Songs of War: Episode 8 BEHIND THE SCENES (Minecraft Animation Series)

After two pretty high-intensity episodes songs war episode 8 comes as somewhat of a breather it’s an opportunity to expand on everyone’s situation and prepare for the upcoming events at the end of the season Hello everyone David here director of songs of war and welcome to the episode 8 behind the scenes we try to work in little details into the world to help make it feel more alive when Phoenix created this nice deer rig based off the Twilight Force mod it just seemed

Extremely fitting to see Kendall walking around the songs war world this episode had one of my favorite render glitches I think we’ve rented out the opening sequence with sin and igneous and when I went to play it back it looked like a nuke was going off you know I’m still a

Child by most standards I’m already about halfway through my life I’d love to experience everything I can go hang a Mac turns out I just had put an extra decimal in the wrong place when doing some compositing or something so this episode we needed another town that was

Bigger than hog town a bigger town bigger ton the name was literally as simple as that we kind of said it as a joke at first but for some reason it just kind of stuck and it worked nice as a name rumor has it that right down the street is smaller Tintin and

Average 10 the tavern sequence was a good opportunity to really show off all the different sorts of people and creatures many of whom we haven’t even seen before I always tried to avoid making my background characters too interesting because you don’t want to draw attention away from your your main

Characters your subjects but in places like this I wanted to make it seem like many people here had a story there’s this iron golem looking character kind of sharpening his sword is that armor or is that like his species we see some bandits armed with unique weapons which I normally reserved for foreground

Characters and then there’s green thing everyone loves green thing this was another judo scene and I think he spent more time animating the green little guy than the rest of the tavern sequence it really shows in all his detail though you can’t quite see over the counter and

He has to kind of hop when he orders his drink then he kind of struggles to pull the cap off and it eventually kind of pops out when igneous comes up behind him who towers over him he’s a bit startled and heads off even his walk was animated a lot more

Custom to give him a kind of shorter feel I always imagined him as a kind of water-based species who normally doesn’t come on land so maybe needs to drink a lot to stay hydrated and the excellent music in the tavern was too different lively light lively live recorded guitar

Songs the first one was by after infinity he just I think he’s just recording some random guitar thing at one point he’s like oh this could be a tavern song at one point so I used it and then the second one was a one that I’d put up at one point because we

Realized we didn’t have enough music so I was like oh grab my guitar and I put some more tavern music so both Dan and I got some that’s my guitar work in the tavern in the background this episode is a good one to finally talk about Philly

Knows and Maggie writes a bit more as far as Philly knows I see that I see them as little as far as Philly knows I see them as fairly similar to humans the females have more cat-like features whereas the males have more wolf-like features all the male Philly news will

Have their hair in shades of black gray white whereas the females can be born with their hair as any color and their species is a bit more agile has little better senses whereas magnin writes they’re a bit more bulky kind of tanks I wrote in their original species

Description many years ago that they can they can be compared to something like sheep where they kind of just do whatever all the magnets are doing it’s just kind of their culture which makes their species stand out a little bit physically they’re resistant believes as we see and heat but they can’t swim

Currently a lot of magnets are pretty aggressive and rough and have been causing a lot of problems the garden Bickerton kind of turns around as they enter and keeps his hand on his sword just in case I remember it was this scene that I really felt like I was

Really improving my lighting it’s surprisingly difficult to do lighting in Minecraft because you aren’t working with smooth shapes you can’t really get rim lighting other than faking it with subsurface scattering but even that doesn’t actually reveal the nice shapes I was struggling to light some of the interior bits and was debating whether

To do bright lights on the characters and backgrounds or brighter backgrounds and dark characters I wanted the place to feel dimly lit then I realized I could keep everything if I just started to introduce some variants in colors in Marshalls map shop you can see that in order for me to make

Everything look less flat I made the room a kind of warm orange but then made the light on sin a bit blue to contrast the tavern was incredibly complex lighting setup for songs war scenes I’d added some colourful lights around the bar area to help give it a little more life it also

