In November 2019 I boarded an animatic to the song RPG by soramafuursaka for a ridiculous and niche idea: “What if the K/DA members were online friends who played games together?”. The lyrics to the song are in Japanese, which I do not speak, and I thought it would be interesting to use animation to tell a purely visual story based on this concept.

This project took almost two years to complete and, despite the fact that I had little to no experience animating, successfully premiered on Youtube in April 2021.

I started with a point form script of moments I wanted to include, as well as an outline of the story. I then designed the outfits, sketched the entire animatic using the script as a guide, and threw together the images in Windows Movie Maker to get an idea of the timings.

After finalizing the animatic it was time for the long and tedious part: actually finishing it. Every frame needed four steps to finish: a clean sketch, the lineart, flat colours, and shading. I experimented with vectors for the fully animated sections which helped speed up the colouring process later on. Then, once everything was completed I exported the frames and backgrounds separately and edited everything together in Premiere.

Over the course of this project I learned a lot about speeding up my workflow through shortcuts and trying out new techniques, such as the vector line art. One little road bump is that Clip Studio is not meant to have such a long animation in one file (lots of lag), so I had to periodically save as a new file and merge completed frames together. This meant if I had to go back and fix something it was a pain to find a version of the file where it wasn't merged. An animation of this length should have had separate files for different scenes rather than one large file.

I also learned a lot about compositing and editing. I had never video edited in a professional program like Premiere before, and it's clear in the final product I still have much to learn. Learning keyframes was frustrating and the editing on the video is far from perfect, but it's a much better result than what I could have made with Movie Maker.