Hello! This is Viva, and I'd like to hijack these subtitles to give a running commentary on the production of Brony Polka Animated!
This is a music video that spanned production all the way from the start of 2016 up until the end of 2019. July 2016 featured the release of the "WIP Teaser", showing on the top right. September 2018 featured the release of the "Second third", showing on the bottom left.
The bottom right of course is the finalized version released in December 2019, the top left is a little different though! It's essentially a stapled-together version featuring storyboard-esque crude drawings that were made throughout the entire video's production.
Likewise some of the later ones look half-decent, while some of the early ones look espeeeeeecially trashy. Many images I used as a guide were just screenshots from their respective music videos.
It might be a bit obvious which ones I drew and which ones I didn't, but for the sake of clarity I decided to mark each screenshot with the "(Screenshots)" text.
I didn't draw up a traditional set of storyboards for the majority of the video, as since I was the sole animator- So long as I could picture it in my mind's eye, storyboards weren't really necessary.
This of course stopped being the case later on in the production, when I got better at drawing and deviated more from the source material!
The "WIP Teaser" uploaded in 2016 features animation spanning up until the end of the "20% Cooler" song, roughly a third of the way into Brony Polka.
Likewise it features the most primitive/earliest form of "finalized" animation, including a pony face angle that I ended up scrapping.
Here it is visible on Carrot Top (Golden Harvest), and Octavia afterwards. I found it a rather unflattering angle, and decided it was best to leave on the cutting room floor.
Every instance of it was replaced with a slightly altered "3/4" (Regular) angle for every version after the 2016 WIP Teaser release.
Vinyl Scratch (DJ Pon-3) is a good example of a project-wide palette revision I made very late into production, her darker colours are very different compared to earlier versions.
It came from the decision to have a more striking contrast between the lighter and darker colours on each pony's body. I generally used their outline colour as a guide.
Every "Release" version of BPA besides the very last one was rushed to a deadline, meaning there were things I wanted to do very early on that I didn't do until the final months of production.
You might notice pony manes bounce in the earlier scenes of the earlier versions, but not the later scenes. I wanted to make every mane bounce in every scene from the start.
However, to get each video out in time, I always put mane bounces as a "Low priority" fix. They weren't "Missing backgrounds" or "Missing lip sync" after all.
Likewise, only finally in the final version did I implement every mane bounce for every shot for every pony like I originally wanted... It took a long long time and it doesn't add too much, but I think it was worth the time spent.
If you go through the video frame by frame, you might notice different versions bounce on different frames.
This isn't an error in syncing different versions of the video. This is because I changed the timing for beats a few times over the video's production.
First was all by hand, listening and scrubbing through the song and guesstimating which frames should have beats, however this was incredibly slow and full of human error.
Later I figured out how to get mathematically perfect beat-to-frame timing, and used that for the rest of the video.
...Meaning going over lots of old animation with the old timing, and fixing it up to match the newly laid out beats. It was very very time consuming and clunky.
Lullaby for a Princess features backgrounds drawn by my sister- If there were any backgrounds that look more than half-decent, they were probably drawn by her.
For the purpose of Lullaby for a Princess, that was because I wanted to have something somewhat imitating the look of the WarpOut animated original. Flat colours wouldn't've worked here.
Brony Polka features 24 different songs with wildly different backgrounds and histories, essentially meaning I was making 24 mini-music videos in one.
To organize all of this, I put together a spreadsheet featuring a (seemingly endless) checklist of "Things to fix".
Things ranging from something as simple as "Celestia's too far to the left", to as complex as "This shot needs to be reworked from the ground up".
This chalkboard scene is one that I spent a long time trying to get to "Look right", to me I feel as if the 2016 version and the 2019 version is like night and day.
I had fun with the transitions from scene to scene. The transition from Love Me Cheerilee and 20% Cooler you might notice is rather different between the early and late versions.
One of the core ideas behind Brony Polka Animated was unifying all these different works of art into one seamless production, featuring a consistent art style.
Thinking about it the heaviest art style inspiration was CaptainHoers' "Spitfire's Day Off", easily one of my favourite fandom productions, featuring lineless solid colour designs.
Highly recommended.
