You’ve watched the video, now you want to know how it was made? Well here are the production notes for the Stage 58 Arranged Battle Scene, Innovation! Contains Gundam 00 spoilers!
The Video
The plan
As a Gundam fan foremost, the overall idea for this video was a “Super Gundam War”. Every Gundam unit (bar Turn A) would appear somehow. The video is split into five “Acts”.
Act I – A warm up fight between A-LAWS and Celestial Being. Unlike Assault on Memento Mori, I didn’t want to end this one with CB getting owned, but rather show off some combos.
Act II – The “Counterattack” by ZEXIS begins, and I have the rest of the Gundam units in the game appear.
Act III – The Innovators, Ali, Louise appear with the Gaga army.
Act IV – After Setsuna’s TRANS-AM burst, ZEXIS starts to take down the enemy forces.
Act V – A final battle between Setsuna, Amuro and Ribbons.
With that general plan in mind, I worked backwards from the end of the video. I wanted to stay true to the anime’s ending but add a little Gundam crossover flair onto it. Certain events had to happen, such as the double (or triple KO in this case) between Setsuna and Ribbons, Lyle doing a last ditch TRANS-AM attack and so on. The rest of the details were filled in with whatever I felt could lead into these events.
Most of the original first plan made it into the final video as you see now. One of the major changes was that I was going to have Louise destroy Fa and have Camille take her down with the Waverider Crash. The SEED guys would’ve taken Hilling down in a Combination Assault/Destiny Finger combo instead. However I changed my mind, because I didn’t actually want to ‘kill’ Louise on screen, so I had the pacifists ‘disable’ her instead, while the angry BFFs go avenge their girlfriends.
Originally I had Lockon say his “We are Celestial Being” line after he destroys Ali, but that cut-in takes a whopping 5 seconds, which is way too much time.
Zechs was also not originally in the first draft. It wasn’t until I was doing filming on Stage 56 Normal Route that I saw him appear as a friendly unit that I had the idea of including him. Since I wanted the main protagonists in combo attacks against the bosses, we teamed up with Heero and Allelujah to bring down Revive.
Also I had planned to Ribbons to fight each Gundam protagonist in some way. This was scrapped because due to time constraints, since I would have to find some way for the fight to end up as just Setsuna/Ribbons/Amuro. For example, an idea I had was if Kira attacked Ribbons, he would send fangs or shoot the Eternal, causing Kira to go support defend and get blown up etc.
As for no Turn A Gundam, I stated previously in the WIP that I didn’t include it because I felt it didn’t quite fit in with the ideas I had (also my general dislike of the design and animations itself). Sorry!
Anime cut-ins
I went all out this time and sourced cut-ins from SEED Destiny, 00 Gundam, Char’s Counterattack, Endless Waltz, and Gundam X this time. I wish I could’ve given everyone who appears at least one cut-in, but I ran out of available time to work with. As with Desperate Endgame, I was able to splice voice clips from the game (and other sources) over the anime footage to be able to get characters to say what I want.
At other times, I let the cut-ins help write the story. I scanned battle scenes from all of the above animes to find things I could use. For example, in SEED Destiny, Shinn yells at Athrun for hurting Luna, I had the idea of Luna getting blown up by one of the Innovators and Shinn getting really pissed off.
I also used cut-ins to help segue between each act and the music to go with them. One of the longest ones is Sumeragi calling for the R2 to get sent out. This cut in is about 5 seconds, but I felt like it should go in because it sets up for the various endings.
Special Effects
Hell, where do I start? Maybe it’s easiest if I go through bullet points on the ones I can remember.
Anything which involved flipping footage around was done by using cheats to change an enemy unit to whatever I needed, and replacing an allied unit with the enemy one. The correct portrait would be cropped and pasted over to make it look right. This includes Lockon shooting the other way, the GN Archer attack and so on.
There were a couple of attacks I used where a pilot cut-in normally appears and stops me from cutting footage where I want. Examples of these are Setsuna’s GN Sword and Double X’s Saber attack. To bypass this you can swap in someone who doesn’t have a cut in – say Xingke, into these units and record the attack minus the cut in. You can then easily crop the original character’s portrait and dialogue and paste it over the top.
