Minty Root

Essentially, I am simply one of the artists of the project. As we are planning the project, I have decided not to stand still and to get started doing some R&D for a proper animation pipeline that could run out of a television budget while still giving a somewhat cinematic result. Obviously, I could just make a rig, make a demoreel of it and present it to people, but I want a real R&D for the project, including the character animation, making the scenery, compositing the scenes and editing it together in a real animation context so I have to budget my time between shots and make the right decisions to get the project done. This way I have a good idea of the actual quality level we could hope to achieve while staying within budget and something more concrete to show than just concept art. So one of the things I've been doing along with the Equestrian Tales team was to test out how to translate their concepts to animations by using some of their concept art for the project. I took for example their concept of Star Swirl's library and made a 3D model of it, which was seen in Luna's Determination and The Fall of Sunset Shimmer. Our collaboration has been mutually beneficial in the past too, as they helped out for concept art for Dinky's Destiny while I helped them making some show accurate rigs in Flash they could use for testing and making show style concepts too. For my next project I am pushing things a bit further, featuring some of the characters from Equestrian Tales in it in some important roles. You can think of it as some sort of teaser for what to expect from it. My main concern is that since those projects are mostly my script and my own direction, they might feel a bit different from the final vision of the project, but I think it's a nice opportunity to experiment while we have the opportunity to experiment. Obviously I also want these projects to be some nice fan animations on their own. Since there's always the fear the project could die due to factors out of our control, we would like to make the best out of it, have something to show we made something worthwhile in the end after all. But it's my part, I'm not the director of Equestrian Tales. I'm simply one of the artists who want to make the best out of the project.

I'd say we were around 10 to 15 on it. We didn't make one of Ponyville because it wasn't worth the time. Since we were only at one location of Ponyville we could get away with paradoxes, it was shown as a backdrop and that was all. Canterlot was a different story because we needed a good idea of the structure of present Canterlot to build past Canterlot out of it for the next acts. I couldn't fix all the paradoxes, but I wanted to at least make something coherent out of the city. I will be at BronyCon 2015 and host a panel on fan animation. I will announce the official title of my next project and show an animation I've been working for the last months.

I had to put the series under indefinite hiatus because of some drama that happened after the release, but don't worry, the story of Dinky's Destiny will return in Project Bloom, slightly differently presented, but with the same characters and ideas. I lost the count on Dinky's Destiny, but think of working on it for eight months, around two hours a day, with other members of the team working on it too. We built three different 3D models of Canterlot just to get it right within the different views we've seen in the show, the last one being inspired by Minas Tirith and the city of Quebec.

I'm studying 3D animation for cinema, so my knowledge about game development isn't very big, however, in both the most important thing is the team. Good communication within the team will help a lot getting things done right. Having clear intentions of what you want to do, what the project is about will help the team members in many way. Getting the art direction right, the music fitting the tone, the acting fitting the story and not having to worry about the team working too much on things that don't really matter to the project. I knew about the fandom for a while, but I just thought it was more some sort of ironic fandom. I saw Fighting is Magic and I thought it was done as some sort of joke game, making ponies cool for grownups. I found out that my best friend had some figurines back in mid-2012 and the first thing I knew was that I didn't have long before I would become a brony. Gave the first episode a try and I enjoyed it so I continued to watch the show. I like the show because of the universe and the characters, it feels like a world I'd like to visit. Working on reviving Dinky's Destiny as Project Bloom, since the time to animate a full 30 minutes by myself would be a nightmare I decided to cut a bit the length and to go with around ten minutes, maybe more if I can. The animation won't be show style, as I want to experiment with a new style that works better with the story. As for the shattering scene, I don't even remember how I came up with it. I think I just wanted to show that Dinky felt useless and broken, and as a way to make us realize that the whole thing is a dream we decided to break her like a porcelain figurine.

