Songs of War: Episode 1 BEHIND THE SCENES (Minecraft Animation Series)

Songs of war was a story I’ve been wanting to tell for years even before I was creating minecraft animations the vision from the beginning was always to make a universe that the viewer could engage in the world was built fully to scale so people could one day explore it

All the characters were designed in such a way that the skins could easily be worn in game I don’t think anything quite like this has been done before so there was a lot of risk going in fortunately the project created a lot of excitement and we were able to put

Together a team to create something which i think is truly unique everyone David here director of songs of war and welcome to the behind the scenes of Episode one with each episode we’ll be releasing a behind the scenes to explore the episode show how it came together and hopefully provide you with

Some more insight on how everything was made the series opens with a prologue a narration detailing an important event in the world’s history I talked a lot with my co-director Samuel khyber about whether to do a prologue at all as it’s kind of a lot of lore dumped real quick

Without meeting any actual characters but we felt it was almost necessary because of how different this world was and things need to be explained like songs the other function of it was to set up almost a sort of preview of what this universe can be like despite times

Having moved on the music in the series is completely an original score done by after infinity or damn as we call him we wanted to create a long singular flow of music for the prologue but also go between many different moods and establish some of the themes that we’ll

Be hearing later in the series the first version of the prologue was just a narration with some real basic piano beats set two screenshots taken from within the world nothing had even been animated reluctantly the clans agreed and held a tournament to determine which Shaw donee would become their champion

And wield all four Prime’s songs the series despite being mostly original lore is based very closely on the lore established in core minecraft you know there’s the nether the end the undead zombies and skeletons and a lot should be familiar to those who play Minecraft

But with just a lot more added on top we did change a few things to better adapt our story something’s already seen and others you’ll be seeing later there were a lot of really nice shots in the prologue but one of my favorites is at the ender Knights walking out of the

Mist i brought the light level down to the point where you could you only really see their silhouettes and gradually the lights on their armor begin to illuminate as they get closer I also added some volumetric lights to get the Rays coming from behind them it’s a

Nice wet reflections on the floors to really exaggerate the colors of their armor and fake some 3d dynamic mist by adding dozens of little 2d planes in a row the Enderdragon rig was a big improvement for us the inner dragons are very important in this series so there

Were a few things I had to do to make them really work with the story first they needed to be each slightly unique so you could tell the different dragons apart just as important however was when you did a way to do better wings default minecraft

Wings a fold out kind of plainly and they get in the way when you actually want the dragons to walk around so when Sophie can’t started working on the rig we pushed for a more anatomically correct bone structure this was the first if I put together comparing the

Old wing design to the new and immediately any was a success and to this day I think the ender dragon is one of the best rigs in the series and you can I’ve even seen the best part yet the ender dragon the flame effects this was

One of the very few times where we actually used fire simulation although I did a lot of tricks to save a bunch of render time and make it more efficient it’s a bit of challenge however when setting up the opening shot as the flames kept going in front of the death

Singer and covering him up I ended up creating this rather strange cylinder Collider shape to keep the fire going on either side of him but but still appear to be hitting his shield in summary the prologue was long too caged organized and it was actually one of the last

Things I left in production that way it would have a lot of improvements from animating all the other scenes and I could apply that knowledge to make the prologue the best it could be when the prologue ends we moved to the walls of time a location far in the north with

These giant walls that tell the tales of the world’s history the design I had was that they were literally these huge walls of stone that were mined around when hollowing out the room every time a new historical event worthy of being recorded happened they’d mind further

Along the back side of the room and carve out more walls to write more history that’s why in the four end of the place you can actually see some of the scaffolding and equipment where they’re preparing to continue mining should the need arise for more walls

I wanted a really dark and cold look for the place so these big monolithic walls really stood out and receding almost entirely out of sight as they kind of disappear towards the ceiling I think the color palette for the final renders with a scene which some of my favorites

In the series with the dark black sky lit by the prisoner in cyan colors and only periodically broken up by the warm orange from the lanterns the prologue is then revealed to not just be a total narration but rather it was a character reading off of one of these walls which

I think helps make it a bit more immersive that way the story is read by Thalia’s whose voice which is perfect for it they were given to the Masters of the for our Tony clans as a sign of peace and unity that’s a minor breaks they’re like we can do it again Taliesin

Doris plays a major role in the series he’s very old even for an R Tony and is one of the few people alive who who was also alive during the events of the Great War he was just narrating about we also meet one of his friends Hawken this

Was a character that went through a lot of rewrites we bounced around a bit between making him too silly or too serious we wanted him to be a bit fun and eccentric but not set to light of a tone so early in this series one of his

