Since our HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA parody broke 3576 (Reinhard von Lohengramm’s birth year according to the Common Era) views, we decided to do a comparison video and share some details from the creation process with you.
One of the most crucial scenes for the video was the dance. It was created from a scratch… well, almost. Spaceship’s floor was used as a background, after we removed the characters from it. At this stage of the plot, it should’ve been Goldenlöwe symbol, but unfortunately we haven’t found a good frame that could be used here instead. At first we wanted to only slightly modify Reinhard’s silhouette from the 89th episode. However, it turned out to be too flatly drawn to imitate He-man poses faithfully. So it became a raw base for “dancing” Kaiser while animation from original parody served as a reference.
Second most important piece of animation was laughing Kaiser Reinhard, which originally comes from episode 67. It was necessary to recreate the tip of the head, remove the hands from all frames and close his eyes though.
We thought it may be funny to have Reinhard singing with destroying FPA ships in the background. The exploding battleship resembles Ulysses, but this isn’t its faithful design. Originally Ulysses was never destroyed, despite being involved in the final battle of Shiva.
The thing that required the most work in retouching was lip-synching. In the key scenes, we wanted Reinhard to move his lips as if he were really singing, but in the source animation were often only 2 variations of open mouth (or none, sometimes in the scenes chosen for this parody he and other characters didn’t talk at all), while we needed at least 3 to make it look believeble. There were no other option but to create new talking animations.
There were also a bunch of corrections, re-drawings, or re-paintings of the backgrounds. The whole work took us about a week. But probably the most difficult one was to find the right scenes that would do as good counterparts for He-man version. It’s like seeing a few times a whole series, but on several accelerations.
BONUS! Awesome trivia: Both He-man and mein Kaiser have remarkable blond hair and are quite fabulous, but it’s not the only connection here. Reinhard von Lohengramm during the LotGH finale was 25 years old, just like it is in the lyrics of 4 Non Blondes song. Since it goes so well with him, we couldn’t help but create this parody. Your positive response prove it was worth the efforts.
Thank you all for the support!
