Welcome to the first of the Next Gen FM-ABR episode breakdowns. This is a video series offering a behind-the-scenes look into the production of a given episode. This being the first of the series, however, let's begin by covering our core ingredients for this transmutation. The first two are perhaps the most obvious, Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Much of the reason this project is even possible hinges on the fashion in which these two split up the manga amongst each other, taking close to half respectively.
The result is that only about seven fragments of the story were not sufficiently adapted on their own during either show's runtime. Through precise compositing of both series, as well as manga panels from a surprising source, one of them can be revived. At least for now. Possibilities for future changes will be covered in a later breakdown. Additionally, some content from after 2003 fully deviated from the manga story was also not adapted faithfully.
To restore all but one of these, we would outright need new dialogue. There's no two ways around it. And in two of these cases, some of the actors who betrayed these characters have sadly passed away.
Some of the missing Ishval flashbacks could be done in a mostly silent fashion, while others could have entirely new voice lines made exclusively for characters that don't appear in Brotherhood itself. Also, since I'm not really comfortable doing ADR work in a language besides English, That's the only language I could do an edit of that nature for. We'll talk more about that section when we get there, though.
I'd also like to expand on a statement I made in the introduction. What did I mean by, better adapts the manga's themes than even the manga's early chapters themselves do? Well, that has to do with the nature of 2003. I'm of the belief that 2003's alterations come in three forms.
The first is changes that were designed to take the series in a new, darker direction. The bird chimera Cornelio creates to kill Rose. The longer and more arduous alchemy exam, the 2003 exclusive filler adventures in the East, the changes to Lab 5 after the slicer fight, Ed and Al not going to dub with willingly, and larger scope ideas like the homunculi resulting from human transmutation, as well as their subsequent desire to become human, are all examples of this.
Changes of this nature were not considered for inclusion in FM-ABR due to the lore and thematic inconsistencies they would create. The second is changes made to allow for 2003's rearranging of the plotline. like the reordering of the backstory, the battle on the train, the shout tucker arc, and Winry leaving Rush Valley with the brothers.
These are largely irrelevant to FMABR, as we'll be retrofitting these events into a manga structure anyway. The third and last form involves cases where 2003 introduced lore that adds to both canons, even if it was never officially brought over. Lior being a desert is one we'll discuss later today.
There are also edge cases like having Dr. Marco along during the Elric vs Scar round 1 that were considered, but voice actor inconsistencies ultimately resulted in them being cut. If someone wants to try including those moments, I think a cut utilizing that portion could absolutely work within a manga-broho framework. All this is to say, manga accuracy is not inherently the goal of FMABR.
It will certainly be closer to the manga than either official cut, but there are select elements of 2003 that I believe stand to improve the manga-broho narrative without sacrificing the integrity of the timeline, pacing, or tone. There are two additional sources besides the two shows and occasionally the manga, but they're only relevant to Lior. Before getting into Lior though, there's one thing left to address. Aspect ratios.
Without getting too in the weeds on this very technical topic, 2003 and Brotherhood were not made for the same screen size. 2003 used the older 4x3 full screen standard, while Brotherhood uses the modern 16x9 widescreen standard. There are four reasonable paths to resolving this discrepancy, three of which have been enacted as part of FMAVR where applicable.
The first option is to hardcoat black bars to the side of the screen at any time 2003 video is shown, at least in its full frame, a practice known as pillarboxing. This will appear very disjointed and may even break immersion, but it won't remove any details from the scene and will still match a widescreen display when widescreen footage is on screen. The second option is the opposite, where Brotherhood footage is letterboxed to match the frame size of the 2003 footage.
This is just as disjointed as the prior option, except that now it's designed to match a full screen display. Showing this on a widescreen display would cause an artifact known as window boxing, which is undesirable. The third option is to crop all of the 4x3 footage into 16x9 so that everything matches the widescreen standard.
