In this video, I set out to re-animate the notorious Seven Deadly Sins fight, Meliodas Vs Escanor… Can I do a good job?
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00:00I'm gonna attempt to reanimate one of the most disappointing fight scenes in all of anime Escanor versus Meliodas from seven deadly sins
00:11That's a sneak peek of what's to come I'm gonna take you
00:13Yes, you through my process on how I made this 16 cut animation by myself
00:18You're not gonna want to miss this for context
00:20This was the series most anticipated moment and when the anime episode came out
00:23It was so bad that I had the fans of the series in shambles. No, this is not cool, bro
00:29What is this before starting the process of my reanimation?
00:33I skimmed through the manga chapter of the fight and I was shocked to find out how different it was from the show I
00:37Could feel as if the mangaka had a specific vision of how the fight would flow when animated and the anime really did not deliver
00:43At all, so I had the bright idea of reanimating this scene as closely to the manga as possible
00:48I knew that going into this it was for sure gonna be my most challenging animation that I've done to date since you know
00:54It's a fight scene that's gonna require a solid amount of drawings
00:56But thankfully I had some ideas that could potentially speed up the process because you know, I want to make a good but I also
01:01Don't want to spend 30 decades on it. I kind of have a YouTube channel to run here to start this project off
01:05I decided to put together a reference board of both the characters that are featured in this scene Meliodas and Escanor
01:11I also placed a couple of images of their weapons different angles of their faces and even Meliodas is tattoo in the board
01:17I then lined up images of the anime scene and the manga scene so that I could get a more clear view of the layout
01:22That I was gonna go for when I start sketching out the storyboard
01:24These boards are gonna help me draw the characters more accurately and more consistently for the seven deadly sins bunny studios edition
01:31Then I decided it would be a good idea to try drawing both
01:34Escanor and Meliodas's faces for the first time to get a hang of what they're gonna look like more or less and to also get
01:39Myself warmed up. I didn't notice that his nose is a good little a little rounder than normal
01:44I couldn't find like any like character sheet of Meliodas in this form
01:49So I kind of just have to go by the manga and the anime in order to get it as accurate as possible
01:53After I drew up Meliodas, I got ready to practice drawing Escanor's face
02:03So far so good
02:04I 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
02:09Ahead and render and try and figure out the colors for the characters and more or less get an idea of what exactly the final
02:15product is gonna look like I
02:18Think Meliodas is looking a little bit. Hello. Hello. This is not working
02:22I'm gonna quickly draw Escanor now
02:28The last thing I was missing was a solid reference for the background of the scene
02:32So I sent some pictures of the anime to my friend with benefits to cook up a CGI background
02:36Then he said anything for you. Just say the word bro got me blushing and shit
02:39So we'll come back to that later when he's done cooking in the meantime
02:42Now that I have all the references of the characters that I need and I also got warmed up
02:46It's time to start working on the storyboard of the fight to make the storyboard
02:50I looked through both the manga panels and the anime and sketched out the keyframes in a way
02:54That's more faithful to the source material
02:55This process helped me visualize the flow of the animation and plan out the transitions between the scenes
03:00Also this time around I decided that instead of making extremely rough sketches to help me come up with an idea for what I wanted
03:06The 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
03:12Them a lot more accurate and exactly as I wanted it to look in the final product
03:16This is in hopes that it was gonna save me a good chunk of time and a lot of headaches
03:19So, let's see if it actually helps or not after I finished drawing up the storyboard
03:22I took a step back to see if the scenes flowed. Well, I'm gonna lie
03:25I was kind of just admiring my own work for a while
03:27However, I knew that the real challenge was still ahead
03:30So without dwelling too much on what is yet to come I moved on to the animation process
03:34The first cut features Meliodas looking up at Eskin or and he tells him that he's in a bad mood
03:39Thanks to the storyboard sketch being exactly what I wanted the final cut to look like I wasted no time and got straight to the
03:44Lineart portion of the process off rip. I started off by doing the lineart of the static elements of the shot first
03:50This was basically everything that didn't include the mouth chin neck and the eye
03:53I then proceeded to animate the most basic blink in all of existence, but it gets the job done
03:58Well next I animated him speaking which was done by animating his mouth opening and closing in a simple pattern this basic animation technique
04:05Gives the illusion of speech without the complexity of full lip-syncing cut to features Eskiner looking down to Meliodas
04:11And he's telling him that he is in a great mood unlike Meliodas who is in a horrible mood
04:15I'm not gonna lie this cut straight-up follow the same process as the last one
04:18So I'm not gonna bore you with all the details
04:20I will say though in my own humble opinion the colors and just the drawings in general look pretty cool
04:25I really really like how both of these cuts turned out in the end and cut 3 Eskiner is talking a ton of shit about
04:30How this is a golden opportunity to prove that he's better than Meliodas