Well, in animation there's three things you need to get right, each more complex than the previous one. You need to learn how to draw the character right, how to make the character move right and how to make the character act right. So improve your skills at drawing, learn on timing and spacing in animation and learn about acting. This will help a lot more to make animation feel more natural to you. Never got into any legal issues, I even got to discuss with some people working with Hasbro to make sure not to run into any legal problem. That's why I don't use the Mane 6 in my animation projects and I go with background characters as my main characters, as Hasbro won't have to worry about their IPs. For Dinky's Destiny I used Adobe Flash for my 2D animation, Blender for the 3D animation, Adobe After Effects for the compositing and the special effects, Adobe Premiere Pro for the editing, Adobe Photoshop for some rasters, Adobe Illustrator for some brush effects and Apophysis for the fractal flames that were used for the sky and the explosion of the elements of harmony. For my next project I might switch to Maya and Toon Boom however.

Yeah, I definitely didn't have the right VA for Luna. While JennaBun didn't do a bad performance, it felt it didn't fit Luna as much as I first thought. The main intention I had was to show that Luna felt weak and I couldn't go with a very deep voice. I needed someone who could voice Luna just like she did in Sleepless in Ponyville, something soft and young. I like Luna because she feels like a deep character, a character with a dark past who decided to turn her life around and to help others. She's a character to be proud of. I also really like Twilight Sparkle for the same reasons.

Getting characters to act right when they move. Moving them isn't too hard in the technical level, but giving them the right emotion is. I have to play with the way the scene is framed, the background elements, the choice of color and the audio elements to strengthen the emotion of the character as it's hard to make the action of the character convincing enough on its own.

Lullaby for a Princess #Bestpony

Definitely Dinky's Destiny. I really liked the art direction, the choice of color, the choice of cameras and the themes behind the project. It felt different from other projects.

My favourite canon character is probably Luna, which was shown in my last two projects. As for my favourite fanon characters, I don't really have any I animated. Lived a really weird time back in 2012 where I didn't really know what to do of my life, and one of my friends introduced me to the show. Since I previously animated things in Flash and the show was also animated in Flash I told myself that maybe I could try something like that. I didn't expect to be the best but I could give my own touch and do something original. Back last year I got into a very difficult moment in my life as my parents were divorcing and my last project didn't have the result I expected. I was looking at the Luna episodes that were released, Sleepless in Ponyville and For Whom The Sweetie Belle Toils, and I got interested in the idea of seeing Luna helping fillies in need. She felt like some sort of mother, and I was wondering what could be done with Luna seeing a filly who reminded her of her own childhood. Dinky was already portrayed in the fandom as some sort of filly Twilight, and it gave some pretty interesting ideas of a young character with a passion for magic who needed help from someone else. So what if Luna talked to Dinky about her best friend, Star Swirl the bearded, a unicorn who once had troubles with his magic like her.

Okay, this one is a crazy story. I have been making things move on a screen since I learned how to make computers make thing move. I make very simple animations using PowerPoint until I learned how to use Flash, and thanks to Newgrounds I got to have a place to post my animations. Since my art skills weren't too good I used sprites, and I got to learn the very basics of animation in an animated series about an hybrid between a Yoshi and a Koopa until I found the brony fandom in 2012. I made a very crazy move and I sent an application for a panel on fan animation at BronyCon 2013 before I even started animating ponies, and after they accepted I started applying my knowledge of animation to ponies. In the process I made a short animated project called Project Thundercloud to share a headcanon about Derpy Hooves' cutie mark I had for a while. Pretty interesting. I was sharing ideas with Cast about the lore of our two projects and started developing ideas about the characters we had in common. In the process we shared common resources and that's how we got Dinky's VA who happened to voice a filly in their project. The original script for Dinky's Destiny was very very different from the final one. The first scene showing Dinky struggling with the door lock was completely absent, with Dinky walking down a hallway, finding Nightmare Moon and running away as Nightmare Moon attacked her. Nightmare Moon was supposed to be shown as a violent character trying to destroy Dinky, until we realized that it would be much stronger to show her try to save Dinky while Dinky would defend herself in fear. So we cut Nightmare Moon using magic beams, which allowed to use the time it would have took to animate them to work more on the backgrounds instead. We worked for eight months to produce Dinky's Destiny, which is only eight minutes long. It may seem a lot but typically fan animation projects tend to take even more time to make, as a single shot can take almost a week to animate. Yup, you can all find them on my channel. I also have a new animation that will premiere at BronyCon 2015.