This requires the 4x3 footage to be cropped 25%, and additionally panned around in order to work, but you'll gain a great deal of consistency both within the episode and in the series at large. The fourth option is just the other way around, wherein 16x9 footage is retrofitted to 4x3. This is absolutely the most situational of the bunch that was considered for inclusion, but the results can look quite good on an authentic fullscreen CRT, if you're lucky enough to have one. I would advise the vast majority of people to stick to 16x9 for the entire experience.
as only 6 of the 14 episodes even have a 4x3 mode anyway. This was a limitation based on the amount of 2003 footage used, as I didn't see an advantage to a 4x3 cut for episodes that used 2003 footage for less than half of their running time. Still, a case can be made that 4x3 is the superior option on applicable episodes for those who can display it natively. Original Aspect is basically never recommended, though, and is largely only here for those who just hate the idea of Pan and Scan on principle. Hopefully, though, the work done to Lior will convince you that Pan & Scan can be done right.
With that said, let's get into it. Here's the project timeline for Lior. As you can see, it's pretty complicated from the outset, but once you see what each of these tracks does, it will start to make more sense.
The timeline is split between two halves, one for video and one for audio. Starting from the top of the audio half, we have 2003 series English audio. There are six tracks in total for the 5.1 mix, which is represented as front stereo, front center, subwoofer, and rear stereo in the software.
Beneath that is Brotherhood English audio. This is also a 5.1 mix just like with 2003, although audio levels have been adjusted between the two to make the 2003 audio sound a little more in line with Brotherhood. These two were mixed rather differently for the English localization, so this is the most I did regarding audio rebalancing.
There's also an additional front-center track chilling out between these two mixes that we'll get to later. Beneath that is English post-production audio. which needed to be run at a different volume from its Japanese counterpart. Beneath that is the Japanese stereo audio from 2003, followed by the Japanese stereo audio for Brotherhood. Oddly enough, Brotherhood is the latter of these two mixes, resulting in it being toned down slightly to match the 2003 audio.
Beneath that are two stereo tracks specifically for Japanese post-production audio. As for video, the bottom track is a reference track with hard-coded subtitles, that was only used to assist in creating the SRT file for the episode. There are later episodes that will use this differently though, which we'll get to in a later breakdown. The next sets are in pairs, with orange meaning source footage and magenta meaning modified footage.
The bottom pair is for footage that was originally in 4x3, while the above pair is footage that's originally 16x9. An additional track above this is used for the transition unique to the original aspect cut, as a fade to and from white occurs between a 4x3 and 16x9 shot here. From there, we have two pairs dedicated to reframing, with one changing all of the 4x3 material to 16x9, and the other doing the opposite.
Finally, the three tracks at the top are used for lipflap edits, which we'll get into as they come. With all of that out of the way, let's finally jump into the actual order of events. Right from the first shot, we already have a deviation from Brotherhood's official cut. Rather than starting with a shot of Central followed by a shot of Isaac McDougal, we are instead taking a cue from 2003 in the manga by beginning with Ed and Al's human transmutation. To get this out of the way now, MacDougall isn't going to show up in this one, or any other numbered episode.
Instead, we'll be giving his story a new categorization altogether later on. Back to the opening we actually went with, the key difference between 2003 and the manga here is in the details given before everything goes horribly wrong. The manga gives us almost nothing, which is by design since the entire point of the scene is to build intrigue and speculation.
The only clues we get into the setting of this world are some bookshelves, a circle made of chalk, and some lightning. It doesn't even make clear that the lightning and the circle are connected. While I love the composition of this page a lot and think that it absolutely accomplishes its goal, 2003's first handful of carefully curated shots expand on it in ways that feel just as integral as the source material for selling this opening. The shot of the armor and shield followed by beakers filled with assorted chemicals alone would allow it to win out.
But then there's the instrument Ed uses to draw the circle. The resemblance to Auto Mail present in its design is so genius yet so subtle. I missed it until Goat Jesus pointed it out in his deep dive on 2003's first episode.
The scene's use of music here is also masterful, with the horns crescendoing as the golden aura whisks us into the sky as it spirals out of the circle. Just as the music changes, however, I choose to make a key deviation from 2003's direction here. By pulling some b-roll from 2003's music-free redux of this scene, I manage to create a version with the original narration removed.
