Zelda Valley

DstCoyote’s review:

The series of three videos featuring a more serious, action oriented storyline with gags placed around it continues here with Episode Four. In the order of production, this was the last one of the three we finished. In fact, both Episode Three and Five were finished long before we were halfway done with this one.

It picks up where Three left off, just as the battle is about to start. The .gif of the catapult hitting the wall and absolutely nothing happening was actually made by JMAP, a first for him. Then the sequence featuring ourselves in stick form where a stray arrow “breaks the camera” was thought of by me. I tried making us have our real life distinguishing traits for our stick versions, so that’s why JMAP is wearing a red, black, and blue hat (a hat given to him by his father), and why I have a long ponytail.

Up to this point in the video, I had already finished the major boss fight that takes place after it, plus the dramatic scenes towards the end of the video. So I wasn’t feeling like making a huge war scene because I felt I needed a break. But let’s mention that JMAP was urging me to get the rest of the video done as soon as possible; he had already started writing on our blog that it was about to come out even though I felt it wasn’t even close to being done. I was thinking of something to save me time. At the time, JMAP only had pivot on his computer while I only used photoshop. We had tried to get photoshop on his computer but there were problems that only I myself could solve when I visited up there long after this video was done. Since I was the only one who had photoshop at that time, I felt that I was leaving JMAP out because there was no pivot stuff planned for this video. So the idea came where we “used a different camera.” I wanted him to make pivot animations that composed together to last as long as 40 seconds to save me some time and give me a little break.

All he needed to do was to make a bunch of small pivot made .gifs, but I don’t think he really wanted to do any pivot stuff. I say that because he kept telling me reasons why I shouldn’t have considered it, such as: “I can only make one on one fights, I’m not good at doing anything else!” or “I can’t think of a bunch of small pivot fights, I can only do one big one!” In the end, he did put in a fight featuring Agahnim and Link, but he made only a few small pivot .gifs. So I ended up looping them just so it could fit the desired amount of time on the video. It is the only down part in the entire video, but luckily it doesn’t last that long. It gets back to true form once “the photoshop camera is fixed.”

The scenes with General Onox were practically a test for future things to come, such as using people figures and not sticks. The music playing during it is a remixed version of an unreleased song from Chrono Trigger. It was hard to move his legs due to the big piece of armor over them (plus I only had his feet to be able to move), so I could only settle for him practically standing still. But it worked, and I loved doing it. From now on though, I’ll make sure the legs can move.

We wanted to reveal the true evil behind the storyline at the end of this video, then have the evil guy wreck havoc. I tried making that scene as dramatic and emotional as possible, and tried to set the stage for Episode Five. Because of that dark, harmonic hymn from Metal Gear Solid, it works.

In all, I feel it is an improvement over Episode Three. The only down part is the looped pivot scene, but it’s not that bad, it’s just repetitive. For a first time using a different form of figure animation, I feel we did pretty good. In all, this was a much better effort despite the whip cracking towards each other. I definitely feel this one deserves to be viewed a lot more than the current stats on YouTube show.

My Overall Score: 8