Early designs we liked a lot until someone pointed out it was very similar to another character from television so we redid him almost completely which I think ended up with actually a nicer result there are some interesting choices we had to make early on the production such as how much we’d be

Following Minecraft rules unfortunately I don’t think there’s ever a clearly defined line but we definitely erred on the side of more realism you know people can’t place cubic meters of stone everywhere however we do have the concept of an inventory Hawkins able to draw both his fish and his weapon from

His inventory weapons then exist on the bodies to free up inventory space as well as help identify characters because they are still here the big climax to the first episode is at Mountain valgrind where they discover the Volt ours are indeed still around and were introduced to ty Granville tars

You must be Thalia sandara’s I’ve heard many things about you after the death singer died he rose up to lead the remaining Vultar scattered and unorganized this was his first design but then we updated it to a slightly newer design to get kind of an angry or

Look in deeper colors then later we added better shading to all the ardougne which gave him a little bit of an older look most important however was making him a threat when villains show up in songs of war that they shouldn’t always lose and be forced to retreat but should

Actually feel dangerous and the confrontation is dramatic this fight was done by zillion we thought it essential to work in a major fight sequence in the first episode as they are a big part of the series The fight sound design at general was a big improvement from our past animations dan and I recorded a lot of custom sounds including metal hits and scrapes we then use these elements and designed more stylistic sword hits and movements to make everything seem just that much more intense choosing the lighting for

The final fight was a big process I did tons of different environment ideas and first I wanted it to be really snowy with an intense blizzard that way in the final shot everything was just going to kind of get lost in this big snowstorm as it fades to pure white unfortunately

None of these song effects were showing up well on the white background so I went with one of the more dark nighttime ones so these songs and effects would really punch a bit better I think it was a good choice because it also allowed for the nice moon light rays which

Helped frame shots one thing I wanted to design for songs of war was an efficient misty atmospheric effect this was something I had tried many times during production of the series but always failed you can see my attempts resulted in intersecting the lines and when I tried it again they

Had the same problem I ended up cheating a little bit and having the noise map to the mist which prevented the lines but unfortunately led to a little bit of projection issues hopefully no one noticed I also used a similar misty effect when fading to north wind

Initially there was just a straight fade from white but having it kind of come through the physical mist and reveal things more naturally a lot better for transition tigrin Jenner jebal song was a very important one that was made mostly of these spheres with displacement and nice energy textures on

The outside of these rings that provide little bits of energy arcing around the core dan crea the sound design for all the songs and we described these aggressive songs as being very unstable we wanted to show it being powerful and visually impressive but not make it seem like

Songs were unbalanced his he has a powerful song but it’s very slow and relatively easy to evade also Hawken is able to block it with a shield although the field is entirely destroyed and he seems to get hurt from it as well it was extremely important for me to create a

Balance in the universe so that no character affection seemed to overpower the other song we see being used is Talia’s teleport we wanted something real short and fast more like a quick blink it leaves behind these nice clean trails but we also had to illuminate his

Skin to really get that bright flash of light he sound here was mostly on the charged up when the actual activation happened we wanted to crack in an echo like air rushing back into the void similar to lightning strikes when the other big effects showcased here apart

From the songs most alice is enchanted sword in psalms a war we deviated a bit from Minecraft with our enchantments and gave them both an idol in an activated state for Thalia’s we wanted something pretty clean and elegant so basic RF surrounds his sword and at least behind

Nice clean streak I went through a lot of streak effects and tested and old scenes you can see here that the automatic approach wasn’t really that noticeable ended up doing something a bit more manual where I’d move this big stretchy thing along behind his sword eventually later in the series I did

Find an automatic way to do it that still looked pretty good there’s actually a little bit of this episode they got deleted very last minute we wrote a bit where Hawken is kind of undeterred by tiger ins threats he just starts throwing some snowballs at him

And brushes all the danger off on paper it was this nice little break in tension and a fun little moment with Hawken but we went to put all the scene together we could see it it was just completely breaking the mood there wasn’t a good way to shift from dark music – something

Comedic and then right back to dark without as a feeling kind of jarring is tigrin volt honest yeah yeah we’re not afraid of you Elias can take on all seven of you right Elias your returns will be remembered Scala as for you Dennis Adonis the openings the series instead then ends on

A dark tone Hawken died Dali’s barely escaped and the ville tourists are still out there thanks everyone for watching songs of war episode 1 as well as these behind the scenes from everyone involved we hope you enjoy what you saw and are excited for more if this series does

Understand you please consider sharing it with your friends I often get asked by people if there’s any way that can help out and honestly the best way to help is just watch the videos and share them so thanks again and I’ll see you next episode [Applause]