Don't get me wrong, the narration here is brilliant and deeply thematically relevant. to the 2003 anime. Equivalent Exchange, while important in Brotherhood, isn't part of the thematic crux the way it is in 2003. So, I elected to make a pull that I am frankly ecstatic works as well as it does. The dialogue that it replaces is from Ed's last scene in the entire show. Just as crucially, however, it also references the dialogue of the manga's first page.
It admittedly isn't presented in quite the same way, although that's a bit of a given in lieu of the change in medium. This audio change aside, the visuals of 2003's introduction stay unchanged until the shot of the lightning strike. I decided to hold the initial frame rather than let it fade into the text telling us the locations and the brother's age.
I'm with Goat Jesus on this detail being unnecessary and- taking away some of the intrigue and speculation both this and the manga had done such a good job building up. Similarly, I elected to cut the scream as well as Winry and Pinanko's reaction to it. This was partially to keep their introduction to episode 6, not counting the OP offering some quick glimpses into their characters, but was mostly done to keep the pacing snappier than in the original cut. Mustang's brief appearance was also cut from the scene, but that was mostly out of necessity since he doesn't arrive until days afterward in the manga hood timeline.
With those clips out of the equation, we quickly cut to Ed inside the house, now having lost his leg to unclear circumstances. Even with the snappier pace, I did have to slightly slow down the rolling clouds and rain before the lightning strikes to get the timing right. The glimpse inside the house post-transmutation is the only scene from Brotherhood's first episode that made it in. And even then, I cut it off early to match the manga.
The sound of Al's armor clinking against the ground ended up being perfectly refitted to a hard cut to the modern Fullmetal Alchemist logo. But what about Father's alchemy narration? I hear you cry. The truth is, I did use it in my earlier cut of FMABR. However, this narration doesn't sell the viewer on the premise anywhere near as well as 2003's masterfully directed opening.
It doesn't even work as a counterpart to 2003's iconic portrait opening, hence why Broho cut it so early on in its story. As for FMABR 1.5, you won't find it here at all. Back to the episode, we slowly fade out from the FMA logo before finding ourselves with Ed and Al in the desert near Lior.
Due to the use of Sanhir being so clever in the 2003 episode, as well as the ability to use dialogue that enhances the worldbuilding of both canons, an overarching decision has been made to keep Leora Desert for the entirety of Brotherhood. This does cause some minor anomalies in the art, but fortunately, these only manifest in this episode and episode 5. More glaring in terms of art is the shifting color of Al's loincloth and Rose's entire color scheme. While it is admittedly jarring, the ability to use 2003's take on these scenes makes it worth it.
Plus, they can be recolored to match Broho in the future. Per this decision, the episode starts out entirely using 2003 material. The only change early on is a reframing that removes the text hard-coded into the 2003 episode. These were removed for the same reasons as the previous set of text.
Some 2003 exclusive elements that were kept, however, included the addition of the red wine fountain and the handling of the religious broadcasts. The manga and Brotherhood make these broadcasts into standard background elements. which feels bizarrely disconnected from how people in town talk about the Church of Leto. 2003 changes us to have the townspeople completely enthralled in these broadcasts, establishing a great sense of authority regarding Cornelo that MangaHood never manages to establish. The red wine fountain mostly just exists to show us how filthy rich Lior is under Cornelo.
Soon after this, Brotherhood is brought back in for Al's transmutation scene. 2003 footage is initially grafted onto Brotherhood Audio to ensure as much design consistency as possible. We then carefully switch back over to 2003 audio with the Brotherhood music maintained.
This was done to keep Lior's townspeople in the dark about alchemy, a choice on 2003's part that makes this entire setup make much more sense. Brotherhood does get a brief visual moment in this scene, but even fitting this in required some new lip flaps for Lust here. To make these, I followed KaiserNeko's tutorial on the subject. Luckily for me, FMA's lip flaps followed a straightforward 3 frame design, so moving them appropriately was quite manageable.
This fragment of Brotherhood allows for an easy transition to the episode title card. Since I elected to keep the title of the episode City of Heresy, the episode card had to be slightly modified from saying Episode 3 to Episode 1. A quick masking job with some subtle feathering took care of that edit just fine. We cut back to 2003 to introduce us to Rose and maintain the order of events from 2003's adaptation. This does deviate a bit from the manga by taking things a little slower, but unlike most cases of 2003 doing this, Such a decision wasn't made to pepper in some of its own lore. Instead, it was purely done to offer more credence to Father Cornello and Rose by extension, which benefits both canons.
