Ellen Joe

Hi everyone, here the animation of Ellen Joe from ZZZ!

EDIT 16/08/25 - Re-exported for better compatibility.

MEGA Link

I really liked how my last ZZZ animation featuring Jane turned out so when I started working on this one, I decided I wanted to do something similar. While Ellen's trailer did have a pretty different vibe, I felt like it still was still enough for me to work with and I decided to make an animation based on the second half of the trailer. After reading Ellen's wiki page a bit to try and get a better grasp of her character, the maid-themed 'housekeeping' company that she works undercover for inspired me to create a plot where they offer couple extra services. I felt like that in contrast with Ellen's snarky and disinterested attitude would make a pretty exciting combination.

In order to accomodate this idea, I expanded the format a bit from the Jane animation. In lieu of making a bunch of alternate versions, like I've been doing for the last little while for most of my animations, I've made this one much more varied with plenty of different scenes.

To start of with, I made an introductory scene with inspired directly from the trailer, but changing a few details to transition into the next set of scenes that I had in mind. Since I decided to make the pairing a threesome, it was fun to make a variety of different angles and various positions. I also included two transitions that were intented as timeskips to separate the various scenes and I also tried to illustrate that with a few extra details like making the characters more disheveled and sweaty as the animation progressed.

This was also my first time doing some direction for the voiceover. Usually I just send the animation over to my VAs and let them do their thing, but since this one had some dialogue and structure to it, I needed to direct them a bit more. It's honestly harder than I thought it would be and took a few retakes to get it to sound like what I had in mind, but I definitely still have lots of room to improve.

Overall, I tried a lot of new things with this one and a lot of it was pretty challenging since I haven't done something to this extent in a long time, but I'm reallly satisfied with how it turned out, and I definitely learned a lot while animating it. However there are also a bunch of things I could improve, which I am excited to work on in the next animation!

Also, on a more technical side, I've made some changes to my workflow when exporting to try and improve the animation quality and reduce certain artifacts, expecially color banding since this animation's colors being on the darker side this time combined with my coloring and compositing style caused quite a bit of it. I changed the raw file codec to DNxHR and my final export codec from h.264 to h.265 10-bit. I read that this might be incompatible with some hardware/software. Basically, if you have any issues playing the videos, please let me know and I'll add a version with the previous export settings.

If you're interested in seeing future animations develop and get a bit more insight into the process, consider checking out the second tier where I post regular progress updates.

As always, thank you for the support! I hope you enjoy the animation!