Don't mean to milk this thing but you'd be surprised at how much went into this little not-even minute of animation

Had to conceptualize stuff as I went on, it was a bit of a pisstake going in. I randomly recorded Wilfre's dialogue from before the final boss and went "I should animate this" on a whim. Most people interpret Wilfre's staff as a ruby due to Heather's pendent or a flame due to how it animates. According to wiki and context, it's a brush but I still took inspiration from the Eternal Flame because the funny swirl just works with the style. I added the stripes in some attempt to make it look more like bristles. It's a simple look but I'm pretty happy with the interpretation.

I went and referenced and drew the whole window shattered in wilfre's lair so I knew exactly what I was coloring in. Was good for lazy me down the road 'cus I just copied the drawing on the left and skewed it to where it needed to be. Cheating but free consistency.

References for Yan's TNC Wilfre were rather limited but the design is so simple that it wasn't very hard to wing. The arrow jazz you see are patterns to help me grasp how the hell I was gonna animate Wilfre's shadowy effect and later the stripes that go down his face when he charges up. In the game when he charged up his smoke effect got more violent and he started flashing like so:

I wasn't about to deviate from the pattern I had set so I decided to get a little creative.

I made this gif when testing out how I was gonna do an effect that evokes the same idea but was easier for my smooth brain to animate. I took inspiration from a really quick animation Mari does in the opening FMV of TNC where she gets glowy (not shown in the raw animation) and she gets scratchy looking shading which doesn't show up in the FMV due to the compression and bloom added to the rendering. I thought about Wilfre flashing in the charge setup but he wasn't on screen long enough for it to be gradual and I didn't want him to start flashing immediately because I simply didn't like how it looked in regards to how I was doing things.

Here's the chicken scratch storyboards for this as well in case that's something that tickles your fancy. Pretty unorganized and I didn't write out all the dialogue but the magic of animating something all by yourself is you know what you want so you don't gotta worry about how pretty the storyboards are as long as the final thing looks good.

I can't upload clips directly to a news post so the animatic is a no-go but they aren't much to write home about anyway. Same thing but crude no lip sync and no smoke effect.

Probably silly to make a post like this for something so short but I've never animated something to this caliber before so it was a journey to get made.

Closing message, I hope to Christ Pencil2d gets an update soon and thanks P-Bot for putting Drawn to Life content on the front page for a day