EPIC Survival BEHIND THE SCENES with Alex and Steve!

Hello there samuel kyber here with the behind the scenes to survival after finishing the world apart series i wanted to do something on a smaller scale to take a breather from the larger projects here we get to see how animation life transitions into the new alex and steve series

The story felt like it needed a beginning so i figured why not do one about core survival the animation was designed around the premise of creating a cool fight scene without using any weapons but we needed some build up before that happened i tried to keep the set fairly

Simple by only using one map but it ended up being a nightmare to make tiny adjustments to the terrain in blender i ended up remaking the entire cliffside as the original was far too big the map was actually fairly small but to make it much larger i duplicated the

Entire map and mirrored it behind the original i then offset it slightly and it blended in rather well i wanted the first scene to be a quick sequence of how much time they wasted gathering and crafting items that shouldn’t help them on their first night but still have a positive

Vibe to make it seem like they’re doing really well an old unused idea was to have one gather a bunch of wood or something and then the other would use the wood for their own task and vice versa causing a bit of conflict early on that they would resolve later

But it ended up feeling a bit drawn out and hard to convey that specific emotion so i went with something a bit different the wolf actually ended up chasing the skeleton because honestly i didn’t know what to do with the wolf in this animation the trickiest part of this scene was

Definitely creating the different times of day as each shot went on the time changed so i modified the sun strength sun color mist color ambient occlusion all the fun stuff the trickiest lighting for me is honestly the sunny midday kind of neutral look it feels fairly

Limited to blue mist and a high sun so it lacks those nice shadows and pretty sunset colors to be honest i love doing lighting anyway so it was a lot of fun creating the visuals oh my scene two was a good opportunity to feature a bunch of our patrons

I wanted to show a variety of different ways people try to survive their first night like hiding in a dirt house or building a nerd pole to avoid the mobs also to show some things not to do like building a house without a roof or digging straight down

I thought the scene transitioned really nicely from one moment to another having the explosion from the tnt happening in the same shot as the cobblestone was being placed then having his body fall into the shot of the dirt house then that explosion leads to alex and steve running away

I made the redstone trap in minecraft to make sure it worked before animating it sadly it isn’t entirely functional as the redstone isn’t placed when it falls out of a dispenser but the idea was cool nonetheless to make the tripwire i actually took the fishing rod

Rig that we have i deleted the fishing rod part of it and the hook at the end and was just left with the wire i have these two controllers on either end and one in the middle and i duplicated that and mirrored it across to the other side

And then just used that to simulate a tripwire throughout this scene you see a bunch of mobs in almost every shot just in the background walking around to import that many rigs would have just killed the scene so instead what i did was i parented a bunch of mob rakes to an empty

And then moved that empty around so you see the crowd moving a little bit and then later on it moves to a completely different area of the map and then it moves so it’s the same set of mobs every time a lot of the lighting was done using spotlights

As the dense forest made it tricky to let light in through all the leaves everything was still looking too blue so i keyframed torches to move around the map to create this orange glow which contrasted with the blue very nicely it then transitions back to alex and steve where they face off

Against the mobs on the cliff the concept of doing a fight scene without weapons seems so interesting to me it mixed comedy with action and that seemed like a hard combo to get right i knew zilean could handle it with ease so he animated the fight scene for me

We sent a bunch of ideas back and forth what minecraft items we could use that would be both funny and exciting some of the cut ideas included making a trench with a shovel using a sign to write go away on or attaching the fish to the fishing rod

And using that to slap the creeper why did i just gesture as if i was slapping with the fish huh the fishing rod was originally going to be attached to alex’s waist kind of attack on titan style where she’d be grappling from tree to tree using a different weapon to cut things

From below her but the tree line was pretty far away from the mobs the scene didn’t really allow for that kind of motion so we ended up going with zillion’s idea i wanted this whole scene to show them working together alternating between attacking and crafting which was a nice contrast to

The opening when they were working independently this worked especially well in the fireworks sequence where the camera doesn’t change and shows them excelling at teamwork the bamboo sequence was the part i wanted the most for sure my favorite fighting style zillion had done for songs of war was

The tide singer’s pole arm so i tried to find the closest item to a pole arm in minecraft it turned out so cool the tiny piston punching thingy was inspired by the hulkbuster scene in avengers age of ultron which a lot of people have already mentioned in the comments it’s hard to

See but it did have a lever on the side to activate the piston but to be honest i don’t think it ever really gets shown in the animation since the camera is on the opposite side the items themselves were either things they found in the beginning like the bamboo or the minecart mixed

With items they crafted from resources they gathered like the piston from the redstone or the stick from the wood sound design for the fishing rod and bamboo was super fun to do i used actual grappling gun sounds for the fishing rod and a mixture of tunfurs and whips for the bamboo

The lighting in this was a bit tricky as the sun needed to rise at the end of the scene i had the sun slowly rotate throughout the scene showing the change in time of day i then swapped the sun with a new orange sun when it rises in the morning

To make sure everything still had enough light from all angles as the sun was changing direction i used the same technique from world apart where i play several spotlights pointing in multiple directions and the fire i just hit my mic why did i do that

And the mic and the mic god i’ve gotten thinking about microphones and the explosions were made using particle systems consisting of a simple collection of white and grey objects i wanted the ending to feel like classic minecraft where the sun rises and burns the mobs an old idea was to transition into a

Building sequence with surviving patrons to make the new house they have in ocean monument and beyond it could have worked but i think it concluded nicely soon after the night was over and the conflict had ended it stayed rather true to the survival aspect of the animation

In terms of music i used some classic songs from previous animations to help it feel familiar to animation life the music played a big role in setting the pacing of the second scene especially at key points the music would stop and exaggerate the moment on screen As always i use a lot of stems for the music to help extend certain sections like the beginning of the final fight there were a couple of references here and there ekko was chilling with a diamond pickaxe alex was wielding her bamboo like darth maul from the clone wars

And the term sweet new base was a callback to an old halo reach vidoc and then you can say you know sweet new map the thumbnail was actually created using an unused songs of war design i ended up modifying it a bunch replacing rigs here and there changing the lighting setup but mostly

Adding a bit more color and more vibrant make alex and steve easier to see i know the animation was a bit shorter than what we’re used to making but i wanted to keep this one fairly straightforward and take a bit of a breather from the long-form stories

I’m super happy with the result though zilean especially did a fantastic job with the fight for those waiting for bloopers they’ll be out on september 19th and for me i’m excited to work on my next project thank you all for watching and i’ll see you in the next video You