"Beware the Well of Shade, for the shadows run deep through its endless walls and twisting caverns"
I've been messing around with this rig on and off for awhile, but I finally finished this little side project making a short scene in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I've never been quite happy with how Starswirl the Bearded looked in the show when he finally appeared but, last year I happened upon a really cool fan design of Starswirl by the user Orin311 that I fell in love with. I decided to make a one view puppet rig this year directly based off their vector art as a surprise, complete with show style lip sync and a full walk cycle. One thing led to another in adding a background, a few illustrator texture brushes, multiple sound effects, re-purposing some old fire animation of mine and suddenly it became a whole completed scene. With such a cool wizard design, the choice for using Gandalf's voice to test the rig with was a no brainier. The background is based on the Well of Shade location in the Season 7 finale of MLP.
I had a lot of fun making this and it was great practice for some future personal animation projects I wanna start next year!
Credits for the character design and sound effects listed below
Starswirl fan design by Orin331
Lord of the Rings audio
fire audio
rocks and pebble audio
magic effect audio
horse walking audio
isn't needlessly bloated with convoluted lore or character drama that goes nowhere
never sold out
never tried to go "bigger and better"
no controversy
no crunch
never became consumed by drama from the creators' personal lives
still gets updated as a labor of love even after the creators went on to bigger things
I just think the indie animation crowd could learn a thing or two from Homestar Runner.
(and before you say "BUT THEY HAD A TELLTALE GAME AND ALEX HIRSCH ON" it bears mentioning that Telltale was a much smaller company back then and it made sense as a way of returning the favor, given the Chaps had done tributes to LucasArts games, and Hirsch was just a one-time thing and they didn't make a big deal about it, plus the whole reason Matt got to work on Gravity Falls was because of HSR and not the other way around)
I couldn't seem to nail the angles/scale on Arthur's key for a Lythero UMVC3 video, and got stuck enough on this that remaking it in Blender for reference somehow actually saved time.
I thought I was being clever for this, but it turns out that (of course) people use this approach all the time for everything from backgrounds to character angles. So uh yeah if you're in 2D it's worth it to learn a bit of 3D jsyk ✌️