[S] Murrit: REW/FFD - Part 1

Hey there, everyone! Me and Tyson are so happy to welcome all of you to a special monthly commentary post - the very first of its kind, in fact.

That's right, we're about to get into all the nitty-gritty, concept-arty behind the scenes that involved bringing the massive undertaking known as "That One Murrit Animation" to life!!! We've never done that for animation pages before, which is a bit of a shame, but we figured we couldn't just not share all these goodies with you folks. Because boy oh boy, are there a shitton of goodies to share. 

Yep. As you can probably guess by that big ole "Part 1" in the header there, we miscalculated the amount of stuff we'd have to go over yet again. It just keeps happening. But hey, the good news is that you're gonna have EVEN MORE Murrit flash content to look forward to next month!

So strap in, dear readers. We have considerable ground to cover.

We briefly touched on this during this month's Q&A, but the song choice of any given flash is maybe one of The most primordial seeds of the whole thing. Before we even start sketching anything, Austin and Heather will take some time to listen to it over and over, breaking it down into segments and giving us a pretty detailed shot-by-shot outline of the whole thing. Each artist obviously has some interpretative freedom once everything's said and done, but these documents are HUGELY helpful, and just like the rest of Vast Error, the animations definitely wouldn't be the same without their directorial vision.

One of the main things we wanted to play with during this specific animation was, obviously, the site and panel layouts, besides just embiggening stuff (even though there was also a lot of embiggening happening), because that's old news by now. The main point of reference on that front was the page [S] ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1, from a webcomic you may have heard about. It's one of my personal favorite Homestuck flashes, and I'd like to think we did a pretty alright job with wearing that stylist reference on our sleeves!

Here's a link to the full animatic! (Patreon doesn't let you embed multiple videos in the same post. Boo.)

As is usual with our animated endeavors, storyboarding duties were spread between multiple people in the earlier months of production. This time around, the brave animatic warriors were dynamic duo ConjunxEndurae (also known as our good pals Chase and Rick), Max Squidsmeister, Tyson and myself. Tyson also later made this extremely helpful color key for the different segments of the animation, after we had them properly organized and split:

So there's our guide for ease of reference later in this post. Ain't that gorgeous? Don't worry, you'll be seeing some of those concept shots way bigger and in higher resolution in a bit too.

But first, let's talk about that delightful little intro, courtesy of Mimesis and Tyson!

Here's another linky link.

TYSON: The Mimesis animated intro was, ironically, the very last thing to be finished before the final edits and export, despite it being one of the first things concepted for the video! It wasn't originally planned to be animated at all, but after looking at the script I had an Animator Vision brain blast. Some of the keys I timed and sketched in Toonboom during the earlier months of production, but it didn't get picked up again until the day before the flash was initially planned to drop. I held off working on it intentionally, because I knew it would be easier and faster for me to focus on the animation by itself instead of juggling it alongside everything else I had to work on. Additionally, I could cut down on the detail and frame count as I went along, depending on how close I was to cutting it with the deadline, instead of feeling compelled to follow through on a overly complex sketch visualized months prior when I wasn't worrying about time constraints.

SEGMENT 1

TYSON: This segment was boarded by Rick and Chase, while sketches were done by our artist and friend Diz! You'll see his name pop up a lot throughout this post. We brought him on for this animation and he has been an invaluable addition to the team since. The finalized character art + backgrounds were done by another awesome new artist we brought on, Dizzims (Charlotte)! She did an incredible job taking on pretty much the entirety of this section, really capturing the Bastarde energy of Murrit's expressions from Diz's sketches.

There they are. The troll whom cursed my brain.

TYSON: You may have noticed this shot wasn't in the animatic. That's because Kohi and I decided to shove it in there last minute while re-timing segment 1, since the pacing for these initial shots felt too slow otherwise. It also gave Tee Hanos more of a proper establishing shot, which seemed needed to me.

All in all, this was a relatively straightforward storyboard sequence. We start really going off the shits with the transitions and movement and all that stuff later, but it still has some very well thought-out flairs that manage to keep it visually interesting, like the little doodle speech bubbles that pop up in the panels up above and the dramatic Tee Hanos cutout. 

Oh yeah, and also all the cool robots.

TYSON: I had a lot of fun sketching these guys for the animation! They were designed by Rick and Chase (as shown below), which is a great thing, because mechanical parts are so far out of my alley. It amazes me how they come up with this stuff.