Coming up to the end of the WIP Teaser, so I'd like to move things around a bit-
Now featuring AliCon's 2019 release! AliCon 2019 was a couple weeks after BronyCon 2019, and so I prettied up the BC2019 release and used it to release to Patrons until the final version was complete.
I have six versions of this video and I tried putting them all side by side- But it was especially cluttered. For the sake of clarity and palatability, I made only four versions visible at a time.
Besides, there weren't enough major differences between every different version to warrant showing all six all at once at all times.
Anyways: I'll talk about AliCon 2018's release next, now occupying the top right spot. I ordered these chronologically so the oldest to newest is top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right.
Obviously a lot of time passed between August 2016 and September 2018, I'd originally planned to have the video done roughly by the end of 2016...
...Then the end of 2017, then 2018... Then BronyCon 2019... Until finally it was released December 2019.
Obviously getting it done sooner would've been preferable, but a rule I gave myself was to not give myself a deadline. This project was extremely special to me, and I wanted it to be absolutely perfect on release.
...Minus a total of three extremely minor animation errors I've spotted since, I think I hit that goal, even if it completely trashed my schedule for three years.
Anyways, so AliCon 2018 had Gabriel Brown (Black Gryph0n) as a special guest, seen animated here. As a special sort of surprise I wanted to, if not finish BPA, release the next segment of animation featuring his horse.
It was, although not necessarily a deadline for the final version, was a deadline for a segment of animation. It got me working hard on BPA again, and is very definitely the reason I got it finished in time for the end of 2019.
I'm very happy to say that Gabe, despite his busy schedule, saw the premiere of BPA featuring his horse at AliCon 2018.
...One of the last changes I made to that version was, once at the convention, I realized on all of his marketing material that his horse is always wearing that arm band. That was an overnight addition.
...I wanted to show the final version to him at BronyCon 2019 too, and up until a few minutes before closing ceremonies I thought it wouldn't happen, but then the charity auction ran overtime. Hurrah!
Double Rainboom was of course a fan-made MLP episode, I thought that instead of looking for music videos for this song, I thought best representation would come with taking from the episode itself.
...I will admit I have a bit of a Rainbow Dash bias, it's never implied that she sings Rainbow Factory nor 20% Cooler, but I had her sing both of them.
...However in the case of Rainbow Factory it of course was in service of what's probably my favourite transition in the whole song- Happy RD to edgy RD.
The Animatic version of Nightmare Night is actually a couple things going on at once. First are early sketch versions of the backgrounds I used, second are crude early drawn character positions.
Nightmare Night has a longer segment than most songs, and features a human character and lots of things going on, so it was somewhat intimidating to tackle.
The drawings, as crude as they are, were a form of "Getting anything down on the piece of paper". They obviously didn't end up being used, but they got me moving forward in production.
"Once Upon a Time in Canterlot", originally animated by KanashiiPanda, is an incredibly complex and fluid fight choreography featuring Octavia and a few Changelings.
I tried my best to live up to the original in some form, with a fight scene that plays out to the beat and matches the lyrics. I'm very happy with the result.
The "You just gotta let it go" spin was an extremely late addition, a good example of something that wasn't necessary to finish until the final version, as although the earlier version wasn't that good looking, it was at least "Serviceable".
This was my mindset when finishing a portion for a deadline, "Will the audience notice if X is missing?" if no, leave it until the final version/the polishing phase.
Sister Hate was the projected final portion of the AliCon 2018 release as I was coming up to the deadline. I knew Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu would take a loooot of time I didn't have, and it immediately followed Sister Hate.
...But then I finished everything up to Sister Hate a couple days early. Obviously that wasn't enough time to finish Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu, but it was enough time to get an extra segment done... I'll cover that in a minute.
Incidentally, despite its simplicity in presentation, Sister Hate is one of my favourite parts of BPA. It was probably the only part that translated 1 to 1 from my mind's eye to the screen, and I'm very very satisfied with it.
Coming up is another switch out- AliCon 2018 ends with a "To Be Continued" screen, and in comes the "Pre-BronyCon 2019 Backup". I'd backed up the files for BPA before I flew out to America in preparation for the con.
It is the earliest "Start-to-finish" version I have, and not quite identical to the version I presented at BC2019, as I continued working on my laptop the nights before my panel.
