(This is a very long post)

I was not planning to post it now, I originally had in mind to make a video where I would talk about Project Thundercloud and Animation is Magic! but some technical problems delayed the recording.

As I said before, my plan at first was to make Yoki's Story in five episodes but I wanted to complete it with a movie-like episode following the events of the fifth episode. I wanted to do something inspired by FFVII : Advent Children, where another of Reswob's creation would have attacked the island. I wanted to build a Koopa-like character with different ideas than Yoki. When I realized it would have ended too quickly I decided to extend it to seven episodes instead and to make a remake of the first episode too.

Some people have pointed out how the story of Yoki's Story was inspired by Naruto, it was the case for the four first episodes but I stopped watching the show after that.
Yoki's Story 5 got a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy VII instead with it's blend of prerendered cinematics and realtime animation. This one is my favourite episode, thanks to this I finally found my style and made something different than other sprite animators.
With Yoki's Story VI the choice of adding voice acting to the movie was made at the middle of the project, explaining why it looked rushed in the movie. It's hard to believe but the idea came from My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic, I originally had in mind to make a few reference to the show in the episode. In a scene we would have seen Shion watching a parody of the show called My Little Yoshi and in the Koopa city we would have seen a grey Yoshi with walleyes in the background. I also wanted to use the Rainbow Dash stage theme from Fighting is Magic during the fight on the airship.

Project Thundercloud have been a radical change for me, not only I had to learn how to emulate a new style of animation but I also had to make something even better and for that I had to use all my experience from Yoki's Story to make it work. This was not just a new project, I had to learn everything again. At first I thought that after the project I would return to Yoki's Story but I realized it was a one way road and that after that I couldn't return to sprite movies. I was thinking of continuing Yoki's Story with something else than sprites, but anything else would have been unsuitable as it would have taken too much time to do. With Yoki's Story V and VI taking over six months to do instead of the three months I had for the other episodes I understood that another style shift would have been a development hell for me and that I would have to stop working on it someday.

For the rest of the episodes, here's how I would have made them :

I tried many times to make an anime-like intro to the series like many others did but what I wanted to do was too big for me, I wanted to do something like the fifth opening of Naruto with 3D effects and action scenes. I would have made one between two episodes.

For Yoki's Story VI : part II I was not planning to add anything new to the animation and to wait instead for Yoki's Story 0 for that. Yoki's Story 0 was an episode I wanted to make before Yoki's Story VII that would have told about a war between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Koopa Kingdom happening decades before the first episode where Yoshi's Island was pressured by both sides to join them. The characters in this episode were Yoshi (The chief) and a black Yoshi trying to save the island from the attacks. At the end we would have seen the black one save Yoshi at the cost of his own life and it would have been revealed that his name was Yoki. Instead of focusing on 3D animation I would have made the backgrounds in 2D using photos of trees and forests with a cartoony outline.

After that there would have been a remake of the first episode, with a revised script and much better animation.

And then the last episode, Yoki's Story VII, that I would probably have split in two parts. It was supposed to start with the war from the episode 0 from the point of view of a very young Bowser and Peach's mother (That I was thinking of calling Rose, but I didn't want to make any connections with Rosalina). This would have talked about how the conflicts between the two kingdoms caused Bowser to become crazy and develop a split personality. We would have then discovered that Reswob was in fact that split personality and that Bowser jr. and Yoki were brothers. The events from most Mario game would have been explained as different retellings of Reswob's failed attack against Peach. Reswob's army of mechanical puppets would have then attacked the Mushroom Kingdom, where Yoki and his friends would have fought back. The ending would have been with a conversation between Bowser and Yoki, where Bowser would have asked Yoki to save him from himself. For the finale I would have modeled the Mushroom Kingdom with a low level of details and made some higher detailed parts on separate models to use when needed.

After that I had no more plans for Yoki, at the beginning I was thinking of making a Flash game with him but now I realize that it would have been too hard to do. I also wanted to combine every episodes together in a single movie and to reedit the scenes from the previous episodes with better visuals and voice acting.

So, yeah, this is how Yoki's Story would have ended if I had continued the story.

Here's the final details about Project Thundercloud, my fan film about Derpy Hooves I'm working on since January.

- It's about the story of Derpy Hooves, the origins of her wall eyes, her name, her cutie mark and how she became a mailmare.
- The film is inspired by an unreleased animated movie called Colorless Stories I made in mid 2010 for a school project, this project wasn't very good, but it got the price of the best short movie that year.
- 7 minutes long, including the credits.
- Fully voice acted.
- This time the credits won't be boring.
- It's almost done, but as I will only release in August at BronyCon 2013, I will work on extra content with the free time.
- There's around 20% of the original script in the movie, I rewrote it three times while working on it.
- The original name for the movie was Project AIM (For Project Animation is Magic), then got renamed Project Raincloud as a reference to Friendship is Witchcraft before getting the final name of Project Thundercloud.
- I have shown a preview of the movie to my friends and the movie got positive feedback.