04:34This cut is not gonna have any movement at all in terms of animation
04:37All I really needed to do was draw the characters in a still frame and even with such a simple task my brain-rotted brain
04:42Decided to take over and draw his axe backwards for some reason and I only noticed right after I started
04:48Compositing this shot like three weeks later
04:50The only movement this cut was gonna have is the little animation of the cube and the clouds moving from the wind
04:54But that's all gonna be done later and compositing cut 4 and cut 5 were the next two cuts
04:58I had to animate these scenes feature Eskiner and Meliodas gripping their weapons as they're getting ready to clash since these two cuts are basically
05:05Identical in animation. I'm gonna quickly go over them
05:07The idea was to make very detailed and accurate drawings of their weapons and to have the shot to be more of a close-up in
05:12Contrast to what the anime went for for the gripping animation
05:15I wanted to make sure that you could see the movement, but I didn't want it to be too exaggerated
05:19Just simple ease timing with solid hand drawings, which I have very much struggled with in the past
05:24But I surprisingly did not have a hard time this time around. Am I improving chat? Either way
05:28I believe these two cuts came out phenomenal and came out just how I imagined it in my head cut 6 is up next
05:33Which means it's actually time to get into more complex animation cut for this project in this cut Eskiner is gonna swing up his axe
05:39To charge up for an attack on Meliodas. Essentially
05:42My vision was for this cut to be smoothly animated on once which I never do
05:46My idea was Eskiner quickly swinging up his axe in the beginning and then it turns into a more of a slow motion type
05:51Shot due to me wanting to make this cut in once I was gonna need to make a ton of in-between drawings
05:56So was I gonna do that? Of course not. I had recently heard of this animation software called Kakani
06:01This is not sponsored by the way, don't click off
06:03I 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
06:10Basically creates in-between frames for you. I'm pretty sure this is all vector based
06:13So it doesn't use AI but I'm not 100% sure it apparently also lets you adjust the easing and stuff
06:18Which looks pretty cool since I'm doing this cut in once
06:21This 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
06:27Between so I started off by sketching out the animation and movement and timing on clip studio paint
06:32Then I exported it as a PNG sequence and imported into Kakani and honestly as I used it for a bit
06:37It was actually extremely confusing
06:39I had to basically draw the strokes in the same exact order from the previous frames in order for the program to be able to
06:45Generate 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
06:50So it was honestly pretty annoying. I'm not gonna lie to you
06:53But after some time of going through the struggle it was time to generate the in-between frames and see if it looks good
06:58Wait, that's actually pretty cool. Wow, it's not 100% perfect, but it actually did such a good job. I'm very impressed
07:04I then exported every frame as a PNG sequence and then imported it back into clip studio paint for coloring since this is animated in
07:10Once there was no way in hell. I was gonna go frame by frame and shade everything myself
07:14So I imported it into after effects to see if I could find some layer styles that can add some simple shading or something
07:20And this is what I was able to cook up. It doesn't look half bad
07:22It looks kind of Disney like but I kind of like that. So I guess this works something you guys should know about me
07:27I think in full color and I'm able to visualize exactly what I want to make before I make it
07:32So 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
07:37It was no different
07:38I tried visualizing cut 7 the way I had planned it on the storyboard like with a hair waving past the pan down
07:44But I just could not see the vision
07:45In fact, I had a completely different idea in mind instead of the shot featuring a standard pan down
07:50I'm laying it out to be a wide-angle shot featuring a quick and then slow motion attack and then the impact
07:55It's kind of hard to explain. So you guys will just see in a second
07:57I started off by sketching the rough animation on clip studio
08:00Just like in the last cut and I also added in some pretty fire looking impact frames nice
08:05Then I imported everything into kakani again and man things did not go as planned
08:09The software was supposed to make things easier for me
08:12But it really made things a lot worse following the strokes in order from the previous drawing was a huge headache
08:17Especially with this cut having way more lines than the last cut the process was slow
08:21Draining as hell the drawings look wonky and I found myself
08:24Redrawing the keyframes over and over again more times than I needed to which led to me wasting a ton of time
08:30There were barely any tutorials on YouTube on how to use this program
08:33So like the only way to figure out what I needed to know was through their manual
08:37Which 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
08:42So after what felt like forever, I looked at the progress I had made and I did not like it at all
08:46I ended up deleting kakani from my computer and throwing it into fire
08:50I'm just kidding. Don't sue me and ended up going back to the software that I knew best clip studio paint
09:04Man I'm actually I'm actually really going through it right now. I can't lie to you. This animation has really taken a toll on me
09:11Especially
09:12with you know that the
09:14Standards that I set for myself and how fast I want to get things done because I have a YouTube channel to run and I
09:19Need to upload at least not once a year. You know what I'm saying?
