I'm gonna attempt to reanimate one of the most disappointing fight scenes in all of anime Escanor versus Meliodas from Seven Deadly Sins That's a sneak peek of what's to come I'm gonna take you, yes you, through my process on how I made this 16 cut animation by myself You're not gonna want to miss this For context, this was the series most anticipated moment And when the anime episode came out, it was so bad that I had the fans of the series in shambles No bro, this is not cool bro What? Before starting the process of my reanimation, I skimmed through the manga chapter of the fight and I was shocked to find out how different it was from the show. I could feel as if the mangaka had a specific vision of how the fight would flow when animated and the anime really did not deliver at all. I had the bright idea of reanimating the scene as closely to the manga as possible I knew that going into this it was for sure gonna be my most challenging animation that I've done today since you know It's a fight scene that's gonna require a solid amount of drawings But thankfully I had some ideas that could potentially speed up the the process because you know i want to make it good but i also don't want to spend 30 decades on it i kind of have a youtube channel to run here to start this project off i decided to put together a reference board of both the characters that are featured in this scene meliotis and eskenor i also placed a couple of images of their weapons different angles of their faces and even meliotis's tattoo on the board i then lined up images of the anime scene and the manga scene so that i could get a more clear view of the layout that i was going to go for when i start sketching out the storyboard these boards are going to help me draw the characters more accurately and more consistently for the seven deadly since bunny studios edition then i decided it would be a good idea to try drawing both eskenor and meliotis's faces for the first time to get a hang of what they're gonna look like more or less and to also get myself warmed up so i did notice that his nose is a little a little rounder than normal um i couldn't find like any like character sheet of meliotis in this form so i kind of just have to go by the manga and the anime in order to get it as accurate as possible after i drew up meliotis i got ready to practice drawing eskenor's face So far so good. I think the faces are pretty accurate to what I'm gonna do for the rest of the animation.
Now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and render it and try and figure out the colors for the characters and more or less get an idea of what exactly the final product is gonna look like. I think Meliodas is looking a little bit... hello?
hello? this is not working! I'm gonna quickly draw Escanor now.
The last thing I was missing was a solid reference for the background of this scene So I sent some pictures of the anime to my friend with benefits to cook up a cgi background Then he said anything for you. Just say the word bro got me blushing and shit So we'll come back to that later when he's done cooking in the meantime now that I have all the reference of the characters that I need and I also got warmed up, it's time to start working on the storyboard of the fight. To make the storyboard, I looked through both the manga panels and the anime and sketched out the keyframes in a way that's more faithful to the source material. This process helped me visualize the flow of the animation out the transitions between the scenes also this time around i decided that instead of making extremely rough sketches to help me come up with an idea for what i wanted the final cut to look like i would try to make the sketches and the storyboard the actual sketches of the cuts meaning that i made them a lot more accurate and exactly as i wanted it to look in the final product this is in hopes that it was going to save me a good chunk of time and a lot of headaches so let's see if it actually helps or not after i finished drawing up the storyboard i took a step back to see if the scenes flowed well not gonna lie i was kind of just admiring my own work for a while however I knew that the real challenge was still ahead. So without dwelling too much on what is yet to come, I moved on to the animation process.
The first cut features Meliodas looking up at Escanor and he tells him that he's in a bad mood. Thanks to the storyboard sketch being exactly what I wanted the final cut to look like, I wasted no time and got straight to the line art portion of the process off rip. I started off by doing the line art of the static elements of the shot first.
This was basically everything that didn't include the mouth, chin, neck, and the eye. I then proceeded to animate the most basic blink in all of existence, but it gets the job done well. Next, I animated him speaking, which was done by animating his mouth opening and closing in a simple pattern.
This basic animation technique gives the illusion of speech without the complexity of full lip syncing. Cut to- features Escanor looking down to Meliodas and he's telling him that he is in a great mood. Unlike Meliodas who is in a horrible mood.
I'm not gonna lie this cut straight up followed the same process as the last one so I'm not gonna bore you with all the details. I will say though in my own humble opinion the colors and just the drawings in general look pretty cool. I really really like how both of these cuts turned out in the end.
