Watch the Footage archive

I thought this might be of interest to some people. This is the final model of Cthulhu that was made for the Adell video. There are some aspects that might be noticeably imperfect, since this image shows far more detail than the actual video did, but I still think it's worth posting.

Still think it looks like a plushy when you see the whole body. I think it's the feet and arms just being blobs.

Epic. I couldn't make out a lot of what I was seeing in the video due to the pacing of it all, but that is an awesome design for the character.

That's actually a lot creepier than my brain is telling me it should be.

No matter how excellent the character design, he will always be vulnerable to all things purple and sparkly.

(But seriously, it does look good. Thanks for sharing.)

I actually had an interest in making the Gnarbrydh as well, if he ever had reason to appear in a video (in fact, it was something I mentioned even before Cthulhu was a definite thing), but this ended up not being the case. I may still make him/it at some point, but I won't get to it for a few days at the very least, so don't hold your breath.

I would pay to see an animated version of Scarab's Cthulhu fic.

JackAlsworth wrote:I would pay to see an animated version of Scarab's Cthulhu fic.

You would probably have to. Can you imagine how much a decent production of that would cost? Eesh.

Alexander Moser wrote:I thought this might be of interest to some people. This is the final model of Cthulhu that was made for the Adell video. There are some aspects that might be noticeably imperfect, since this image shows far more detail than the actual video did, but I still think it's worth posting.

It's pretty good. Although to me in the video it looked like this:


And when Cthulhu is mentioned, I think of this picture. This is what I think of when his name is said:

And the model looks... kind of severely creepy like that. In the BEST way. An extremely creepy plushy. We sent Adell off to face an extremely creepy, disturbing plushy. Awesome, man.

Dana wrote:

JackAlsworth wrote:I would pay to see an animated version of Scarab's Cthulhu fic.

You would probably have to. Can you imagine how much a decent production of that would cost? Eesh.

[emoticon failure: nothing that quite fits]

I have this little corner, way over here? And I am going to go hide in it and giggle now, is that okay?

Dana wrote:

JackAlsworth wrote:I would pay to see an animated version of Scarab's Cthulhu fic.

You would probably have to. Can you imagine how much a decent production of that would cost? Eesh.

Do you know someone who might want to do that for free as a project for school, or something like that?

RotavatoR wrote:

Dana wrote:

JackAlsworth wrote:I would pay to see an animated version of Scarab's Cthulhu fic.

You would probably have to. Can you imagine how much a decent production of that would cost? Eesh.

Do you know someone who might want to do that for free as a project for school, or something like that?

I'm in film school right now, and while I'm no producer, I can tell you that a production with high production values with everything described would take months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe more.

This is why people write books instead of screenplays. You can have anything happen on the page, but making something just as amazing happen on a screen costs ALL THE MONEY.

I'd suggest Kickstarter or some other sort of crowdfunding, but the project feels a little too esoteric (that is, it only really means anything to we happy few) for that to be effective.

And now I feel like we're drifting a little off-topic.

Dana wrote:I'm in film school right now, and while I'm no producer, I can tell you that a production with high production values with everything described would take months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe more.

This is why people write books instead of screenplays. You can have anything happen on the page, but making something just as amazing happen on a screen costs ALL THE MONEY.

How about those thousands of youtubers who make Web Animation? I think that costs much less and still looks pretty good.

If anyone out there can make Scarab's thing to life, and would do it for free, they do not understand what their work is worth.

Or they are a valued member of our team, of course...

RotavatoR wrote:

Dana wrote:I'm in film school right now, and while I'm no producer, I can tell you that a production with high production values with everything described would take months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe more.

This is why people write books instead of screenplays. You can have anything happen on the page, but making something just as amazing happen on a screen costs ALL THE MONEY.

How about those thousands of youtubers who make Web Animation? I think that costs much less and still looks pretty good.

Recently I heard FreddieW put up what it costs him to make a video. You could look that up if you're curious. It does take money for equipment and work, but like any freelance thing it's basically done A: Out of love and passion and B: in the hope that the returns will be larger than the expenditures.

Here's a closeup of Cerberus as he appears in Watch The Footage Episode 5. As you can see, he's not overly detailed since he only appears briefly and from a distance, but the anatomy turned out pretty well I think.



