Thoughts/breakdown of Once Domestic Castlevania Animatic
(Aka I ramble because I need a break from university for a hot second)
Honestly, really, this is just for me to have a tiny hour break from uni grind as I hit the final week of my final semester and give my wrist a rest. I also thought it would be really cool to do a sort of catch-up moment from the original first Mizrak v Tera animatic fight I did, which you can read here if you still want to!
Thought Process of Powerful Predatory Deadly Fan-Animatic
The way I lay this out is going to be on a similar vein to how I previously laid out my previous thought process. So it's going to be casual and just blabbering out thoughts.
Ok let's starttttttt
✨ iteration process and research ✨
The reason I went back to essentially redo the Tera and Mizrak's fight (this is more so a round 2), not because it was bad, but because I know I can push myself further. Now I have a bit of experience in putting action into practice via Alice Meets Mad Hatter, Parallel Play and Dramaturgy, as well as sitting with action scenes a bit longer to understand them.
Also with that in mind, ages ago, when I realized I actually wanted to properly storyboard, I made this piece of Drolta and Olrox fighting to mark my beginning stages of action boarding before I took classes for it. Originally, I wanted to board Olrox in his Queztacoatl form to fight Drolta, but I psyched myself out. This time around, I wanted to face this challenge head-on, and honestly, I am way more confident/gutsy to attempt anything now, so I knew I wanted to throw Olrox into this fight too. Honestly, a little too gutsy because then I bite off more than I can chew (aka this is why a lot of my more planned out animatics are 5-6 mins now), but it's still rewarding and fun regardless!
Here instead I went for more fight beats which went down this path:
Mizrak gets caught off guard, but overcomes
Tera and Mizrak reaquaint (reveal Mizrak's healing ability)
Tera attacks, Mizrak evades
Mizrak fights, gets the upper hand before dynamic switches
Mizrak gets properly overwhelmed/cornered,
Mizrak reveals new powers/shocks Tera
Mizrak is now overextending himself, but continues to showcase his powers- bad idea
Mizrak is out of fuel/stamina, resorts to physical attacks
Olrox enters the scene
Showcase duo fighting knowledge between Mizrox
Showcase Olrox Queztacoatl form further
Originally, there was more, but for time's sake, it was cut.
Now, to actually figure out fight styles! We already have pre-established styles in the show since we actively see all of them fight; however, I wanted to portray an elevation of sorts to see how they've changed from when we last saw them in the show, to now (we can include the in-between animatics like Powerful Predatory Dangerous and... maybeee squeeze in Parallel Play). These characters have different motives, and there has been an exponential passage of time since then, though for design sake and keeping recongiabilty/time focused more on the animatic itself. Tera keeps the same outfit (gave her a new eyebrow slit because of Mizrak tho), and Mizrak dons the same outfit I mocked up ages ago in my animatic Choices. Olrox stays in mannquin mode, whoops.
Right off the bat, I want to say, this Tera and Mizrak fight is a brute strength & stamina versus speed & strategy moment, which informs how each character moves gets elevated.
Tera
I originally kept to her ice skater themes from my previous animatic depicting her, but you know, ACTUALLY incorporated it further. I also wanted to continue to make her more offensive. With her, I did a lot more research into existing sports because I wanted to be way more technical and strategic, which is way different from how I boarded Mizrak, who's more inexperienced. A lot of research went into Olympic ice skaters and performers, also ensuring she had a graceful, dance-like quality to her. Although if I want to work on something more in the future surrounding her, I would like to push it even further (as with all things LOL).
Mizrak
Now with this, Mizrak is severely disadvantaged against a highly skilled magic user who was not only born and grew up with magic, but has taught "survival and slaughter" of it (therefore deeply understands it). Though now that he's a vampire, I wanted to nudge him a little to give him an extra boost. This was my way of interjecting a tiny bit more story into this through simply how I portray Mizrak in relation to the other two characters in a fight. Mizrak from seasons 1 & 2 is the only character without any supernatural abilities of any kind. Despite being surrounded by the supernatural (in turn, people who are connected to their identity), he doesn't know how to put that into practice, so he's in learning mode.
But also. This is Mizrak. He's going to overextend himself.
Some of his movements, such as backflips or floaty jumps, hark back to Olrox's physical move sets as a vampire while giving him a brick house of a body to get through this.
This also includes aspects such as how I present Mizrak in shots, like either sharing similar shot compositions or similar silhouettes. This is because he's currently learning from Olrox.
The floating swords and ability to summon them were an idea from @aquilaofarkham (sorry for the tag BUT, aquila has written/talked a lot about Mizrak potiential vampric abilities, it's very cool), though with my slight spin on it, since when I depict him using it is beyond overextending himself, where he's coughing blood. In my head, the additional swords should not be RED; THEY SHOULD BE SOLID METAL FORMS. LIKE ANNETTE. He's fucked himself up to where the swords are in a wispy, incorporeal form and therefore easier to just shoot away.
This is similar to how Julia gets rid of Olrox's skulls. Food for thought.
Also, Mizrak gives up at the end and javelin throws the sword as a last effort, like how he gives up and slashes Tera's face. Very few places in the board showcase his technical skills, only because they're all in relation to when he was human. I wanted to make that a point of contention.
Olrox
I wanted to have fun with Olrox. He has THREE forms that all work so differently and still so harmoniously if you put in the elbow grease. Unfortunately, I did shave down his screentime in his alternate forms, but I can still talk about what I had in mind when planning for his appearance.