In cut three Escanor is talking a ton of shit about how this is a golden opportunity to prove that he's better than Meliodas. This cut is not gonna have any movement at all in terms of animation. All I really needed to do was draw the characters together.
in a still frame and even with such a simple task my brain rotted brain decided to take over and draw his axe backwards for some reason and i only noticed right after i started compositing this shot like three weeks later the only movement this cut was gonna have is the little animation of the cube and the clouds moving from the wind but that's all gonna be done later in compositing cut four and cut five were the next two cuts i had to animate these scenes feature Escanor and Meliodas gripping their weapons as they're getting ready to clash. Since these two cuts are basically identical in animation, I'm gonna quickly go over them. The idea was to make very detailed and accurate drawings of their weapons, and to have the shots be more of a close-up in contrast to what the anime went for. For the gripping animation, I wanted to make sure that you could see the movement, but I didn't want it to be too exaggerated. Just simple ease timing with solid hand drawings, which I have very much struggled with in the past, but I surprisingly did not have a hard time this time around.
Am I improving, chat? Either way, I believe these two cuts came out phenomenal. and came out just how I imagined it in my head. Cut 6 is up next, which means it's actually time to get into more complex animation cuts for this project.
In this cut, Escanor is gonna swing up his axe to charge up for an attack on Meliodas. Essentially, my vision was for this cut to be smoothly animated on ones, which I never do. My idea was Escanor quickly swinging up his axe in the beginning, and then it turns into more of a slow motion type shot. Due to me wanting to make this cut in ones, I was gonna need to make a ton of in-between drawings, so was I gonna do that? Of course not.
I had recently heard of this animation software called Kakani. This is not sponsored, by the way. Don't click off. I genuinely tried this.
The main feature that enticed me to give Kakani a shot was the automatic in-between generator the app offered, where it basically creates in-between frames for you. I'm pretty sure this is all vector based, so it doesn't use AI, but I'm not 100% sure. It apparently also lets you adjust the easing and stuff, which looks pretty cool. Since I'm doing this cut in once, this is a perfect opportunity for me to try out Kakani since I don't want to use up 40 hours of my week drawing in between.
So I started off by sketching out the animation and movement and timing on Clip Studio Paint. Then I exported it as a PNG sequence and inputted it into Gakani. And honestly, as I used it for a bit, it was actually extremely confusing.
I had to basically draw the strokes in the same exact order from the previous frames in order for the program to be able to generate the in-betweens properly. And it's not just the order. You also have to get it in the same direction in the same way.
So it was honestly pretty annoying. I'm not going to lie to you. But after some time of going through the struggle, it was time to generate the in-between frames. and see if it looks good.
Wait, that's actually pretty cool. Wow. It's not 100% perfect, but it actually did such a good job. I'm very impressed.
I then exported every frame as a PNG sequence and then imported it back into Clip Studio Paint for coloring. Since this is animated in once, there was no way in hell I was going to go frame by frame. frame and shade everything myself. So I imported it into After Effects to see if I could find some layer styles that could add some simple shading or something. And this is what I was able to cook up.
It doesn't look half bad. It looks kind of Disney-like, but I kind of like that. So I guess this works. Something you guys should know about me, I think.
in full color and i'm able to visualize exactly what i want to make before i make it so when i'm in the shower i get tons of ideas of how i should do certain creative things and when working on this project it was no different i tried visualizing cut 7 the way i had planned it on the storyboard like with the hair waving fast the pan down but i just could not see the vision in fact i had a completely different idea in mind instead of the shot featuring a standard pan down i'm laying it out to be a wide angle shot featuring a quick then slow motion attack and then the impact it's kind of hard to explain so you guys will just see in a second i started I started off by sketching the rough animation on Clip Studio, just like in the last cut, and I also added in some pretty fire-looking impact frames. Nice. Then I imported everything into Kakani again, and man, things did not go as planned. The software was supposed to make things easier for me, but it really made things a lot worse.