09:23I'm just telling myself this but you sort of just have to keep on pushing because
09:27Things are not really as serious as we make it in our heads
09:30Like we really are just on a floating rock you look at the sky
09:33There's the floating rock just there with the Sun reflecting on it. It's just like it just keeps going
09:38It doesn't end it never ends. There's like planets and like
09:42Galaxies and like the universe multiple universes. It just never ends
09:46We're just an atom in the grand scheme of things. So really got to take it easy, man
09:50Really got to take it easy
09:51I then got back to work after my fourth
09:53Existential crisis of the week the liner and drawing process felt way faster in clip studio paint. Everything just looked way better
09:59I had to do it all by hand, but at least I knew what I was doing
10:02You know what I'm saying in the end this cut took a whole two days of hard work to finish
10:06It really wasn't fun at all. But at the very least the final product looks pretty cool. Next up is cut 8
10:11This cut doesn't have any 2d animation. Just my drawn 2d background and the cube drawing
10:15This cut is mainly gonna emphasize the impact of Escanor clashing with Meliodas
10:19I'll create all the impact and after effects and revisit the shot later during the background creation portion of this project
10:25So I quickly moved on to cut 9 after the impact that's gonna cut to Meliodas who was completely unfazed
10:30This cut is gonna start with him staring directly at the camera with his hair whipping around from the impact
10:35No, Drizzy and gradually slowing down. He then starts talking mad shit next
10:38I needed to figure out how to make it look like he's holding off Escanor with a sword
10:42So I decided to draw his hand and sword separately in a new project file and then add a shake effect in post
10:47Which is gonna give you the effect that we want for cut 10
10:49I'm gonna animate Escanor's mouth opening and closing because he is laughing and Meliodas his face
10:54My original plan was to have him open his eyes in this cut
10:57But after pacing around my house like usual thinking of ideas and whatnot
11:01I realized that it would be way cooler to do a close-up shot of his eye opening which is gonna perfectly
11:06Transition to the next cut I sort of just drew the eyeball in one shot
11:09Put it in the bottom layer and just animated his eyelids opening in a very nice smooth way
11:14I'm really really proud of how this shot came out now cut 11 is gonna feature Escanor quickly slashing at Meliodas in the anime
11:21It felt a lot slower than what the manga intended it in my opinion as you can see there is quite a big difference in
11:26Overall energy, you know since this cut is gonna be pretty fast. It's gonna go like
11:32Definitely gonna have to have like a frame where Escanor is like his body's like moved like over here and try to have some variety
11:38But overall the most important part about this shot is gonna be you know
11:42The effects animation like the dust and like the impacts right here have to go crazy
11:46So I just went ahead and got right into it
11:48I'm once again doing this cut in one since it's supposed to be a sequence of really fast attacks
11:52Like I mentioned before I wanted him to move back and forth instead of striking from just one position
11:57So I duplicated Escanor and flip them horizontally on some frames
12:01Which is gonna give the illusion of fast movement that I wanted if this were a professional cut for an official show
12:06I wouldn't have done it this way. This was pretty lazy on my part
12:09I'm not gonna lie, but I was pretty drained up at this point. So please cut me some slack
12:13I also added some smears to make the overall cut look smoother
12:16Then I animated the smoke and the slashes and even though I cut some corners during the process of animating this cut
12:22It still gets the job done pretty well moving on to cut 12
12:25This is a quick shot of Escanor getting kicked in the face by Meliodas after all of his relentless strikes were totally useless
12:31This cut was actually really easy to make it was just one frame of Escanor's face
12:35Then a smear of Meliodas's leg
12:37Which really just is a black blob and then a couple of frames of Escanor's muscular neck and chest slowly falling back
12:42I then moved on to cut 13 which in terms of difficulty is in stark contrast to the previous cut
12:48My idea for this cut is that it's gonna start off with the camera slowly panning up with both of their hair waving