Queztacoatl: This was to test my skills and see how far I could push, showcasing his form. Unfortunately, I didn't push it as much as I liked, but then again, my standards are absurd, so switching between forms alone is already a feat in itself.
Also, I rarely get to see depictions of Olrox in his Queztacoatl form anywhere; there's a lot you can do with him! Though design-wise wise he is complex, and I did find myself having a challenge trying to compose him in a shot without him just swallowing the entire thing (unless I needed to), which came into my favor occasionally when trying to sell his sense of scale. I think I accidentally got his scale wrong, though; then again, it just made him more imposing.
Shadow/Mist: I also wanted to have fun with this, but this got shaved down a bit- HOWEVER, cool aura farm moment, and his ability to just become practically immune to any damage because he's just air and wind.
Vampire: I didn't showcase it as in-depth as I personally wanted to, but I just portrayed just the right amount if there were... I suppose later fights (thinking again, as if it were a series, I have season 3 thoughts on the brain), this would be expanded into a massive problem and create a new interesting dynamic between Mizrak and Olrox, since Mizrak overrextends himself and Olrox only sacrifices for people he cares about. Through this board, there is no utter reason for Olrox to hop into his most vulnerable/normal state unless something happens- aka Mizrak. This was the one thing I absolutely wanted to showcase in here
✨ process time ✨
Nightmare mode, truly. Not only was I sick the first two weeks of boarding this, but there was an abhorrent laptop issue due to my hardware being unable to cope with it. I'm hoping this is because of the additional programs I have due to university, and I can uninstall them in two weeks. Though with all issues, I find myself pushing through it LMAO. Nobody will stop me from boarding, even if it's my own laptop I will find a way.
As it was reaching under a month, I decided to cut it then and there because I also want to give myself time to wrap up my final assignments for my final semester of university without this in the back of my mind, because it WILL haunt me until it's done.
I will say too that the first half I was really solid on its execution, though I got more antsy as I began reaching the latter half (therefore affecting my perception of the overalll storyboard), not only because I had to shave down a lot of what I intended. Such as cutting out Mizrak having a panic attack over slashing Tera's face, and then way later, having Mizrak vie for Olrox's life. I recognized I was making this longer than it needed to be because I wanted to tell so much, when the goal here was to get action down first. Now with this knowledge, I know how to combine this and do it really well.
Boarding this felt really different from Dramaturgy for some reason. Beginning to the end of that animatic, I definitely feel like I could have pushed (as always), I'm less confident with Once Domestic. HOWEVER, I think that's merely time, and I have to sit with this one because I've stared at this for a month straight without stepping back, without hammering it with my own 'critic'. It's the same for every past storyboard I've done in recent times. When I originally boarded Dramaturgy, I also thought it was "ass", but it's grown on me.
✨shot breakdowns✨
Yay guys, my favorite moment. I didn't do too many of these because my aim was 'get good at action", BUT I would explode if I didn't have boxes or some themes in this. There's also some stuff I skip over but yk im going to try and keep this brief!
Eyes are a massive thing in this animatic and symbolize a whole bunch of stuff depending on what takeaway you decide to pull from it! As such, you could derive the meaning of:
Eyes are the window to the soul
Eye for an eye and the world goes blind
Audience/judgment
Etc etc there's a lot more
Its initial appearance is within the birch trees themselves as a way to interject an initial tense horror vibe
It's an idea I've played a bit around with ages ago, and it's never left my mind since. I do wanna continue to push the idea further, but who knows! I think just having the environment looming over as an audience witness tragedy is so interesting because it begs the question of who's watching or what it means, since I’m intentionally playing up with face pareidolia. ESPECIALLY since Old Man Coyote/Mephistopheles is in the background for quite a few shots but ever so rarely in focus.
While obviously the environmental associations lean heavily towards Tera, there is still relevance towards Mizrak as they are, in a way, cut from the same cloth, as they are both fledglings.
Speaking of which! They both have eyebrow slits!
This was to physically connect them more because I do believe they're more alike than we realize, and if we get a season 3, it's only going to push that idea further, while also driving them further apart.
Environmental boxes yay. The boxes here are simply for making the space feel a lot more claustrophobic and limiting.
So wow, I also elevated to *circles*, however, the circle borders are mostly just related to Tera! Honestly, it would be fun to assign characters different shape borders, like Mizrak's being a cross, Olrox being a diamond, so on and so forth, but for now we just have this.
One thing here I wanted to overlap was head rubbing and having ONE EYE VISIBLE. Every single character does it, but it all totally means different things, especially for the context stand alone and then in contrast/adjacent to another, creating whole new meanings
These moments all happen after something monumental happens to said characters, and they're in their moment of weakness. The most obvious being that Mizrak and Olrox are each other's weakness, while Tera's loneliness is her weakness. Despite their different weakness, they're the same weakness. People.
Ok my hour is up (... has been up for a few hours, I gotta put this down)
If you have made it this far, you can now see the cursed spliced version with all the temp audio
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I think by this point in my journey of properly focusing on improving on storyboarding, using Castlevania characters as a jumping-off point to make it slightly easier last year, I've reached a point where I feel like I would be comfortable boarding some sort of episodic thing. Whether that still be Castlevania related or original (or a mix of both, similar to the layout of Castlevania: Dramaturgy), but at this point, I don't know! Even though I'm very sosososoooo close to the finish line, it's kind of scary and exciting, but also the state of things is bleh. It'll be okay though, it's going to be fine, and I will be fine! I'll think about the end of the world another day, uni awaits me, and then after that, more storyboards.