Following the strokes in order from the previous drawing was a huge headache, especially with this cut having way more lines than the last cut. The process was slow, draining as hell, the drawings looked wonky, and I found myself redrawing the keyframes over and over again more times than once. that I needed to, which led to me wasting a ton of time. There were barely any tutorials on YouTube on how to use this program. So like the only way to figure out what I needed to know was through their manual, which I really did not have the patience to read through.
I'm sure the app is great, but it really just isn't for me. So after what felt like forever, I looked at the progress I had made and I did not like it at all. I ended up deleting Kakani from my computer and throwing it into fire.
I'm just kidding. Don't sue me. And ended up going back to the software that I knew best, Clip Studio Paint.
Man, I'm actually really going through it right now, I can't lie to you. This animation has really taken a toll on me, especially with the standards that I set for myself and how fast I want to get things done because I have a YouTube channel to run. And I need to upload at least not once a year.
You know what I'm saying? I'm just telling myself this but you sort of just have to keep on pushing because things are not really as serious as we make It in our heads like we really are just on a floating rock you look at the sky. There's the floating rock I then got back to work after my 4th existential crisis of the week.
The line art and drawing process felt way faster in Clip Studio Paint. Everything just looked way better. do it all by hand but at least i knew what i was doing you know what i'm saying in the end this cut took a whole two days of hard work to finish it really wasn't fun at all but at the very least the final product looks pretty cool next up is cut eight this cut doesn't have any 2d animation just my drawn 2d background and the cube drawing this cut is mainly going to emphasize the impact of eskimo clashing with meliodas i'll create all the impact and after effects and revisit the shot later during the background creation portion of this project so i quickly moved on to cut nine after the impact that's gonna cut to meliodas who has completely completely unfazed.
This cut is going to start with him staring directly at the camera with his hair whipping around from the impact, no drizzy, and gradually slowing down. He then starts talking mad shit. Next, I needed to figure out how to make it look like he's holding off Escanor with a sword, so I decided to draw his hand and sword separately in a new project file and then add a shake effect in post, which is going to give it the effect that we want.
For cut 10, I'm going to animate Escanor's mouth opening and closing because he is laughing in Meliodas's face. My original plan was to have him open his eyes in this cut, but after pacing around my house like usual, thinking of ideas and whatnot, I realized that it would be way cooler to do a close-up shot of his eye opening, which is gonna perfectly transition to the next cut. I sort of just drew the eyeball in one shot. put it in the bottom layer and just animated his eyelids opening in a very nice smooth way i'm really really proud of how this shot came out now cut 11 is going to feature eskimo quickly slashing at meliotis in the anime it felt a lot slower than what the manga intended it in my opinion as you can see there is quite a big difference in overall energy you know since this cut is going to be pretty fast it's going to go like definitely going to have to have like a frame where eskimos like his body's like moved like over here and trying to have some variety but overall the most important important part about this shot is gonna be you know the effects animation like the dust and like the impacts right here have to go crazy so i just went ahead and got right into it i'm once again doing this cut in one since it's supposed to be a sequence of really fast attacks like i mentioned before i wanted him to move back and forth instead of striking from just one position so i duplicated eskanor and flipped him horizontally on some frames which is gonna give the illusion of fast movement that i wanted if this were a professional cut for an official show i wouldn't have done it this way this was pretty lazy on my part I'm not gonna lie, but I was pretty drained up at this point.
So please cut me some slack I also added some smears to make the overall cut look smoother Then I animated the smoke and the slashes and even though I cut some corners during the process of animating this cut It still gets the job done pretty well moving on to cut 12 This is a quick shot of Eskimo getting kicked in the face by Meliodas after all of his relentless strikes were totally useless This cut was actually really easy to make it was just one frame of Eskimos face Then a smear of Meliodas his leg which really just is a black blob and then a couple of frames of Escanor's muscular neck and chest slowly falling back. I then moved on to cut 13, which in terms of difficulty is in stark contrast to the previous cut. My idea for this cut is that it's going to start off with the camera slowly panning up with both of their hair waving.
