and trees, they may potentially serve as cover for the main cast once they start fighting Cordovin’s mech. It’s also possible that the height of the trees specifically may serve for another fight within this episode, but more on that later. One other quick thing to mention are the splash effects at the bottom of the cliff side. Splashes have been done before in the show, but given the setting, it’s appropriately presented with more nuance.
Taking a moment to skip ahead, this is a good opportunity to touch on the visual effects in this episode a bit. More specifically, the effects when Cordovin fires the warning shot from her mech. There is a lot of great timing with the build-up where the ball of energy swells up in small bursts within the cannon while a shock wave releases to help sell that effect. The small shock waves themselves also dissolve into particles which were an interesting touch. The swelling ball also has two bits of animation going on in which the layer of roundish shapes give off a backspin while the slender pen-stroke like shapes spin to the left. The best comparison to make would be the way veteran animator of the Pokemon franchise, Masaaki Iwane, animates effects such as explosions and flames. Iwane very similarly uses that swelling build-up effect in many instances such as this sequence in Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back and this one (about 54 seconds in) from Pokemon: Spell of the Unknown. Describing all of this is frankly very difficult but that is simply a testament to how intricately handled the visual effect itself is from just one cut alone. This is not even counting the next cut of when the cannon fires. From then on, there is an extended swelling effect from the ball of energy as well as small sparks appearing in the form of particles and streams. Once the cannon does fire, we see a couple of split-second white flashes on the screen. This is honestly the only part where a small opportunity was missed to capitalize on the effect and apply something called impact frames. They are basically effects in the form of a few frames that are inverted in color to make a sort of flash to help give off the sense of impact as the name suggests. The white flashes from when the cannon fired almost did something like this and could have benefited from adding say, a more blackened silhouette of the mech and the burst from the cannon, similar to what was seen in these stills which may have come from this sequence in Naruto Shippuden.
Despite calling the lack of impact frames a missed opportunity, it’s also nitpicking, as it doesn’t take away from the outstanding work done in just one instance. It is hard to tell how much of each aspect of the moment was due to the visual effects team or the compositing team or whether 2-D Effects artist, Myke Chapman had any part at all in say, the sparks all over the control panels in the ship Weiss and Maria hijacked. Regardless, this is the most creatively handled work from those departments done yet, outmatching that of the electricity swirling around Hazel’s arms in volume 5 or Cinder’s wind column in chapter 5 of this volume.
With all of that gushing of the effects out of the way for now, let’s rewind back to a scene with Maria and Weiss being found out by Cordovin. In terms of animation, there was one bit of confirmation from Nyle Pierson and what he contributed to this episode, that being the comedic and now meme-worthy part where Maria is chewing cashews. If you recall, Nyle was also the one that confirmed to have animated Ruby’s reaction to seeing Jaune’s sister as well as Blake and Yang treading through the snowstorm to the shed. With three confirmed sequences, this should help give a small idea of how he animates. His timing with character acting can be a bit comparable to Hannah Novotny’s in terms of how he applies small bits of anticipatory action before body gestures or head shifts. That said, they don’t approach animating mouths and eye pupils the same. Where Hannah is more likely to shrink the pupils and makes a snarl mouth shape when say, characters get angry (in fact, she may have animated Cordovin threatening Maria through the intercom), Nyle keeps pupils fairly dilated and the mouth movements can be similar to characters in various Sonic the Hedgehog games.
One aspect of this episode’s production that has been neglected are the storyboards and that’s because there was not much to highlight. Or rather, it was a struggle to find anything to bring up. Part of the problem was that aside from a couple of having establishing shots that make note of the terrain of the different characters and Qrow being framed at certain moments to show him being opposed to everyone else’s plan, the visual direction felt standard overall. There was one fairly clever instance of Qrow blaming himself where the main cast were several feet away from him, only for Ruby to wind up in front of him a few shots later after talking some sense into him (along with an interesting “misty” effect likely from the compositing). Other than that, not much else. That is not meant to be taken as a criticism so much as an observation. Not every episode needs to hit it right out of the park, as this one served as mostly a build-up episode. That said, there’s also the matter that in this episode, there were six storyboard artists which makes this and chapter 2 the most credited. This is strange because usually, an episode will vary from 3-5 storyboard artists and the number is never really dependent on episode length either. Chapter 3, the longest episode in the series (not counting credits) had only Rachel Doda, Kevin Harger and Mari Yang credited while chapter 4 which served as a transition episode, ran only at 13 in-a-half minutes and had all of the previously mentioned names as well as Emily Little, making for four artists. It’s honestly unclear as to why this type of pattern occurs aside from maybe scheduling.
Moving on to the last segment of this episode, we have the start of a fight sequence between Blake and Adam. As much praise as there was with the effects from the cannon fire prior, the moment where Adam launched his attack at Blake was nothing to sniff at either. The attack came with everything expected from what Adam has done before where the screen dims and parts of his body glow. But this time, some black and red-colored spark effects were added which have never been done before and thus gave off an extra menacing feel. The effects of the slicing wave were also a little different from his character short where in that instance, it felt more like a stream of wind. Here though, the shapes are more defined with a heavy blur layered on top. Then there’s the animation. The only animator confirmed to have had a part in Adam and Blake’s fight this episode was John Yang who very likely animated this segment, though it’s unclear whether he animated anything after that though. John has been involved with the show since volume 5 and some of his previous sequences include Blake firing on Ilia which came prior to Kim Newman’s sequence, Oscar vs Leo, Ozpin vs Hazel, and part of Maria vs the bandits. In the chapter 1 production analysis, I speculated that he may have done Oscar leaping from train car to train car to get to Dudley. After some observation, I’m more convinced that he actually animated Qrow’s initial fight against the Sphinx Grimm and Ruby and Weiss helping Oscar defeat the Manticore Grimm. The way John times movement is with a brief but explicit sense of anticipatory action before each strike and movement is suddenly unleashed. The movements and strikes feel swift but intense in ways that feel a bit similar to animation director for volume 6, Joel Mann. In fact, John’s sense of timing can be compared to animator Yuya Takahashi who depending on whp you talk to, is known for contributing to various fan-favorite sequences in both Dragon Ball Super and Fairy Tail.
All of that aside, one last thing of note towards the end of the sequence were the cold-air effects when Blake and Adam spoke their lines, likely done by the compositing team. This was a neat touch in that it helped indicate the temperature of where they are. It’s one of those neat attention to details that along with the dust particles showing through the light in Lionheart’s office in chapter 1 of volume 5, many viewers would not think of acknowledge but none-the-less add a touch to the atmosphere.
That marks the end of this production analysis. This one was admittedly a bit more scarce and scattered in terms of what to talk about, but the parts that were noteworthy through the presentation definitely had much to breakdown. With the first of what seems to be a set of action-oriented episodes out of the way serving as build-up, we seem to be in for a bit of a wild ride as teased by assistant lead animator, Melanie Stern. Here’s hoping that there will be quite a bit more to touch on through the production of the next chapter.