[Fire crackling]
Oh! Hello!
I didn't see you there.
I'm Scott "As Seen on TIME" DeWitt,"
your favorite Extra Credits member,
and I want to welcome you once again to the PAX Extra Credits panel.
This year, I'd like to do something just a little bit different and tell you a story about one of my very first art jobs.
Just a quick disclaimer,
I never actually signed an NDA, but I also don't want to get anyone else in trouble, so no real names here.
That said, one of my first art jobs was at a smaller studio that focused mainly on mobile and social games.
They had just partnered up with a bigger studio that had acquired a property that was by a pretty big name in games.
Let's say they've done art for...
...we'll call it..."Blagon Quest."
It was a property about gangs, drugs, the seedy underbelly of organized crime...
...and it would've made an INCREDIBLE console game.
So naturally, they wanted to put it on Facebook.
If you love clicking cows, you'll love selling the devil's lettuce.
Now, they had the property,
but they didn't have the funding, so I was on production to make a video that would entice investors into supporting the project.
This video in question was a mess.
For starters, they completely ditched this BEAUTIFUL artwork found in the source material for this faux...
Disney...
thing...
Now, it wasn't BADLY done, it's just...
If you like the art direction of Dark Souls, you'll love Totally Spies!
We finished this video more times than I can remember,
only to have the neighboring studio come in at the end of the day, give us revisions, and ask us to stay late and revise it.
Here's how the video and the revisions went:
It starts off with a military woman chasing a witch that looks less like a witch and more like America's Next Top Model.
The witch, it's also worth noting, was very clearly voiced by a man whose voice was pitched up.
[squeaky helium voice] Because she sounded like this.
The chase doesn't last long, and they begin to throw down. And here is where the most SPECTACULAR
series of revisions comes in. See, this is where the combat demo started,
and we got ALL kinds of incredible feedback.
"The background is too static."
"Do you think you could add a rat scurrying across every two seconds?"
We explained, "That's too fast,"
and they said "Nope, it's fine." and gave us our assets and told us to get to work.
And by assets,
I mean they gave us a single, static silhouette of a rat that we proceeded to make the Usain Bolt of mice.
Obviously, that wasn't kept, but it was replaced very briefly with the world's leakiest pipe in the foreground which
also...didn't stay very long.
Eventually we got the combat to start with an adequately leaky pipe and a mouse that checks in on you every once in a while to see if you need anything.
Our hero, the army gal, proceeds to mow down some gangsters like NOTHING.
The witch lady then proceeds to summon this big demon monster thing that I animated and whoops-
Here we go with more revisions.
The animation, it turns out, was fine,
but after it was finished...
Turns out they actually wanted him to be on fire.
Now, before the animators and artists watching start screaming internally,
I want to point out that they did actually give me the fire assets to add to our monster.
Unfortunately, the fire looked like pixelated, poorly compressed lava barf from Doom.
It also didn't fit over the monster or animate properly. This is not a joke:
This is what it actually looked like.
Guess who had to redo it all from scratch.
So, the demo moves along, and the army girl opens fire on the demon, who is now himself on fire.
No damage. Then it's the demon's turn.
He grabs her by the throat, and snaps her...
neck.
He, uh...
He grabs her by the...
Huh.
Well, I didn't want to draw that anyways.
She dies. It's gruesome, it's terrible.
And we were like, "Are you SURE you really want this in here?"
and they were like, "Oh yeah, absoluely!"
So we animate it, and hooooooo boy,
it's about as not great as you can expect.
But what WAS great - and I am not making this up.
I couldn't on my BEST day make this up.
It would be my greatest dream of DREAMS to be able to come up with something this INCREDIBLE.
The notes we got back on that scene were:
"This scene is a bit too dark."
"Can you throw in a beach ball to lighten up the mood?"
And so we did.
[“Winter of Whistlers” by CarboHydroM, remix of the "Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island" Athletic theme, plays]
[music continues]
[pop sound] [music continues]
[music continues]
[These subtitles are a bit too boring. Can you throw in a beach ball to lighten up the mood?]