Hey-J guys
I want to apologize before we start the video you thought you're going to watch Kindergarten this week and instead
You're watching a Bendy behind-the-scenes video the reason is we had ad pocalypse problem
And we are working to solve that as quick as possible so stay tuned hopefully next week and enjoy Bendy behind-the-scenes
Hey-J everybody
Welcome to the behind-the-scenes video of Bendy and the Ink Machine the musical. Before we start let's introduce you to the people
I'm Aj and I've been animating and directing this. Over here we got Mr. Nate.
Peter: Hi Nate
Mr. Nate Morse
I was pretty much in charge of anything involving the Ink Monsters, and Ink dripping, and ink...
Aj: so ink master
You were the ink master
I am Peter, and I was in charge of things like lighting and tech and
You know the normal stuff that I do.
Aj: He's been the man in the chair
Now we're going to show you guys a little bit
So hopefully you're all familiar with the concept of stop-motion. This - what you're watching right now - is video right, it's live-action video
It's footage the camera's automatically taking like 30 frames every second
We don't have to like
Stop and move anybody
We just run the camera, and we do things in front of it. The way stop-motion works is you take a gazillion pictures
And then you have them to play one at a time very quickly past camera.
Peter: Yes
So as you'll see right now
We have a camera - this phone's an iphone 7 is our camera for the shoot and it's on a little mini tripod
And we have these little tiny actors
We'll take one picture on this camera, and we won't even touch the camera 'cause we don't wanna move it
So we'll touch the computers instead, which is linked to it. We'll take a picture on that computer
And then we'll come back over here to the little actors and we'll move them just a little bit
like so
And maybe make The Beard look a little bit
And we're gonna try not to bump all the set
Because the looks stupid. And then - when we're ready - we'll take another picture over here.
You see they're kinda like rocking backwards, and
You just do that a whole bunch of times
For... how many weeks have we been shooting this?
Aj: Two, three, something like that
Yeah, three weeks or so.
Now the process is a little bit more complicated, 'cause Bendy, you'll notice, has a face.
His face is actually drawn on with...
Marker! I'm gonna give him a mustache here
Peter: Oh my
And he has a big messy mustache. So, in order to animate Bendy's face
We gotta wet his face down a little bit
Wipe it off, and then redraw parts of his face
So every picture not only to be have to move him a little bit, we also have to redraw
His face here, so that he is still
Talking with The Beard. The Beard is actually an action figure.
Peter: This guy is Nero from Star Trek
Aj: It's true. Now, the reason he's on a stand is because we're going to witness the power of trying to get The Beard to stand up
Peter: It's ah - pretty abysmal.
Oh oh! I had him, I had him, he was there. There we go, okay
Peter: You did it!
Now, imagine doing like - I think we've shot like 4,000 pictures.
Trying to do 4,000 pictures where you move him just a little bit and hope he keeps standing.
So we didn't actually build these
For this shoot um, we've had these for years
We ended up using them for different things - one of them has a better foot or something, and one of them has better hair
In terms of the three different types of characters, the ink creations are probably the easiest to deal with
Because they're made of modeling clay, so we can kinda put them in any shape
We need them to be to get them to do whatever we need them to do.
Peter: Indeed
but that doesn't mean they work without problems
Because... I'd say probably the biggest problem
Is they have to hold these little buckets of ink and they have tiny arms
And they like to, you know, gravity pulls them forward or pulls them backwards
So there are times when we had to put popsicle sticks in the middle of them - like straight through their spines
Basically,
Take this, put it straight through his head, through is body, to the base so he stands straight - basically just giving them spines
Peter: What are you doing?
I'm just trying to get the last Bendy for you
Peter: What have you done?!
I have a fist full of Bendys here, and an additional one
This is because we've gone through
Three broken Bendys
Peter: Yes
-Trying to make this. They broke in different ways - you'll notice his arm
Does not stay no matter what I do with it because the wire inside has broken.
This one whose arm still works, but I believe his foot is broken
Yeah
Just this foot doesn't like -
It's kind of messed up inside there now. And this guy also has a broken arm too *weird noises*
So we uh-
Peter: We need to rush order two more -
Aj: Rushed-ordered two additional Bendys so we can finish the project. They all have little
Sticks in the back - I guess we call them rods
Um, that you can screw pieces onto, and the reason is that these can screw into a plate. And this guy's on one right now
They screw into this plate, and that is weighted enough that if you set this down
He can kind of stand a little more easily
And you're going to see the plate - you probably already have seen the plate in the musical.
And it's just really hard to keep out - We're not professionals and -
Aj: Sets in the professional animation
Would also have trapdoors so you could get to the characters easier.
Peter: Yeah. This is made of silicone
Aj: Silicone, okay
Peter: So, what we did is uh-
What we did is we had to model in a 3D program a Bendy model
So, you know, I built this model in Blender
And then I sent that over to Mikey Ledoux, who also created the Fnaf puppets
and he used his 3D printer to print them out and then,
once he had a physical model of them he made a
Mold for it. He doesn't just put silicone in that mold he also puts what's called an armature. In this case, it's wire
that's been like
connected to itself in such a way that it creates a skeleton. We knew that wire had the risk of breaking and,
As you have already seen, some of it did break
So we knew the risks going in that we could break these characters
And we did, and we paid the price.
