A few months ago, I said on this blog that in my head PJO is an anime with a badass opening credits. I meant it quite literally, like I can actually picture this OP in my head, with all the shonen tropes like Percy walking around pretty backgrounds, cool fighting scenes with lots of camera movements and huge statues of the Gods standing ominously in the background, Nico standing in the rain till Reyna and Hazel and Jason come for him and a ray of sunshine breaks throught the clouds and light hits his hopeful face, GIMME ALL THE TROPES hahaha. Doing the whole opening would be impossible for a single person but I really wanted to try one big “shonen” group shot, so here you are !!! This actually took me AGES, I’m not kidding, the folder for this on my computer is named “batshit crazy ” for a reason, it may not look like it if you don’t know animation but a really huge amount of work went into this. I think it’s actually the biggest thing I ever did for a fandom. I can’t say how many hours I spent on it since I didn’t count, but let’s say I started this in September and spent a lot of week ends and most of my Christmas holidays on it, and I just finished it this week. I had a lot of fun though !!! And I learned a lot too, this was my first time trying to animate japanimation style, with not many in-betweens and ultra dynamic poses. So yeah, I hope you guys will like it !
I want to thank fimyuan and bisexualjason for keeping me motivated with their lovely comments through the project, even when I was complaining about my own decisions to animate friggin’ skeletons, hahaha. Another big thank you to my friend Wekake who went through the animation frame by frame and spotted all the little compositing mistakes that remained ;p
A few words on the process : I animated and colored everything in TV Paint, drew the background in Photoshop, and composited everything in After Effects. The song is an extract of the Yowapeda opening “Reclimb” by Rookiez is Punk’d because I wanted something very distinctively shonen but no lyrics, and I like that song ^^ I animated directly without any model sheet references which is definitely not how you should do it, hahaha, hence the design inconsistencies, but honestly even my madness had its limit and I didn’t want to spend more than a year on this thing ;p
