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The Shantae Post-Mortem
🕑 Added 2024-06-17 03:51:16 +0000 UTCThe Shantae animation is released for backers, and initial feedback has been very positive over on the Discord! This is a relief, 'cause this thing was a lot of work. Enough so, in fact, that I thought it would be cool to talk about it!! Woah!!
So let's do that! This post might be a bit long-winded, as it's going to serve as a breakdown of my thoughts and intentions, as well as lessons learned, while working on this project. Even so, if you reach the end and have any lingering questions, don't be afraid to ask, and I'll do my best to answer.
Let's get to it!
The Goal
The goal here was pretty straightforward from the start: create something that could serve as a simple loop or two, and then surprise everyone by making it something much more ambitious while nobody was looking. (And I think I got away with it!)
My initial plan for animating for Patreon and public releases (and one that I'd been struggling to get started for months until unemployment served as a strong motivator) was to release these works in two stages: a series of isolated GIF loops (as one tends to see making their way around image boards one way or another when these things are made, regardless of if the original artist made them personally or not) and a final, finished product. Whether the end result was simply a larger, more ambitious loop or a proper start-to-finish animation was never a strong point of consideration; I figured I'd just take it by vibes. Ultimately, in Shantae's case, I asked the KTC which they'd prefer, and the majority were interested in having that lovely finishing cumshot be involved. I'm glad they chose that, to be honest. It's about time I gave that a go, and I'm pretty happy with the results!
With that general plan in mind, I set to work, and it involved a bit of foresight, some mistakes to consider next time, and some hopefully clever solutions to hair-whipping this genie into being ret-2-go.
The Breakdown
Limited animation benefits greatly from experience and learning what you can do to get more mileage out of less work, and as a low-key massive weeb I've already managed to learn a good number of things both the easy and hard ways.
The first step was actually bestowed upon me by the official Mario Paint player's guide back in the 90's: Start with what doesn't move, and then you only have to animate what does. In most cases, this means painting a static background, but even that has room to expand upon things if you're clever.
I started with what was absolutely static: The ocean and horizon line, the distant land upon it, and the foreground land the animation takes place on. I added a single palm tree and one central leaf to this layer as well; given that they are almost always behind Shantae, they mostly serve to fill in any gaps that might pop up and make things look more complete when the backdrop is isolated, which I would end up using down the line for the opening and closing text dump sequences.
Keen observers may notice that that is, ultimately, maybe like half of the background elements though. Good eye, that is correct! We live in the future, and things can move even without me having to do pesky shit like draw every frame by hand. To that end, the sun was added behind the ocean, with beams projecting from its center, and the foreground was amended with two big swaying palm leaves, each isolated to allow for a little extra nuance to the wind passing through them, and a pair of bush layers that could be wiggled about to add an extra sense of breeze. Nothing too elaborate - Lord knows these details aren't where the average viewer will be placing their attention - but some nice additions to add a little life to the environment. Add a three-frame cycle for the sun reflecting off of the water in the distance, and you have a nice bit of living scenery to get railed in.
On which note, we turn our attention to the star of our show, Shantae herself. There was quite a bit to do there, but we want to work smarter, not harder, so we start with one of Clip Studio's least appreciated weapons, the symmetry ruler. Using this, I could work out the animation's foundation, sculpting Shantae's body from a neutral position with the aid of automated symmetry, which is good because I suck at that shit, but also because it means there's half as much woman to draw right out the gate. That gets us something like this:
From there, there's a lot of sloppy editing with my old friend the transform tool. Using lasso selections and some rotation and stretching alongside my good friend the onion skin (digital art's answer to the good old-fashioned light table), you can pretty quickly rough out you initial movements. From there, I moved on to cleanup and more direct touches, both with and without the symmetry ruler, to eventually get the initial loop's movement in place:
The hip sway was important. What is a belly dancer without hip sway!? Had to work in dat sway, baby girl.
Repeat that process for the hip-grinding motion that makes up the second loop, and you've got the body's foundations pretty much ready. In fact, for better or worse, everything in the final animation for this layer came out to only 18 frames. (This would cause some issues later, but limitation breeds creativity, as they say!)
Since the body makes up the bulk of the finished product, everything else is actually comparatively easy. The ponytail wound up being ten frames, employed behind Shantae to help sell her bounces. Her bangs only consist of four drawn frames in themselves, and her face ended up with 13 frames that I could employ and transition between as needed. That maybe sounds like a lot comparatively, but oh, we will be talking about the face later. I have words to say about the face situation.