Additionally, 2003's choice to swap the Ed and Rose discussing necromancy scene and the Miracle Gathering scene allows for both to be further emboldened. It's during the Miracle Gathering that we do have a brief respite from 2003's take on events, thanks to our first additional source, Fullmetal Alchemist Mobile. While the art style from this game is even more removed from 2003 than Brotherhood is, this shot of Cornelo creating the sunflower is a great bit of manga accuracy I'd be remiss not to include.
It's after the Miracle Gathering scene that I technically had a choice to either use 2003 or Brotherhood footage to cover this scene between Cornelo and Cray. While I don't mind MangaHood's version having Cray be in on Cornelo's plan, part of me prefers seeing the power of Cornelo's persuasiveness directly when he convinces a devout believer to attempt an assassination on the the brothers. A quick scene revealing that Lust is in on Cornelio's plan follows this up before we fade into the Ed and Rose discussing necromancy scene we mentioned earlier.
While I vastly prefer 2003's handling of this scene to its Brotherhood equivalent, I should point out that having this room bathed in gold takes away from its connection to the imagery of the gate in Brotherhood. This is an unfortunate detail to lose out on that I hope to change in a future release. Cray's attack on Alphonse is kept the same as it was in 2003, with the next major change being found when Rose chooses not to run away when she realizes the Brother situation. This is quickly cut away to FMABR's most ambitious edit, Rose Confronts the Truth. Starting with Cornela's entrance, I had to carefully keep Rose out of frame during these shots.
More importantly though. I make a deviation after Ad's ultimatum regarding the stone, by using our second additional source. FMA2, Curse of the Crimson Elixir.
This PS2 exclusive went completely overlooked by me for years. It wasn't until a commenter mentioned that it had some extra scenes in Lior that were potentially worth using, that it finally landed on my radar. Thanks, OneHickeyaWarrior.
You really did me a solid on that one. As it turns out, the dialogue here is closer to the manga than either anime, and even includes a still of Rose in the Armor. While initially a very rough 360 interlaced shot, Upscaling presents it in as close to its original quality as we can get with our sources. Thanks, David. Music demixing was also used to reduce the volume of FMA2's OST, which is sadly hard mixed to an obnoxiously loud degree in the game itself.
Another odd discovery was that many of the shots Brotherhood has during its equivalent section actually match up to sections of the manga, but for whatever reason the team behind this episode elected to shovel them around to fit a bizarre anime original take that doesn't work nearly as well. By changing the lit flaps on them, we have almost everything covered. Still, four of the last few shots of this scene were never visually covered in any of our four video sources, which meant that manga panels had to be used once more to fill these gaps.
Well, either that or PS2 and game cutscenes, but I wasn't going to do that. Thankfully, even the use of the manga isn't the issue it once was, thanks to the surprising source of Kakao FMA. This is an official Korean webcomic version of Fullmetal Alchemist that's in full color.
It's not 100% faithful to the manga's shot composition, but it still works remarkably better here than I expected. It's a shame this release has never been translated, as it'd be a great way to check out the manga otherwise. With this new sequence cinched up, we wrap back to 2003 for the Chimera Battle. This encounter has technically been animated three times, once for 2003, once for FMA2, and once for Brotherhood. While Brotherhood was disqualified immediately for its lackluster direction and awful shot composition, FMA2's take on the fight actually was briefly a contender.
The main point in favor of its inclusion is the fact that it's classic 2003 animation in widescreen. And while it does look good in stills, being a PS2 game results in it having interlaced artifacts all over the place. Overall, 2003 just did it better.
Plus the use of sand here to keep Ao out of the fight is a genius. And while widescreen 2003 is slightly missed, we do get one widescreen extended shot here, courtesy of David M. The result is perhaps the only 16x9 shot of 2003 that doesn't involve reframing or panning. For those watching in 4x3 mode, I chose to keep the original cut in place. It should also be noted that cutting around Rose during this fight led to some pretty funny results, such as these two shots actually keeping more of their original frame in the widescreen cut as opposed to the other way around. At the end of the first 2003 episode, we instead cut to the Brotherhood bumpers.