Then it's going to turn into a rotation shot where Meliodas strikes Escanor. I started by doing a rough animation to map out how I wanted the camera movement to flow. After that, I did another pass where I drew Meliodas with more detail, focusing on his face, body, and all that good stuff. Then I moved on to cut 13, which in terms of difficulty is in stark on to the line art and after drawing a few frames a tear legit ran down my face because i absolutely hated how it looked the frames had so many inconsistencies the anatomy was super off and his face looked dumb as in some drawings even though i didn't want to for my own sanity i took a long needed break for an entire day to rest my mind and come back stronger than before No joke, I'm actually at a point where I can't draw a single line because I'm just so totally done. Like, I'm so blocked.
I can't do anything. So I think it's more productive for me to take a long break and then I can come back whenever I'm feeling better. Because I feel like I'm going to mess it up. After taking a much needed break, I got back to it.
I redrew every single frame, adjusted the timing to make the animation look smoother, and even added some more frames. I was struggling to keep the hair consistent across the frame, so I grabbed one of my previous frames from a different cut and numbered the hair strands. So then when I was drawing Meliodas's hair...
hair, I could just count how many hair strands he has, which was going to help me draw his hair more consistently. I had references for the anatomy, the manga panel, and previous frames up on other monitors to be able to keep the cut consistent. I even added a tiny bit of slow motion follow through for extra polish.
For lack of better words, this was a fuck ton of work, but I pushed through the mental anguish, blood, sweat, and even tears, and finally wrapped up this entire cut. Man. I finally finished cut 13. That was actually gonna be the most difficult one.
So i'm really glad I got that out the way now Everything else should be easier theoretically, of course I then moved on to cut 14, which is pretty much just Meliodas falling, serving as a transition to the next cut where he legit turns into a tornado. This cut wasn't too hard. It was actually pretty straightforward.
In order to transition him into the tornado, I did a frame where his face is super smeared, followed by a couple of frames that are going to transform him into this tornado of slashes. Cut 15 is up next. I decided to stick with a manga layout yet again because it really captures the intensity of the scene. Unlike the anime, I wanted to emphasize the sheer speed. speed of Meliodas spinning while showing Escanor's struggle to hold him off.
To do that, I created a two-frame loop of Escanor struggling to keep up, moving his axe back and forth. Meliodas was animated in ones to showcase his speed. Later on in After Effects, I'll add some directional blur to Meliodas to make it look even better.
After that, I colored it in, added the shading, and moved on to the final animation cut, cut 16. This cut looks hilarious in the anime. I'm not really quite sure how this ended up happening, but either way, I think a cut like this should happen pretty quickly, so I'm going to start it off with Meliodas. Meliodas still being a tornado in which I'm just going to reuse the animation from the previous cut because there really is no point in doing all that again I already did it so I just got straight to animating Escanor up until Meliodas breaks out the tornado and launches him off I thought this frame came out really really nice and it kind of sucked because it's only going to be shown for like a millisecond in the final product so I'll just leave it up on the screen so that we can appreciate it together By the way, if you've made it this far, comment something like pink horse in the comment section so that all the fake frauds that skip to the end of the video to watch the animation can be extremely confused.
I finished up this cut by adding a couple of frames of this white transparent pod. This white transparent shockwave to showcase speed. And just like that, I finished the animation after three weeks of work. Now, I gotta do all the backgrounds, the compositing, audio, and putting everything together. Hahaha.
Okay, so it's time to check out the background my friend made for me in blender. Ooh Nice, I like the crater the crater looks sick chat. Did he cook?
My idea for the backgrounds is to sort of draw over the CG references and make it stylized to my liking. I quickly painted up the backgrounds with a pencil outline look. For now, I'm gonna leave the cube looking pretty raw looking, so that when I put it into After Effects, I can add some special effects that's gonna make it look better.
These are the background assets that I cooked up, and before moving on to the compositing, I quickly had to animate the smoke effect that's gonna disappear after Escanor's first strike on Meliodas. The next step is compositing. I was genuinely at a point where my sanity was slipping out of my cute little hands, so I- I took a nice little nature break to gather my thoughts and creative juices back inside me. Pause.
