Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25247233-20160513080632/@comment-27997419-20160517133901

Gastropod wrote: Well, in defense of Volume 3's animation...

While the fight scenes in Volume 3 are a step-down from the previous two, I think it's fair to say that the non-combat animations are miles ahead. They're so much more natural and emotive. The spectacle of the fight scenes is greatly diminished, but the storytelling has been elevated enormously. Previously, while the fight scenes were singularly spectacular, virtually everything else was mediocre to bad (Cinder on the rooftop).

And I think this betrays the flaws of the previous pipeline – Monty focused mainly on making awesome fights, since that was his undeniable strength, while letting the other animators handle non-combat animation, inexperienced and handicapped as they were due to having to work in an unfamiliar environment such as Poser.

There were also as many if not more fights in Volume 3 as there were in 1 and 2 combined, so not only did they lose Monty's expertise, their attention had to be divided even further.

Ultimately, I think it's a trade off between better non-combat animations and Monty's fighting animations, but if nothing else, the new pipeline/animation process certainly has its own merits. I did think Volume 3 was visually appealing in its own way. hehe, you made your comment as I was writing another reply.

But in short, this issue would have been easily solved by adding more people to make the non-combat scenes and stuff like that.

Also, as I also mentioned...which you didn't see because I hadn't replied yet, it's not just about the fight scenes. But it's about creating beautiful animation everywhere!! It's about the weapon animation (weapon morphing between it's forms), animation of the semblances, animation of aura, animation of the grimm, animation of everything and anything that can be considered cool in the eyes of an animator. It's this freedom to choose something that could look cooler and actually make it cooler that Shane is saying was left behind and buried under all the bureocracy.

Instead things as they are now would be made exactly according to plan, and anything done against plan is scrapped completely, even if it is a cool original idea. (Or this is what I understood from Shane's letter.)