12:53Then it's gonna turn into a rotation shot where Meliodas strikes Escanor
12:57I started by doing a rough animation to map out how I wanted the camera movement to flow after that
13:02I did another pass where I drew Meliodas with more detail focusing on his face body and all that good stuff
13:07Then I moved on to the line art and after drawing a few frames a tear legit ran down my face because I absolutely
13:14Hated how it looked the frames had so many
13:16Inconsistencies the anatomy was super off and his face looked dumb as fuck in some drawings
13:21Even though I didn't want to for my own sanity
13:24I took a long needed break for an entire day to rest my mind and come back stronger than before no joke
13:29I'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
13:35I can't do anything
13:36So I think it's more productive for me to take a long break and then I could come back whenever I'm feeling better because I
13:41Feel like I'm gonna mess it up after taking a much-needed break. I got back to it
13:44I redrew every single frame adjusted the timing to make the animation look smoother and even added some more frames
13:50I was struggling to keep the hair consistent across the frame
13:53So I grabbed one of my previous frames from a different cut and numbered the hair strands
13:57So that when I was drawing Meliodas his hair I could just count how many hair strands he has which was gonna help me draw
14:02His hair more consistently I had references for the anatomy the manga panel and previous frames up on other monitors to be able to keep
14:09The cut consistent. I even added a tiny bit of slow-motion follow-through for extra polish for a lack of better words
14:15This was a fuck ton of work
14:16But I pushed through the mental anguish blood and sweat and even tears and finally wrapped up this entire cut man
14:22I finally finished cut 13 that was actually gonna be the most difficult one
14:26So I'm really glad I got that out the way now. Everything else should be easier. Theoretically, of course
14:31I then moved on to cut 14
14:33Which is pretty much just Meliodas falling serving as a transition to the next cut where he legit turns into a tornado
14:39This cut wasn't too hard. It was actually pretty straightforward in order to transition him into the tornado
14:44I did a frame where his face is super smeared followed by a couple of frames that are gonna transform him into this tornado of
14:50Slashes cut 15 is up next
14:52I decided to stick with a manga layout yet again because it really captures the intensity of the scene unlike the anime
14:58I wanted to emphasize the sheer speed of
15:00Meliodas spinning while showing Escanor struggle to hold him off to do that
15:04I created a two-frame loop of Escanor struggling to keep up moving his axe back and forth
15:08Meliodas was animated in ones to showcase his speed later on in after effects
15:12I'll add some directional blur to Meliodas to make it look even better after that
15:16I colored it in added the shading and moved on to the final animation cut cut 16. This cut looks hilarious in the anime
15:23I'm not really quite sure how this ended up happening. But either way, I think a cut like this should happen pretty quickly
15:28So I'm gonna start it off with Meliodas still being a tornado in which I'm just gonna reuse the animation from the previous cut
15:34There's there really is no point in doing all that again. I already did it
15:37So I just got straight to animating Escanor up until Meliodas breaks out the tornado and launches him off
15:42I thought this frame came out really really nice and it kind of sucked because it's only gonna be shown for like a
15:46Millisecond in the final product. So I'll just leave it up on the screen so that we can appreciate it together
15:50By the way, if you've made it this far comment something like pink horse in the comment section
15:55So that all the fake frauds that skip to the end of the video to watch the animation could be extremely confused
16:00I finished up this cut by adding a couple of frames of this white
16:04Transparent ha this white transparent shockwave to showcase speed and just like that
16:09I finished the animation after three weeks of work now, I gotta do all the backgrounds the compositing audio and putting everything together
16:18Okay, so it's time to check out the background my friend made for me in blender, ooh
16:22Nice. I like the crater the crater looks sick chat
16:26Did he cook my idea for the backgrounds is to sort of draw over the CG references and make it stylized to my liking?
