Everything WRONG with our videos: MINECRAFT LIVE! (PART 1)

Foreign look at this all right what am I looking at it’s where I put my collection of last year’s Element Animation Channel videos if I had any where are they done I know you have them what are you doing and I want my videos done I want my

Videos okay there weren’t as many Channel videos last year but that’s partly because we were working super hard on some videos for Minecraft live Minecraft live is the biggest Minecraft event every year and it’s where we can see all the cool stuff going on across the Minecraft Community it’s also where

All the new features and games get announced and we get to vote for our new mob to get added to the game I want more blocks uh hi I’d like to submit this mob for consideration that’s just a squid no no look it has nine tentacles and a

Hatred for mean comments that’s stupid nobody’s gonna vote for and it wouldn’t be Minecraft live without animations and sometimes we’re asked to make some for the show but last year we were asked to make not just one but five animated videos and three of them were really big Productions we’re

Probably not going to be able to cover all the animations in this one video so I’m just gonna put this at the end of the title before we get into the technical issues on these videos I want to tell you a little bit about the events leading up

To the Minecraft live project oh I want problems now show me your mistakes okay so if you want to jump straight into the problems here is the time code otherwise come with me let’s rewind the clock all the way back to the bygone era of late 2021 Does anyone want to go outside today no wait James what are you doing here you don’t work here but I want to be in here we were looking for people to join the team and help us make videos faster but there was a problem that’s been an

Issue for the entire history of the studio we use some software called Cinema 4D to make our videos and every time we try to hire someone uh do you use Maya I only know Maya oh I only know how to use blender minimator Maya Maya Maya my yeah laughs

Oh I don’t want to jump I just want to hang out and distract you while you’re working that’s already covered so we asked them if they’d be willing to let us teach them Cinema 4D learn no I can’t believe you’ve asked this off me I’m telling your mum so after I Stern

Talking to my parents we decided it was time to say goodbye to our old friend Cinema 4D it was a very emotional day guys we’re using Maya now okay okay except none of us knew how to use Maya and just as we were getting to

Grips with it we heard a knock at our virtual door actually it was an email anyway the email at the door was from our friends over at Mojang and they said something like element it’s that time again Mojang had asked us to create a big video to announce Minecraft live uh how exactly are we gonna do that we’re kitted out for Maya but we don’t know how to use it yet he was right but if we were going to learn everything we needed

To in time for this project we were gonna need some help and that’s when I remembered why we switched in the first place do you guys use Maya no no we use Cinema oh oh wait yeah no yes welcome aboard yeah yeah and all of its many quirks huh

How many is that that’s the fourth one today on top of the switch to Maya we also switched our render engine from octane to Pixar’s render burn which turned out to be way more work than we thought and why did we do that Dan because it looks very pretty and all the

Other reasons are in this box it’s locked yep so to sum up we were learning how to animate again with lots of new ways of doing things and the Clock Was ticking and on top of that we were figuring out what we were actually making coming up with the concepts and

Pitching ideas and everything else that normally goes into pre-production but this video is about the technical issues so with all this in mind there were bound to be some small problems that worked their way into the videos and almost all of them are things barely anybody would have even noticed but it’s

Still fun to find them so let’s find out everything time is the Minecraft live 2022 announcement video Before it was released we called this video the frog stroll because the video revolves around these three frogs bopping along through the different Minecraft biomes this wasn’t the first idea for this video but it was the most fun and it looks like you guys thought so too because the response this video

Got was huge it also spawned a bunch of memes and musical edits that I can’t really show here but I’m sure you can find them if you haven’t seen the original video you can find it right here so let’s jump into the problems first up is the very first shot of the

Video we open with an underwater scene where we can see this little tadpole he swims away and joins a giant swarm of other tadpoles to form the Minecraft live logo but if you follow him closely he just vanishes so this shot has a couple of Parts this guy is a full

Character rig so it’s controlled by an animator but all of these other tadpoles are simulated because they have to swim into the shape of the Minecraft live logo if an animator had to do this by hand we’d probably still be here today working on this one shot so the idea was

That by the time this little guy gets over here he’d be after he’d been animated we had to switch out the Minecraft live logo with an updated version which changed all of the swimming patterns of all the simulated tadpoles and we didn’t realize that he wasn’t blending anymore good we’re pointing out subscribe

So a frog comes up and blasts through the water and then we go into a super slow-mo scene with all these frogs bopping along to the beat in the background but this frog here is in some grass like in the grass like he’s just clipping in and out of it when this was

First animated This Grass wasn’t here but the set went through a bunch of revisions and nobody noticed before it was sent to render whoops Here we have the frogs bopping along through a bunch of slimes a frog is about to eat a slime when this alley swoops down and steals it making the Frog very angry but while most of the slimes in the shot were super happy dancing along with the frogs this one up