I'm presenting this version instead of the BC2019 version as it features some more fun differences that differentiate it from the AliCon 2019 version.
I also quickly want to mention the first shot of Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu that went by rather quickly was originally front on, as you could see from the animatic. A bit of an awkward angle, hence the change.
Surprise! The AliCon 2018 version is back! I spent the few days I had left until AliCon 2018 making a fake end-screen that played during Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu, but had it slowly fade in to It'll Be Okay.
This of course was because It'll Be Okay was a very very simple production, most of it was one character on a black background with an old Twilight puppet I was already very familiar with.
It features differences between it, the Pre-BC2019 version and the Final version, unlike the AliCon 2019 version which was almost identical to the Pre-BC2019 version.
The original idea I used in the AliCon 2018 version was for Twilight to bounce on the beat, and Shining Armor to bounce on the off-beat, but because he was already moving vertically it kinda just looked awkward.
Something I noticed when putting together the animatic was the end of parts that were leading up the the "Deadline", 20% Cooler and Sister Hate/It'll Be Okay, have little to no storyboard content.
I devised my own guesstimation as to why: I was very much more pressed for time for those parts, meaning I didn't really have the time to plan them out and instead opted to just throw puppets on the scene and figure it out raw.
Here we are with the real ending for AliCon 2018's release, likewise I'll be swapping in with AliCon 2019's release until the end of the comparison.
From here on, backgrounds were far less of a priority in the non-final versions. Working on BPA was basically "Being pressed for time 24/7", and I prioritized blocking and character animation over backgrounds.
Likewise, the final version in these last few songs will look a lot more populated than they do in either of the previous versions.
Loyalty is the best example of differences between these three versions, I knew what I wanted the overall aesthetic to be but I couldn't quite nail it until the final version.
The "Blurry images" I used in the AliCon 2019 version were just jpegs of the Double Rainboom segment. Very unclean, but better than nothing. I am a loooot happier with how the final version looks.
The only music video I could take off from for Loyalty was a PMV featuring clips from the show, as opposed to any original animation. Likewise my idea was to instead take the song's cover art and plan the animation around that instead.
Lost on the Moon was another one that didn't really have an existing music video to base off of. The most I took was from an old SFM that didn't have anything close to the energy I was looking for, however.
Likewise 99% of this one was basically making something up from scratch, wobbly arms and all. I had a lot of fun with this, as much as my computer hated it.
Of course here I reference Argodaemon's "Luna's Banishment", which itself is a reference to my own "Princess Celestia Being Deep". His video ended up getting more traction than mine, so thought it cute to reference in some way.
I Am Octavia got cleaned up a lot for the final release. I had ideas on how I wanted to present it that didn't quite translate as well as I initially thought it would, especially considering the mostly-empty backgrounds.
Part of the idea was the mood behind "Silent but massive room with a spotlight on a single person", but when put directly onto the screen it just came across as a big lot of nothing.
Likewise, the attention on the revision/polish phase was how to keep the mood subdued, but also have fun things to watch, hence the afterimage effect, the contrast change, and the "Blinking audience" effect.
Of course proper backgrounds being introduced such as at this point of the song very much helped populate the screen.
Also a silly thing: It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Octavia's left hoof should probably be on the strings of the Cello. Oops.
There are a couple of "Oh duh" moments like that in the production, another one was making sure Rainbow Dash didn't have her cutie mark in Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu. She doesn't have her CM in that part of the original story.
The original goal for BPA was to present it at BronyCon 2016, at a panel in which I also had AnimatedJames up as a panelist.
I'd kept the entire production a secret from everybody, even James, so when I presented it up on that panel even he had no idea it was coming. It was a rather special and exciting moment!
Unfortunately, since James disappeared off the internet mid-2018, several months before AliCon that year, I have no idea if he's seen any future version of BPA since the 2016 release.
Likewise, although BPA was originally meant to be a gift for James and his hard work on some fantastic fandom content, it eventually morphed more into a sendoff for the pony fandom as it was completed around the same time the show ended.
I'd animated multiple different Weird Al Polka Medley segments with ponies, so animating a pony-themed Weird Al-themed polka medley felt like a perfect match.
Although it took significantly longer than expected, I'm extremely happy with the final result. I do very much hope the wait was worth it, and also hope you'll stick around to watch my future works!