In case either of these images are too big and cut off on your screen, here's a direct link to

Cerberus: http://i47.tinypic.com/6gbubb.png
and Cthulhu: http://i47.tinypic.com/1zx9wdc.png

Though the volume of investment required to make, say, an Anime Episode of the fight would be considerably smaller than going for full 3D modeling. It would still cost quite a bit even to commission an established studio (which already has all the gear and know-how) to actually build the animation.

And Tom is right, short of one of us (either GM team or player team) being capable and doing it out of love, whoever accepts to do such a thing for free has no idea what their skills are worth.

Pixelmage wrote:Though the volume of investment required to make, say, an Anime Episode of the fight would be considerably smaller than going for full 3D modeling. It would still cost quite a bit even to commission an established studio (which already has all the gear and know-how) to actually build the animation.

And Tom is right, short of one of us (either GM team or player team) being capable and doing it out of love, whoever accepts to do such a thing for free has no idea what their skills are worth.

Or they are from the touhou fandom.

So the problem with making an elaborate animated film is generally just time; even if you ignore the time it takes to actually make the models, sets, and animations, the rendering itself can take an absurdly long time (or, alternatively, cost a lot of money to rent a render farm, etc.).

Cthulhu's fifteen seconds of screen time, for instance, took six hours to render. If even a minor tweak was needed to the animation, fixing it required at minimum another six hours, even if it was a very trivial change. The worst part is that it's generally not easy to tell if the change you've made makes things better or worse until you've actually re-rendered the whole thing.

There were a lot of versions of that video that had all of the same technical components that the final video did but just didn't even come close to achieving the right overall illusion. Of course, even the final video had plenty of room for improvement, but fortunately (at least in my opinion) we managed to get it mostly outside of the sphere of laughably awful.

About that, if you go about it as in pausing the video and say "Ok, I'm looking at chuthu and boy does this frame look awesome or not?", then yeah, you're going to find flaws. Especially you being the mind behind it. But taking the whole composition as a whole, it wasn't out of "laughably awful", it was actually "pretty damn awesome".

Why? Not because of me attempting to sound nice. I really like the framing of the whole scene. We got a flash at him, the "oh god, something is coming". It was exactly the vagueness that Lovecraft's mythos is all about, after all, we're supposed to see that kind of stuff just like that, more precision and clearly defined euclidean boundaries from a static camera and we'd get Avatar instead of Cosmic Horror there. So yeah, we had it defined clearly enough to associate with the accepted image of Cthulhu, but also vague to keep the feeling of not really understanding what exactly is that thing on screen.

I'm no expert on this, I'm a complete negation in regards to graphical stuff, that's just me seeing something I like and pointing out why I like it. It worked and it was awesome.

On the note of the time required to do the rendering, all I can say is:
I knew video work took a lot of time, but that actually boils down to 24 minutes of rendering / 1 second of actual footage. I have no other reaction, it's simply mind blowing the amount of work that goes into making these things.

The Cthulhu sequence was fantastic for what it was. The Daylight Horror and Adell's fearful (though hammy-sounding) performance pretty much stopped me from focusing on any Special Effect Failure there was. (I only saw the video once, and I did not have any intention of coming back to it simply because I feel I would have caught errors that I had missed the first time which might have ruined my liking for it.)

Right, even if Cthulhu had come out looking ten times as detailed and realistic and frightening as he ultimately did, I still would have fought to make sure we never saw too much of him in the video, simply it's much better to suggest that kind of thing, especially with something like Cthulhu for whom not being able to comprehend his full form is one of the most important features (the other being tentacles, of course).

The long render times probably turned out to be a good thing in the end, as they forced me to take a break sometimes (and also gave me the chance to record the Witch's lines and, you know, sleep).

I think Adell gave one of the better performances of the ARG, and that on extremely short notice.

Course, that probably had to do with the fact that his fear was entirely real.

Alexander Moser wrote:Here's a closeup of Cerberus as he appears in Watch The Footage Episode 5. As you can see, he's not overly detailed since he only appears briefly and from a distance, but the anatomy turned out pretty well I think.



In case either of these images are too big and cut off on your screen, here's a direct link to

Cerberus: http://i47.tinypic.com/6gbubb.png
and Cthulhu: http://i47.tinypic.com/1zx9wdc.png

AHA I KNEW IT WAS A STATUE.