Here doesn’t move he’s just there staring into the distance so a few of these problems happened because we were still working out some of the Kinks in our new pipeline usually when you’re making a shot it’s done in stages so you start with the layout which is where you put all the cameras

And the characters in then that’s passed on to the animators who animate all the characters then all the visual effects is added in if it’s needed so particles fire simulation cloth and a bunch of other stuff after this it’s sent for lighting to make it look all fancy and

Vibrant and finally it gets sent to render where we get our final image the cool thing about having it in these stages is that you can change something in an earlier stage and it will propagate through all of the stages that come afterwards so I could swap out a

Character in the layout with another character and even if the animation is already done in the animation stage it will update this also means that all of these stages can be worked on at the same time by different people or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work when we did this

Shot we were still working out some issues with that and at some point we decided that having this slime here dancing like all the others would be too distracting from the main action so we hid it in the layout stage but somehow it returned it skipped all

The stages and jumped back in at the render stage leaving us with this slime and a thousand yard stare So throughout the video this big chase in the background gets longer and longer adding more mobs each time but it always starts with the alley being chased by the Frog but in this one the Frog just isn’t there also there’s a rabbit sat on a cactus in

The background that rabbit would be dead Earlier in the video we see the Frog strolling through a Savannah and then through the snowy mountain biome there’s nothing immediately obvious about these two shots until you look at the sky and notice that the clouds are exactly the same just shifted over a bit when we were first setting up these

Shots the clouds were just this big solid object so to make it look like a different set of clouds in each shot we’d bring the clouds in and shift it over to a random location using a very robust proven scientific method so now a different area would be in

Front of the camera and we did that with every shot these two being so similar was just a huge Flute one drawback to this method is that you have to remember to do it later in the video the clouds in these two shots are exactly the same

So here we have the arch Elijah in the Minecraft dungeon’s throne room he gets rudely interrupted by the crowd passing through and on top of that the Frog eats the orb of dominance so he storms down here only to get blasted into the air by

The Stampede but let’s go back if we go through frame by frame we can see that he loses his legs it looks like once the crowd hits him his legs separate and start trailing behind him I’m not 100 sure why this happened it could have been animated that way or it could be

That the rig was updated after it was animated and didn’t carry over properly this Magma Cube on the other hand is about to become another problem but it looks like we can’t see it in the final shot so uh so so that’s fine takes us through

At biomes did you catch that that’s six entire scenes in less than two seconds and I have a lot of respect for everyone who worked on these shots because they were a huge amount of work each one needing set building characters rigging animation all the particles and the

Lighting and they all just flash by in an instant but it looks amazing when they’re all played together But Dan you worked on some of these shots too I know but there’s one issue with this very last one in the end we have all these Enderman and endomites dancing along with the music and the chase going on in the background but what’s this there’s a rabbit just hanging out in the

End with all these end of it the rabbit is part of the big chase in the background and we animated all those chases in a separate file so the main scene file wouldn’t get super laggy and for some reason the animation just didn’t carry over he’s just here chilling

Next up the mobs and the chase eventually make their way into an ancient city but as they get there the Frog accidentally and darkness Creeps in around the mobs and suddenly sending all of them flying zombie is still sort here completely unfazed by what just happened and if we

Go back it looks like he wasn’t animated at all throughout the entire shot the problem with this shot just a frames later it’s weird Shadow all across his face so this happened causing the shadow one problem’s a little more annoying is that had been staring at the shop for a while

Fixing another problem so I really should have spied it but I was preoccupied with the floating the floaty Cube was the absolute bane of my week every time this shot was sent to render there it was bloating at us all we knew was that it was appearing after

The animation stage and we tried everything we possibly could to find out where the floaty Cube was coming from and why it was there until finally after the flowy Cube look isn’t at the layout stage what yeah see there’s no animation at this point too much of our time and

Budget had been spent figuring out this problem so we did what most governments do when they have a problem we covered it up the next scene is in the Minecraft Legends World Minecraft Legends is a brand new game with a whole new style so our Chase blasts through interrupting

These piglens attacking a village this doesn’t stop our frogs though they stroll through while all the piglens are causing Mayhem in the background and there’s a few problems in the shot and there’s a lot going on so it’s hard to spot them right here there’s a piglet

Trying to smash his mace into the structure over here but if he was just a little bit over to the left we wouldn’t see his mace popping out of the side here this piglet rushes through and takes out a villager but as he does that this zombie intersects one of the lights

That was attached to him my favorite thing about this shot is that the piglins aren’t just attacking the villagers and the zombies they’re attacking each other too so you see this piglet up here throws his mace at this other Piglet and he gets knocked off the