Through all of this, many frames are simply flipped versions of others, so those numbers are probably smaller than they first appear, but you can hide that simplicity in a number of ways. For starters, once lighting was added, that symmetry is much less apparent immediately; the light source is behind Shantae and distinctly on the viewer's left-hand side, so you wind up with a pretty lopsided rim lighting that I thought would look pretty splendid. (I still think it does! Sunsets are pretty!) The ponytail's horizontal inversions, conversely, were hand-drawn to try and better sell the flowing of our starring gal's signature long locks, and the simple bang animations were paired with hold keyframes to reposition and rotate relative to her specific movements, which allowed me to vary them up pretty significantly in the long run once she picks up the pace. I used a similar method to position the face, pairing the positional keyframing with the individual drawn frames to allow her expression to vary basically whenever I wanted instead of whenever x and y frame cycles lined up. This is one of the big benefits of working this way, and we can thank the ol' Hannah-Barbara boys for popularizing it. Gracias, Yogi Bear!
The last step was adding in the juicy, juicy juices that make sure the whole sex thing isn't a horrendous encounter with unpleasant levels of friction. Our viewer proxy shall not be goin' in dry! I believe in fun, you see.
With that, step one was finished, and the result was...
The Loops
Ah, yes. Step one of my evil plan!
Using the various parts made for the final product, I produced three simple loops that I could post on here as an appetizer. This is something I intend to do every time with these; the loops go up before the finished result, and are the first thing that gets a public release, like an ad for the finished product. That's the idea, anyway. Time will tell if it actually works.
Exporting the loops from Clip Studio was pretty straightforward. The third was a variant of the first that I threw in as a surprise. It was the first piece I'd done off-stream, but it wouldn't be the last, because I'm not about to subject you all to several weekends of me slowly editing together something competent. It was the pudding, though, for it would serve as the proof of my efforts while everyone waited.
For like three damned weeks.
Arrangement
I thought this would go so much faster. I've learned so much in my hubris. There is so much to discuss.
Clip Studio's animation timeline, especially CSP1's (which I am using because we cannot presently afford to upgrade the both of us to CSP3 and their damned subscription and perpetual sign-in model), is a quirky thing, but I'd like to think I've learned my way around it pretty well. I was a fool. I was not ready for one simple issue.
Folders on the timeline do not hold their contents; they serve only as keyframe holders and exposure markers for whatever is held within them. This probably just sounds like nonsense words to most of you, so let me summarize my feelings in a format that I hear is worth a thousand of those.
This caused quite the pain in my ass. Clip doesn't let you edit the timeline outside the scope of your presently-defined duration (that little blue marker at the start and end of the timeline up there), so you can't, say, just right click ten minutes ahead and say "make this the last frame this thing is visible on," and if you copy a folder's exposure, you only copy that chunk of the timeline, not the things inside of it, which meant I was constantly extending my background assets' exposure where I thought a very simple copy and paste would do. This also applied to basically anything I'd used the transform keyframes on, which amounted to a lot of extra work.
To limit this work, I wound up saving an entirely separate version of the work file just to hold these edits, and the reason for that was the most substantial one I made: I extracted every layer of frames from their happy little containment folders and merged them together into their functional parts. Colors and outlines, separate? In my house!? Not anymore!! This made the edits easier - I was working with one extra step instead of as many as four or five per part - but it also meant any changes to the images essentially had to be done in the source project and then merged and ported over, which came up a couple times. Bit of a pain!
Less of a pain was the camera layer, though I had some things to learn about how Clip Studio itself felt about my using the thing. You can toggle between a couple preview modes, one showing where the camera is on the canvas, and the other changing your viewport to match what the camera sees. This is really useful, but it turns out you can't really edit anything while in the latter mode. You also cannot change which drawn frame is displayed in a folder that presently has keyframe transforms enabled. There was a lot of toggling things and disconnecting Shantae's face from her body, is what I'm saying.
Once I got my shit properly together, though, it was slow but smooth sailing, and I learned most of these things as I went, usually through things like trying to change Shantae's expression at certain times or mixing and matching methods to get the look I wanted. Simply arranging the minute-long animation was the vast majority of the editing work.
In the process, I added a couple fun details; a couple transitional faces that weren't in the loops got polished up and implemented, and there was that lovely little moment where Shantae just hovered in place and let her dew drip down the rigid shaft piercing between her legs.
And then, of course, there was all the cum. 30+ frames of just cum. For a first effort in this department, I think it came out extremely well, and also I have a wonderful time doing it. I kept giggling. I shared it over Discord with a friend. We then giggled together like a pair of filthy gremlins. Just as God intended.
For a final touch, I did a cheeky thing with the sun, which I'd planned on all along but largely kept to myself. Over the course of the animation, the damn thing slowly sets, and the horizon darkens with it. I really doubt anyone will notice this without being told, but I'm very happy about it, because that's my specific brand of nonsense. It's peak me. "I made this elaborate porno. Did you notice the sun?? The sense of time??? Haha!!" Of course you didn't. There were tits bouncing, and a woman was moaning, and the camera keeps moving so you can't consistently see the sun anyway, and why would you want to as opposed to a close-up of a white geyser blowing out of a trembling cooter!? But there it is, for reasons. The reasons are "hee-hee hoo-hoo." I am a gremlin who likes shiny celestial bodies. Look at it go.