Including Tieria in the battle against Ali was a bit of a challenge. As he says “Close quarter battles are the best!”. Tieria only has one melee attack, which is the Seraphim Gundam, and although it looks kinda goofy, I wanted to include it somehow. In the end I made it more dramatic by having Seraphim eject while Seravee blows up, which was made using footage of the Seraphim Gundam attack, zoomed in you can’t see the Seravee, with the explosion of the Seravee underneath.
“Team Confuse” is actually a mashup of Destiny’s cannon attack, Zeta’s Beam Confuse, and Strike Freedom’s Dragoon attack.
Units blowing up takes up a lot of time, especially because they explode twice, once at weapon impact and once to ‘blow up’. I saved lots of time by cutting at the first explosion while pasting the pilot’s death cry over it.
Ribbons dodging the Fin Funnels was a bit of a pain to do. I had to do this on Stage 53 ZEXIS (the Wing finale). I created an allied version of Reborns Gundam and loaded it up with Hyper Jammers (which gives the unit Bunshin). I then had to use cheats to change an enemy unit to Reborns Gundam, as the cheats grant the player version, with the Hyper Jammers on it. Finally, I attacked the Reborns Gundam with Fin Funnel repeatedly until the bunshin activated, giving me just the funnel beams needed to overlay against Reborns’ TRANS-AM attack.
And while not really a special effect, as a test, I removed all of the text where possible, since I figure it would never match up to what the characters were saying anyway. I hope it’s not too distracting!
Sound and Music
As I said in my WIP, I went outside of the game to get additional voice samples. The games I used were:
Gundam Extreme VS
Gundam VS Gundam NEXT
SD Gundam G Generation World/Overworld
All three games have a wealth of pilot sound bytes, which I feel help give the video a bit more soul. I have to thank BQR though, I was only using Extreme VS clips until he mentioned G Gen, thanks for that idea 🙂 Prince Ali has a whole bunch of crazy ones which I wish I could’ve used somehow (HIIIIISATSU NAN-TORA!!). Everyone in G Gen has a quote for God/Shining/Darkness Finger and I wanted to include one – it’s just such a shame that Shinn’s one is kinda lame otherwise it would’ve suited his Destiny Finger move so well. In the end, the honour went to Lockon.
All of the music is from 00 Gundam. I used the movie version of TRANS-AM Raiser because it’s much longer than the regular version (4 minutes as opposed to 2 1/2).
One thing I did manage to try out and learn to do is place the in-game dialogue wherever I choose to during the animation. Sometimes pilots don’t speak during animations or they talk in rather bad timing which prevents me from cutting at locations I want to.
In order to fix this, the voice track has to be completely separated from the SFX track. This is where Mobile Dolls come in. Since they have no dialogue, you give the MD any unit you want to record, and get just the sound effects for any particular attack you need. Once you have the sound effects, you can record the dialogue by setting Voice volume to max and the rest to minimum, and voila, you can now place voices anywhere you want. Being able to control the timing of the dialogue can really make a difference.
Finally, I had a lot of trouble balancing sound volumes for this video. The various musics I used had different volume levels and when balancing music, you have to take into account dialogue and SFX as well. The last Act of the video gets a bit louder than it should…maybe I’ll release a remaster in the future which fixes the problem.
Random facts
Production took around 70+ hours over one month.
This video covers the battles from the final 3 episodes of 00 Gundam 2nd season.
This is the longest Arranged Battle Scene I’ve done yet, at 17 minutes, the previous record was the Mazinger Z finale at 15 minutes.
I went through 70 revisions of the file before publishing it, compared to Desperate Endgame’s 12.
If you add the endings, the total run time is almost that of an anime episode.
I did filming on Stage 56 Normal Route. This mission has Ali and Louise as boss units. I also did filming on Stage 53 for the initial fight against A-LAWS.
I recorded over 100 gigabytes of uncompressed footage to make this video.
Phew! That’s all for now…I think. I’ll have the endings as their own separate post. Thanks for reading!
Really awesome!!! Just inscribed in your channel on Youtube! 😀