Big sign but if we follow the mace that he drop it just falls through the ground like it’s not there Ah what as we get into the final stretch of the video the alley races away from all the mobs that were chasing it and bumps into Alex who’s just placed a sign but as she stands up her arm goes through the sign so all the mobs catch up but the alley stops them

And shows them that this whole thing was to bring them all to the train to go to Minecraft live they take a beat to think about it I mean they were all super angry a second ago but who can say no to a free ride to Minecraft live so the

Frog starts feeling it and the beat kicks back in and then everyone joins in and everybody wants that train ride so the first problem with this scene and throughout the entire video in fact is that the hoglin should be a zoglin well except in the nether but this is all

Because in Minecraft a hogling can’t exist for more than 15 seconds in the Overworld and considering it’s part of the chase throughout I’d say it’s been a fair bit longer than that and even if it hadn’t been he would be violently shaking all the way through

Another issue with this shot here is on the rabbit he has this line through his leg this is a problem with his bump map but mapping is used to add extra surface details on a model and it can look really convincing but it’s all an illusion here’s a single polygon with a

Brick texture on it it’s pretty obvious that it’s just a flat flat plane but if we apply a bum map to it it starts to look a whole lot more convincing Mojang likes to include bump maps on the big animated videos because it adds a little

Bit more Flair it also gives a little bit more detail to catch the lighting on what Maps can look great but make sure they’re on the right model we’re so bumpy before we go into the final shot I want to talk about signs so near the start of the video the frog

Chases the alley through the snowy landscape angering this goat but there’s a sign in the background and while the joke is fun a few people were very passionate that the text on the sign should match the game and couldn’t be centered the way it is on here now I

Have my own extremely pedantic and not at all important feelings on Minecraft signs and I’m gonna tell you about them so the graphic designer in me sees the texture on a Minecraft Sign like lines on a page and there’s three of them so if I go into the game and place a sign

Down oh oh just a note so it might be really hard to see but this is what my character normally looks like in the game so I put a suit on for this video so you can see me hey guys look my coffee’s floating again this is why our projects take so long

Anyway this is how it looks on a regular sign which to me is the same as writing like this online paper I am however gonna give us a ding for this because this video is an official video for Mojang so really it should be how it is

In the game even if I have opinions on it you care far too much about this I do hey Chrissy Chrissy Chrissy wake up this better not be about Minecraft signs again uh never mind in the final shot of the video we have all the mobs in the train making their

Way to Minecraft live this train is a recurring theme through all the videos we made it’s what links them all together the shot has a couple of problems the first one is here on a couple of frames we can see the strange pink object in between the frogs and the

Goat that’s actually the Frog’s tongue in the original layout we had the green frog flapping his tongue in the wind but it looked a little bit weird so we put it back in his mouth and closed it up but one set of keyframes was left on the

Tongue so as soon as we send it to render it reappeared we spent a little bit of time masking it out of the final shot but it was missed on a couple of frames as the camera Rises up into the sunset before the Xbox Studios logo pops

Up we can see some bright lights down here and a few people were speculating on what that was and it’s a missing chunk this world was so huge that we couldn’t really play the file back until it was rendered because of how slow it made our machines

So what we normally do for shots like this is break the world up into chunks so animators can only bring in the chunks they need as we were turning all of them back on for the final render this one was missed so what you’re actually seeing there is the sky coming

Through from underground and finally motion blur it wouldn’t be an element animation video without some motion blur issues if you’ve seen our other videos in this series you’ll know that we usually do our motion blur after the renders are complete and that comes with its own advantages and drawbacks we

Were planning on using the full 3d motion blur in renderman for this but there was a huge bug in renderman at the time which didn’t play nice with our rigs so we had to fall back to our old ways if you want to know why that

Happens you can check it out in our other videos but what that means right now is that we need to add a bunch more dings to the problem count Announcement trailer total comes to wow you know what considering everything that went into making this video that’s a win that’s a that’s an absolute win of course there are probably more problems in there that we didn’t spot so if you do find any of them let us know in the

Comments the main one pointed out last time was that I counted one of the problems twice I promise I’ve checked this one so we’ve been asked why we make these videos why point out the problems with our own work well mostly because it’s fun we get to go back over our old

Projects and see what went wrong and where we can improve and also make jokes about it it’s also a reminder to any creative people out there that there’s no Movie video game music or piece of art that is perfect except for these signs that have the text in the lines

Those are perfect anyway that’s it for this edition of everything wrong with our videos If you guys manage to make it this far and you didn’t get bored we might even make a part two I want to give a big thank you to Mojang for allowing us to share this all with you

And also to our patrons here especially our ultimate Patron the waffenhoten clan without all of you this video just wouldn’t have been possible if you want to help us make videos you can join our patreon over at patreon.com forward slash Element Animation see you next time