From there, we use a small bit of 2003 episode 2, but quickly work our way into the Brotherhood version of events. This was necessary if Rose was going to leave with the brothers at this point in time. Aside from being a bit too silly, it works just fine here as the wacky shot composition stops at this point in the episode. The main issue from this point on is an inconsistent time of day.
It will be changed in a future release, however. The scene of Alan Rose on the roof is largely untouched, but the scene after with Ed and Cornelo did receive some modifications. An inverse to the scene with the radio from the beginning of the episode, we start with Brotherhood video which then gets crafted onto 2003 audio partway through Cornelo's speech to Ed.
I'll admit that this dialogue here is a bit redundant, but it's close enough to the manga that I think it still tracks. Plus, you get a moment of Cornelo directly saying that human alchemy is impossible for him, even if it requires Ed to goad him in a way that doesn't quite work as well here in this context. We encounter another visual anomaly after Ed slices Cornelo's gun, as the room Cornelo leaves is not the room they were just in. The goal is to eventually cut Cornelo and Ed out of the 2003 shot, while a new matching background layer is put in place of the prison cell from 2003. If you have any interest in doing a commission for this, please feel free to send an email to project.fma.b.r at gmail.com.
From this point onward, we let 2003 visuals roll into the last scene. This technically is a manga deviation, as Cornelio Stone backfires immediately after his gun is sliced in two in that version. Considering how anticlimactic that is, though, it should be no surprise that we went with 2003. Oh, and- Giant Cornelo is lame and probably lore-breaking, so that was a no-go.
The only remaining deviations are due to the audio, like this bit from Al here since it no longer applies. Or this bit from the Japanese version specifically where Al begins speaking to about the brothers' past, which is a 2003 exclusive decision that will not be carrying over. We wrap things up with Brotherhood's last scene of its episode, with the usual Brotherhood opening used as the credits, just as 2003 did for its first episode.
The last element to cover regarding this episode is reframing. I won't go over everything here as most of it boils down to this shot is framed to show the top portion, this shot is framed to show the bottom, and this shot is framed to be in the middle. That said, I'll show off the highlights. To start, we should talk about static versus parallax truck shots.
A truck shot is defined as a shot where the camera makes a steady horizontal movement during the shot. Depending on the shot, FMA 2003 either had all screen elements static during these, or they layered shots to move them in parallax. The main reason I make the distinction is that scenes where all elements are static can be untrucked. By taking a snapshot of the start and end, and sometimes the middle of these shots, we can get a still of the entire shot in a way we can't with parallax shots.
This can then be panned around to our liking, allowing for the entire frame to be used in widescreen instead of a mere 75%, which is usually required. Lior can pull off this trick three times. The first is this shot of the cafe during the broadcast at the start of the episode, the second is a crowd shot during the miracle gathering, and the third is a shot of the townspeople hearing Cornelo give his villain speech.
All other truck shots were parallax, meaning they couldn't receive this treatment. The next category is pedestal shots. These are the same as truck shots, just on the other axis. Seeing as all 4x3 material is cropped from the top and or bottom for the 16x9 cut, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that more of these made it in. The first example of this was the shot of everyone looking down at the broken radio.
There was no way to show everything I needed to at once, which meant turning the shot from a still to a pedestal. It does unfortunately have a Seinfeld's The Pothole feel, but it is much less egregious by comparison. Most of the other examples involve other crowd shots, such as this one where Cornelo comes out from behind the statue he's just transmuted, though there was one fun shot near the end where Ed transmutes the Leto statue.
This pedestal shot was already baked in, but I essentially stacked my own on top of it. The result is a very neat, albeit accidental, effect. And that's it for Lior.
This episode was easily the largest undertaking in all of FMABR. No one adaptation does the manga justice. which meant utilizing some knee sources just to cover all of that material faithfully. At last, though, you can now experience Rose facing the truth in near fully animated form. For that alone, this was worth it.
Next time, we'll discuss the two episodes added to Brotherhood's order, The Mining Town and Battle on the Train. See you there.