Look at this lovely little concept page. Any similarities to existing pieces of media are totally and completely intentional.

They really blew it out of the park, all of them look so interesting! And honestly, the enemies on Murrit's land could have been nothing else other than some funky robots. To paraphrase Victoria on a past post, it's great, it rhymes. Another fun detail is that these robots intentionally look a little like Murrit's boobdrones, since it's a part of the LoWaR in-game lore that she was responsible for the planet's current sorry state.

SEGMENT 2

TYSON: I took on the boards for this segment! These thirty seconds or so seconds have the most shots out of any other segment in the flash, as I tried to cram as much obscure crafting binge shit as I reasonably could while still getting Murrit where they needed to go for the scene. And as is the nature of the dubious items Murrit makes, it was a headache trying to wrap my head around the actual 3D shape of their equipment and how they were supposed to work in the shots themselves. 

As always, Murrit keeps causing problems on purpose for everyone, forever.

TYSON: Even though I'd never boarded something this action-oriented before, I'm very pleased with how the pacing turned out. Due the amount of assets involved, we had a bunch of artists take on stuff all over the place! (Same for segments 5 and 6. Which I also boarded. Whoops <3) I'll speak broadly for simplicity's sake here: sketches were done largely by Olschu, with Eddie and I helping out on a few shots. The meat of the character art was done by Neptune and BGs were split up between several artists, which we'll make note of whenever relevant.

What a deceptively simple shot. You have no idea how many layers this damn file had in the end. People died to get that disk case looking right and properly positioned in perspective. All worth it, though! The motion of Murrit slapping those disks in turned out silky smooth and so satisfying to look at.

RIP to "Not a Guardian", you were a real one. Don't worry about that misplaced red core we fixed it in post.

MURRIT WATCH OUT THERE'S INVISIBLE ROBOTS BEHIND YOU!!! Oh god she has her Paizuriphones on she can't hear us

TYSON: I ended up reworking this pose myself a little, since I had a very specific motion in mind for it. This scene is easily my favorite thing I boarded for the segment!

TYSON: This is another shot I took myself and, believe it or not, it's one of the files I spent the longest time on in the entire animation. Bart was NOT designed to take up complex 3D space, and I hope I never have to draw his spiky head with such realistic volume ever again. Ciro ended up taking the BG for this one, the absolute saint.

One brief Bartpack joyride later, and Murrit is just about ready to get moving along. Forward, into the past! The second retrogauntlet hop of the flash brings us to...

SEGMENT 3

Here we are. This is where it happens. Or like, starts happening.

Segment 3 was boarded by both Tyson and Max! And those two did an absolutely STUNNING job with what was frankly a pretty complicated sequence. There's a ton of panel movement, buildings in perspective, foreshortening and very dynamic poses, which made for a super dynamic scene! All the sketches and background finalization here were mostly handled by me, with the exception of one background which Xam took and some final touches by Tyson here and there. Character finalization was split between Neptune, Diz and me. Last but not least, Tyson was our SFXs guy, as always.

Before we get into the sketches themselves, though, let's take a look at some concept art.

This stunning piece was penned by Xam and acted as our aesthetic north star for pretty much the entire segment. They actually wrote up a brief little doc for the rest of us after they talked over the details of how Murrit's planet was supposed to look like with Austin, because Xam is nothing if not an overachiever. I'll share some of their thoughts here:

XAM: The big driving concept was retrofuturism - square bulky shapes with rounded corners.

(Or, if you want to be all literary and fancy about it, zeerust. Basically, an outdated vision of the future.) 

XAM: The main difference between this and something like SH21 is that Murrit's planet is meant to lean on the "retro" part more than the "futurism" one. If vaporwave is the 80's-90's dream sci-fi, then their planet is the 50's-70's.

XAM: I wanted to keep the original colors of the planet, just add more accents to make it a bit more lively. The color scheme leans more toward darker tones, warm red and yellow (makes you think of old prints and comics), as opposed to light tones, cold blue and magenta (makes you think of neon lights and digitalism). There's parallels to be made with Dave HomedStuck's land, actually. Hot, dark, a bit oppressive, full of machinery, but less steampunk and more atompunk.