All right, enough of that. Let's lock in. First up, to keep the shots consistent in appearance and to add depth to the characters, I used the OLM color key plugin to mask out specific colors and then applied an inner shadow layer style to add some extra dimension to the characters.
Finally, I added a purple rim light to give the characters an extra oomph that ends up giving it a more polished look. Next, I used the turbulent displace effect on the 2D cube I made from the 3D reference my friend sent me. This added some subtle more- movement to the cube, making it feel more dynamic.
After that, I pre-composed the cube and added a glow effect on it, making it stand out from the rest of the background. I imported some 2D clouds I had made earlier, then adjusted the positioning of the clouds to create the illusion of wind moving them, adding some extra movement to the scene. In some of these cuts, I added a flare to Escanor's axe and added some camera shake during the impact moments to increase the intensity of the shot.
For example, in this cut, I added a flare inside of the cube and added a shake effect to show the impact from Escanor's strike. As the scene progressed, I I gradually reduced the scale of the optical flare to create a seamless transition into the next cut. For the cut with the fast strikes, I used the OLM color key plugin again, this time grabbing the lighter brown color and adding a glow to it, highlighting Eskimo strikes even further. For the rotation shot, I messed around with the screenshot of the CG background and tried to keyframe it so that it looks as if the camera is rotating. Then I added one of the background drawings I had done to make the overall shot look nicer.
On impact, I added yet another lens flare. I just really love how these look if you couldn't tell already. For this cut, I selected the white color with OLM color key and gave it a nice glow effect.
Then I added directional blur to Meliodas cosplaying as the tornado. I found the speed line overlay on YouTube. I added it onto the composition and it ends up working really, really well, really bringing this cut together. For the final cut, I added in tornado Meliodas from the previous cut and added a camera shake on impact.
After I was done with after effects, I dragged the entire project into DaVinci Resolve for color correction, which honestly took a lot longer to get down than I expected. Ultimately, the goal is to try to make everything look as consistent as possible. possible, it was actually really hard to get down in some cuts due to the change in brightness and other factors, which was extremely frustrating.
But either way, thankfully, the visuals for this project were finally finished. And now, the final step to finishing my reanimation. is the audio. So I started by downloading the original episode and separating the stems to isolate the characters voices. Unfortunately because of the loud background music and other voices mixed in, the quality of the isolated vocals was not great.
I ran their voices through voice isolators, compressors, and a bunch of other plugins to try to improve the sound, but honestly the result still wasn't the best. I wasn't going to trip too hard about this though, because there's really not much I could do about it. I then found the original soundtrack of the fight scene on YouTube.
I downloaded it and imported it into the project. After that, I added my own whooshes, explosion sound effects, and all that good stuff. I did end up using the stored sound effects from the anime and also threw in the CubeSpark hit sound effect for this cut.
Because I quite frankly couldn't find anything similar anywhere else. It actually never fails to amaze me just how much sound design could elevate any project. It is truly insane.
After 3-4 weeks of work, I finished this project. Honestly, I probably learned a lot more about myself than about animating during this process. Surprisingly, a lot more than when I worked like a MAPPA animator for 72 hours. Seven days video is coming soon by the way.
I pushed myself a ton and discovered that I had a lot more discipline than I previously thought I did. I went out of my comfort zone and tried a lot of different stuff I hadn't done before. And most importantly, I made something I'm proud of. I know it's not perfect. And regardless of all the struggles I faced, I'm glad I made it.
So make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow my Twitter and my Instagram. I also have a Patreon if you guys want to further support me.
Thank you guys for all the support. I'm going to keep doing my best and I'm going to keep working harder than ever. All right, guys, this is the final product.
Enjoy. Beware of the blood. I'm not in the mood to be spoiled. I'm in the mood to be spoiled.
Do you understand? I'm a machine that can prove that I'm superior to you. Now then... Please struggle as much as you can. I can't believe I'm beating a human.
Ha ha, you're a great man.