Anyway, one absurdly long AVI export later, we had a 15.5 GB video file to work with, and it was on to the actual video editing part of the video editing.
Yeah, that still hadn't happened.
Post-Production, Baybee!
So it turns out 15 gigs was way too much. My PC blue-screened trying to generate a preview for the wretched thing. I wound up doing a whole second export with a bunch of layers turned off and at a significantly lower resolution to serve as my editing placeholder, and also learned some new things about wrangling Shotcut into not being mad at me about it.
Shotcut's come a long way over the last couple years, by the way. As free video editing options go, you could do a lot worse. Which is good, because it's my weapon of choice for this part of the process!
An initial concern going in was that I wanted Shantae to actually vocalize, but presently lack the resources to commission any VAs to work with me on this kind of thing. (It's actually not horribly expensive, I'm just horribly not making rent consistently.) Someone on Twitter recommended seeking out pre-made kits from VAs over on itch.io, and that wound out working out really well. Coming out of that situation with a fresh audio tool set thanks to Gia F. Simone and my fellow smut peddlers over at Monsterbox, consisting of both some lovely vocals and a new selection of sensual sounds I could use to have a bit more variance than my last effort, which consisted of one plap noise being pitch-shifted a lot.
Not that there wouldn't be some pitch shifting involved. There was plenty, and some splicing, especially in the back half where Shantae speeds up and I wanted her to sound like she was exerting herself. Thankfully, I have enough audio editing experience that I think I pulled it off decently enough! Being a jack of all trades has its moments! Add in some ocean ambience off of Pixabay and you've got a fairly complete auditory experience!
The final step was some last bits of polish. There was a frame assignment error on the sweet sweet pussy juices that had them zig when they should've zagged that involved me exporting and inserting a patch of corrected video, and I threw some basic bloom lighting over the highlights to help sell the sunset vibe. (This could have been done in Clip Studio but would have been... exceptionally tedious!! My typical bloom method is to dim and contrast the entire image before blurring the result and adding it back as an additive blend of some sort, and due to the tweened backgrounds, setting sun and variant positions of Shantae and her disparate parts, I would've had to manually do this about 4000 times by the end of things. I deemed this to be a bit too much effort. Forgive me.)
Bookending the video, I exported a simple background loop for the start and end of sunset and then made some text overlays for credits and the opening content warning. One Patreon URL watermark later, and we were finally, finally done!
Places to Improve
So here's what I'm taking away for next time that I haven't discussed already:
The export? Probably not uncompressed next time. That was probably unnecessary. The visual difference between "not compressed" and "slightly compressed" is pretty slight, and the computer screams significantly less. Honestly, I had the thing exporting at YouTube quality (55%!!!) before I really noticed any significant degradation, and at this point I think that amount is just what most people are used to when it comes to online video now.
Barring that? That damn face.
Okay, let's talk about this now. I am not innately unhappy with the face. It's a perfectly fine face. What bit me in the ass was how utterly limited the face was to work with.
I simply did not give it enough in transitional frames. Changes in expression are frequently jarring, if not utterly instantaneous. This isn't against anime law or anything, but I'm the expressions girl. People love my expressions. I can do better. I know how to do better.
Step one? Separate the eyes from the mouth. Let them emote separately. This is the idea behind all the other parts being partitioned into their own layers, so why didn't I do it here? I just didn't think about it I guess, but it would've allowed a lot more variance. Throw in an extra blink frame to smooth out some of the shifts in expression and isolate the eyebrows and you can suddenly do way more with less effort. It would also be easier to add new bits and in-betweens with this method, and be less prone to jank and errors.
Step 2? Get wild with the pupils. Clip Studio lets you clip a layer's alpha to match the layer underneath it; isolate the eye whites, and you can just move the pupils anywhere you want. Resize them, rotate them, have them go dark because she's possessed by a demon, the world is your oyster here. This one's less vital, but for a prolonged shot from one angle like this, I think it would've opened up a lot more options for me.
And in Shantae's case specifically, if we started again, I would've isolated her headband as well. That thing never moves with her face, and that really hinders the illusion of its angle changing that I was going for with every other moving part. Just letting that thing slide around a little could've done a lot, and the same could be said for a lot of designs that put that visual separation across their foreheads. Bangs? Same deal.
Each project teaches me things like this. We get a little smarter every time. A little better at it. So...
What's Next?
Y'all have chosen, and we're doing Rouge the Bat next!
I'm hoping to get a little clever with the presentation on this one, but we'll see. Aiming for three loops again, but more distinctly defined ones. Who knows, maybe I'll even find an excuse to animate cum twice this time! That was fun.
I'd love to get a VA that fits and isn't just me doing an impression while my wife looks at me with a horrified gaze, but no promises. We'll see.
As for doing another one of these, that depends how this one goes over. It's a lot! I talk too much! But I hope it's been insightful!
Until next time!
- Sera