XAM: The original Star Wars, Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey are good examples of what I was thinking in terms of 70's tech and ambiance. I can also cite the animated communist classic Robots - it's kind of the perfect representation of it lmao. Plenty of great retro machinery inspo, as well as grungier visuals. The Jetsons are another classic example, though the color scheme leans more towards the blue/magenta I was talking about. Still has plenty of nice angular tech and architecture.

The general motifs we kept in mind for Murrit's land were:

Wave

• Literal water and beaches on the planet
• Draw the sand in "waves"
• Audio wave patterns incorporated in places

Record

• Turntable UFOs
• Cassettes, VHS, vinyls, hard drives, you name it
• Musical elements, like speakers, synth keyboards, drums
• TVs everywhere, as is traditional for Murrit, but a lot of cameras as well

Some other elements include a lot of wires connecting everything, car tunnels that look like giant cables and plenty of lights and knobs that beep and boop, levers and valves, pumps, pipes, etc. And, of course, clocks that all show different times - digital clocks in particular - for that Time player tie-in.

WHEW! That's a lot of pre-production stuff out of the way. Let's get to those sketches now!

TYSON: This BG was one of the more important ones for the flash, both as the main establishing shot for Past!LoWaR and the fact that it's supposed to linger on screen for over twenty seconds, as things get overlaid on top of it. It had to be passed off to Xam towards the end of production, though I roughed this out to give something for them to work from. They absolutely knocked it out of the park with their final rendering, as usual.

I was actually a little scared of this shot when I first started drawing it, because that car interior seemed REALLY intimidating and I'm not used to drawing stuff like that, but I ended up having a ton of fun with it! I really like how the sketch turned out, especially how expressive the poor platypus driver ended up being even though we can only see their arms and eyes in the rear view mirror.

This is another shot I had an absolute blast with. Murrit's poses were all a joy to work on throughout, even though it was a challenge to go right into figuring out the details of their new outfit from twenty different angles immediately. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the way we stylize certain things (like their jacket's collar) changes a bit over the course of the flash, but that's just how these things go! We kind of speedran the outfit streamlining process by diving into a huge flash. It was definitely some sort of character design crucible, but I'd like to think we all came out the other side stronger for it. 

And also with intimate knowledge of how Murrit's shoes are supposed to look like from a complete 360 degrees angle.

Speaking of shoes, FANTASTIC news everyone: wheelies are back!

Of course, these kicks offer both wheel-based ground locomotion and rocket-like propulsion at the same time. They are made only for the most discerning of equipment crafters, after all. Two in one function. Brilliant. What's not to get.

Have I mentioned that I had a blast drawing these shots yet? Because I absolutely did. The conceptual groundwork Xam laid out beforehand was so juicy, it was a total breeze coming up with BGs that matched what they had already done. Plus, I enjoy how all these little Murrits make this file look like a tiny storyboard in its own right.

So many Murrits! There are fish flying in the sky as far as the eye can see.

That last shot was a bit of a head scratcher for a while, because we wanted to play with some perspective distortion for those buildings. As it turns out, fisheyeing made-up architecture and solid structures is hard work, so it took a few tries to get everything looking right while still maintaining some of that playful wonkiness we wanted. But all's well that ends well.

Oh, and it goes without saying that those beautifully rendered smoke trails that were coming out of Murrit's shoes were later added by Tyson. The guy is simply too good at visual effects.

Another deceptively simple shot for the books. Getting the angle on Murrit's head in that middle drawing there took an amount of blood, sweat and tears.

Closing off the end of this segment, we've got this nice little visual callback to another shot from a different flash from about a thousand pages ago. Can you believe it? A WHOLE one k pages. Time flies.

Anyway, we thought it'd be a good opportunity to play into that Time-Space connection with this little echo, on top of it being a very imposing and cool looking temple. Murrit looks so tiny in front of it. Humbling.

Lastly, I wanted to appreciate how cool the rewind effects turned out! The film reel on the side is such a nice touch, courtesy of one of our wonderful animators, Kohi. We'll be seeing a bit more CSS fuckery in the upcoming segments, but that will be left for... next time.

We hope you guys enjoyed getting a look at everything that was going on in the production side of this beast! It feels very gratifying to have it all laid out like this, sharing our process is always a good time for us. 

Tune in for the rest of the REW/FFD breakdown next month, when we'll be getting into the Alt!Murrit scenes, all those fancy pure self designs, a shitton of concept art, and more! See you all then.

- Eddie, Tyson, Austin and Xam