So as we talked about previously
Professional sets actually have little trapdoors built into them
So the animators can come up underneath the set and change things, and then go away again
And you'll never see them. With our set ah - it's on a tinier table
We're literally eating on a folding table right now, so that we can build this on a sturdier surface
So this is the fourth wall. It actually - s-sorry
Peter: Mmmm. It's so big
Yeah, it's supposed to shut this closed
Peter: In theory
But imagine trying to animate characters over a wall
We just removed this wall for just about the entire shoot
That way we have access to everything, but the audience doesn't know what they're missing.
Peter: Yep, so the set itself is actually made of like
There's cardstock down here - a giant sheet of it, and we just like glued a hundred of these little popsicle sticks
Aj: There's so many!
Every one of these is like a popsicle stick - it goes on and on and on.
Peter: Yeah
Aj: - and it goes down the hallway to the next room
It's pretty intense. And the walls, oh yeah like the walls
There's like three more walls like this, like up and down these, the doorways, that thing
and then Aj
Painstakingly found a whole bunch of like these little box things and little
Crates, and stuff like that, and drew on them and painted them. And, those are actual storyboards, like legit.
Shrunk them like 4 million percent.
Peter: Yeah
Aj: Okay, so I went through Lowe's or Home Depot
I just started taking anything to look remotely like a big box tank thing
Which is really fun because they all have real purposes
This is like for electronics to like, go into like for like wiring your home
Peter: That's a faucet
Aj: Yeah, this belongs on a bathtub
This is like, this is hose that we bought for - I don't know what it's supposed to be doing, but for us it runs power
/ink, or something - we don't know
These are interesting too.
Peter: Oh yeah, what are those
Stab them in anywhere you please and these are just like PVC piping that are you know meant for plumbing purposes?
We look at them and go bendys ink machine room is supposed to have big piping going through it
So let's just get some pre bent piping and pounded into the walls here these are actual burn marks
Oh, I set the set on fire
Don't do that out because one night miss bird was like is there something burning and she ran downstairs
And she literally found Aj just like burning parts of the center or things on fire
This animation software is called a stop-motion studio pro. Yes by a company it called
Cat eater LLC and you can get it on Android iphone Mac windows
They say really alive right now this entire setup is Mac
Oriented rate at which is unusual for so we have another Mac just to play music which everything at yeah
oh and lip sync and lip sycn
So you know we're using an iphone. We're tethering to wi-Fi to a Macbook pro and wholesome to the iPad
so I'm about to change the white balance which is the color of the
iphone and you saw
I'm about to make it super bright so now I have full control over the iphone and it's like
Functions which allows me to change?
Everything up all the way up to focus, and you can do it all from over here and share without ever even pressing
The camera right here if we're important because you don't want to touch the camera and make it yes
Once we have all the camera settings
Tuned in we can start taking pictures. I just hit enter and it takes a picture drops it into the timeline down there and
we move things like say nate move the beard beard master nate
ohh the ink though Sick moving well a
Great job. I'm going to take a picture here
Moved appeared again, and you can see it live and see the powerful of the beards oh
They did they probably seen storyboard versions of some of our other live-action projects
But we still do storyboards even when is going to be an animated video
The difference is the storyboards are a little bit more like guideline that
Doesn't mean that there isn't some sort of order still to the madness for example here
We have all the lyrics the entire video including some of the lines that he just says in-between
this helps us to keep track of what we're filming when and these color coordinate to
colors of the Storyboards
So all storyboards that are drawn in orange are supposed to be filmed first blue shots are things like ink monsters traveling from room
Room to room when we finish them we have shots in green to do those are going to be all the opening scenes with just
Been in the beard meeting for the first time and the final shots are special effects shots in pink which I'm going to show you
Because it's like one of them in
Editorial one other useful thing that we do along with the lyrics is we have a recording of just my mouth
singing all the lines of the song in time to the music
So that we can frame-By-frame watch how the mouth moves and then copying we animate Bendys face
wastes at a low efficiency is high every loads up to code and certified
sure those kinks quirks and hiccups but the far flung between nonetheless. I still think the best of my ink
machine
It's mostly just to make sure that it's about as long as these word is supposed to be and the mouth is in a roughly
The same shape even if it's caricature eyes yeah, or exaggerated
We actually just got finished with this entire set and that has to get torn down to put up that set hey
Look fimilar though looks like the other ink fountain thing goes there. Yeah, okay, no business
And we have to put the beard made a mess beard clean up after yourself. Did how hard is this clay?
It's actually not that hard really. It's kind of soft still it's going to so thin
Just stuck that's the problem. Well, this time is it not coming up easy
Or it's coming up way, too easy is it such as I can bring anything?
I want to pull but I can't because I don't want to pull the floorboards up with it
If you have plans for this clay nate it's going to become the big guy again
that you probably already seen in the video the big dude with the muscles the one that lifted up bendy
did we name them they have names. I believe one of them was bloptimus prime. At one point
I think that's the big one. The big guy is bloptimus prime
Guys this project has taken a really long time and a lot of work, so we hope you enjoyed it
And I hope that this video was kind of educational for you. Thank you for watching we'll catch you guys next week in another video
*random noise*