16:32I quickly painted up the backgrounds with a pencil outline look for now
16:35I'm gonna leave the cube looking pretty raw looking so that when I put it into after effects
16:39I can add some special effect is gonna make it look better
16:41These are the background assets that I cooked up and before moving on to the compositing
16:45I quickly had to animate the smoke effect. That's gonna disappear after Eskimos first strike on Meliodas. The next step is compositing
16:52I was genuinely at a point where my sanity was slipping out of my cute little hands
16:56So I took a nice little nature break to gather my thoughts and creative juices back inside me pause
17:01All right enough of that let's lock in first up to keep the shots consistent in appearance and to add depth to the characters
17:07I use the OLM color key plug-in to mask out specific colors
17:10And then I applied an inner shadow layer style to add some extra dimension to the characters
17:14Finally, I added a purple rim light to give the characters an extra oomph that ends up giving it a more polished look next
17:20I use the turbulent displace effect on the 2d cube. I made from the 3d reference
17:24My friend sent me this added some subtle movement to the cube making it feel more dynamic after that
17:29I pre composed the cube and added a glow effect on it making it stand out from the rest of the background
17:33I imported some 2d clouds
17:35I had made earlier then adjusted the positioning of the clouds to create the illusion of when moving them adding some extra movement to the
17:41Scene in some of these cuts
17:42I added a flare to Eskimos axe and added some camera shake during the impact moments to increase the intensity of the shot
17:48For example in this cut
17:50I added a flare inside of the cube and added a shake effect to show the impact from Eskimos strike as the scene progressed
17:56I gradually reduced the scale of the optical flare to create a seamless transition into the next cut with a cut with a fast
18:01Strikes I use the OLM color key plug-in again this time grabbing the lighter brown color and adding a glow to it
18:06Highlighting Eskimos strikes even further for the rotation shot
18:09I messed around with the screenshot of the CG background and tried to keyframe it so that it looks as if the camera is
18:15Rotating then I added one of the background drawings I had done to make the overall shot look nicer on impact
18:20I added yet another lens flare. I just really love how these look if you couldn't tell already for this cut
18:25I selected the white color with OLM color key and gave it a nice glow effect
18:28Then I added directional blur to Meliodas cosplaying as the tornado. I found the speed line overlay on YouTube
18:34I added it onto the composition and it ends up working really really well really bringing this cut together for the final cut
18:40I added in tornado Meliodas from the previous cut and added a camera shake on impact after I was done without their effects
18:46I dragged the entire project into DaVinci Resolve for color correction
18:49Which honestly took a lot longer to get down than I expected
18:52Ultimately the goal is to try to make everything look as consistent as possible
18:56It was actually really hard to get down in some cuts due to the change in brightness and other factors, which was extremely frustrating
19:02But either way, thankfully the visuals for this project were finally finished
19:06And now the final step to finishing my reanimation is the audio
19:09So I started by downloading the original episode and separating the stems to isolate the characters voices
19:15Unfortunately because of the loud background music and other voices mixed in the quality of the isolated vocals was not great
19:22I ran their voices through voice isolators compressors and a bunch of other plugins to try to improve the sound but honestly the result still
19:29Wasn't the best
19:32I wasn't gonna trip too hard about this though, cuz there's really not much I could do about it
19:36I then found the original soundtrack of the fight scene on YouTube
19:39I downloaded it and imported it into the project after that
19:42I added my own wishes explosion sound effects and all that good stuff
19:45I did end up using the short sound effects from the anime and also threw in the cube spark hit sound effect for this cut because
19:51I quite frankly couldn't find anything similar anywhere else
19:53It actually never fails to amaze me just how much sound design could elevate any project. It is truly insane
20:02After three to four weeks of work, I finished this project
20:06Honestly, I probably learned a lot more about myself than about animating during this process
20:11Surprisingly a lot more than when I worked like a Mapa animator for 72 hours seven days videos coming soon
20:16By the way, I pushed myself a ton and discovered that I had a lot more discipline than I previously thought I did
20:22I went out of my comfort zone and tried a lot of different stuff
20:25I 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
20:31I faced I'm glad I made it. So make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel follow my Twitter and my Instagram
20:37I also have a patreon if you guys want to further support me. Thank you guys for all the support
20:41I'm gonna keep doing my best and I'm gonna keep working harder than ever. Alright guys, this is the final product. Enjoy
20:46Enjoy
21:16You