Helps the characters stand out from the dark and dim backdrop the undead skulls along the walls each have this ominous under lighting and then there’s shafts of light coming in from the outside and a kind of warm glow coming from the big chandelier and maps the top-down maps

These are genuine maps of the world I used on mind map renderer which is a great mapper then I color corrected it a bit to give that kind of parchment look I also littered some of these maps around nica’s tree for it and to make them fit a bit more with her strategies

And records give it the YouTube thumbnail treatment I also designed some clouds shadow technology for signs of war the actual skies we use don’t animate at all they’re just images but I wanted to give the effect that in songs war the clouds were kind of moving along

And everything felt somewhat in motion I faked it by adding a huge 2d plane over the world with a basic animated noise texture which is invisible to the camera but still cast shadows most of the time you won’t even really notice the actual shadows but if you speed up shots

Sometimes it becomes a little more apparent it also helps just kind of vary the lighting intensity in the environment to get a nicer final result this also was a time where I decided to use a few clear skies in songs of war I usually lean towards kind of low Sun

Angles like my sunrise and sunset or else kind of nighttime and dark clouds but it seemed appropriate for this a little bit of the story to just see some normal days for a change there might not be too much more opportunity for this later there’s something else that

Happens this episode that I really like which is it’s the first time two story arcs directly meet it’s strange seeing someone like Sen standing next to Abigail and this definitely won’t be the last meeting between story arcs that’s for sure now why would I save them we also are

Introduced to a more military side of the world for Zuko it’s a large military training Fortin Feldon where we see archery ranges and training pits and I wanted to show a character really kicking ass for a bit so you know this guy is one of the

Best and then we reveal and meet Kyoshi here she’s interesting to me he’s actually one of my favorite characters in the series because he initially acts as somewhat of an opposition to Lucan as they insult each other a bit and then we learn Lucan will be forced to fight in

The army beneath him and he’s one of those characters that he’s not a bad person he just conflicts with the the characters we’ve been following and if anything Kyoshi is the one who’s you know a lot more justified a little more pure he rose through the ranks of the

Military and is now a renowned captain whereas you know Lucan just kind of lives a petty life doing crime so it’s interesting dynamic between them now that they’re forced to work together for all the kingdoms we designed the various types of skins for the military usually a guard and a

Soldier for Kyoshi we gave him this little gold patch visible from the chest and on the shoulders to make him stand out as the captain we decided to take that idea of the gold mark and make it so that his personal group of soldiers all used gold weapons we even gave him

This nice group of honor guards with big ceremony as golden staffs unfortunately you can barely see them one final detail with Kyoshi is his ear which appears to have been cut or wounded it’s missing a bit of the tip and seems scarred we thought this was nice to contrast the

Rest of his look and personality his silver hair shading is extremely slick and clean much more than most of our hair shading so – to see him have this little visible scar she was a bit of a rougher side to him and it kind of makes

You wonder a bit about how he got to this point you can also see Skyfall as a soldier here Skyfall animated these fighting training loops which got used all around in background I also use these earlier in the necro base scene for the zombies kind of fighting each

Other and even the Magna rights outside open Dale meanwhile at the river the Guardians Jackson be doing some sweet improv igneous his line here had a lot of improv that wasn’t in the script I said another thing about magneride is a little something I don’t think we can

Swim I always welcome voice acting improvisation and it helps things come across more naturally and sometimes leads to more of the funny details initially if this scene with the Guardians was in episode 9 and a scene from nine actually is what ended the episode here but we had some problems

With 9 being pretty short so we shuffled some things around in the end it was I think the only time we ever changed actual scene or during after finishing the script we solved the problem of episode length and I think we also ended up with a lot better cliffhanger here Thanks everyone for watching this episode of songs war behind the scenes as a reminder we’re running a special promotion where if you pledge to any level on our patreon before episode 10 release you can have your name in the episode 10 credits the patreon earnings help fund the series so please consider

Supporting us by pledging if you’re enjoying science war and with that I’ll see you next behind the scenes You