- There's four different builds of the movie that will be made :
- The first one being the BronyCon 2013 / Youtube build, this one is 7 minutes long and is the Director's cut.
- Then the Newgrounds build, as the original build features some content from the show I have to cut it, but this build will feature some exclusive content after the credits instead.
- The Colorless build (Youtube only), like the unreleased film, will only be made out of Flash and Open GL renders and will be timed exactly like the first build.
- The Source build, this one isn't a movie, but a .zip file with all the Flash, Blender and After Effect files used in the movie. This shouldn't be bigger than 500MB but won't feature the rendered scenes with it.

There's also another short film I made for the occasion named Call of the Storyboard showing how to animate a scene in 5 steps, it won't be uploaded on Newgrounds as I used content of the show for an example.

I can only include one image with my post, so you will find the rest on my Tumblr.

Right now I am reviewing the E3 on my blog. I originally planned to only review the Nintendo Direct event but I decided to review the other conferences too. In a few minutes I will start reviewing the E3 2013 Sony Press Conference.

I had some stuff laying on my computer I don't need anymore I wanted to give you. First with the source file of the Untitled Luigi Fight Scene I made for Pixel Frenzy. It can be useful for somebody curious about Flash animation who wants to learn by looking at other people's work.

The other thing I had for you was a remix of a theme from Super Mario Galaxy 2 I made a few months ago to try Garageband, as I won't use it I guess you can have it instead.

My next update will be about Project Thundercloud, I have some pictures I think you will like.

I don't have any new content related to Project Thundercloud to show for a while so I wanted to make a post that was talking about me instead of anything related to animation. The thing is, I never did one before so I don't know what to talk about, so instead I want to know what you would like to know about me.

This year I did a lot of things, I decided to open my mind to other platforms and made a Youtube page, a Twitter account, a Reddit account and a Tumblr blog but I am still a mysterious guy you don't know a lot of things about, and I want to change it.

So, yeah, ask me anything.

The project is going great, and if you haven't heard of it yet you should read this post before reading this.

- The film is made from 24 separate shots, of which 18 (Edit: now 20) of them are already done. If I have the time I could add extra content to the film to make it even better.
- In one of my posts I said it would be around one or two minutes with the credits. I was wrong, right now I already have 3:30 of footage done and I don't even count the credits or the tutorial.
- The animation tutorial at the beginning of Project Thundercloud is done, it's 1:47 long.
- I was not supposed to make a video tutorial, when I made the animation example I wanted to show every step manually for the panel, but when I converted the steps in Swivel (A great software by the way) I rendered them all at the same time. I was not expecting the software to save them all in a single file but it did and I liked the result.
- There's lens flare in it, but I try not to abuse of it.
- There will be two different versions of the movie, but I will talk about it later.
- The entire project is in a 5.21GB folder, that's a lot, but Yoki's Story VI was taking 4.63GB just for the first part.
- The project is in sRGB IEC-61966-2.1, instead of using Adobe RGB like every other project I made before. (Be careful, Flash exports everything in Adobe RGB by default)
- It's very complex to render, enough to make my computer crash by going out of memory even with 16GB of RAM. (No, I don't have a swap file as my laptop has a SSD)
- The editing is still done in iMovie, it's not perfect but it's doing the job.
- Oh, and I'm not just doing the animation, I also made a remix of a theme for the film.

This project is a fun project, scary, but fun. It influenced in part Yoki's Story VI : part I, when Thierry37 recorded the last line of Yoshi ("I do Yoki, I do"), he accidentally played the file in iTunes and the very next thing on the playlist was This Day Aria. It gave us a good laugh, but not as big as when my friends from my school watched the trailer of my movie. I told them a lot about the project, but I just "forgot" to tell them it would be about ponies.

Also, I made another short teaser a week ago. It's not a lot, but I think you should like it.

Outside of this, well, even if I am not working on sprite movies anymore I'm still here to help anybody who want to learn. I will always be there for you if you need my help on something or you just want to talk about life in general.

I'm happy to finally be able to announce what is ROOT project. This summer I will present a panel called Animation is Magic! at BronyCon 2013. This project is a big challenge for me, bigger than any project I have ever done before, but I like challenges. Why making a panel about MLP? Well, that's a long story but in short Thierry37 told me to watch the show, I did, and liked the animation so when I saw all the fan animations I told myself "Hey, I could do that!". As Yoki is a Flash puppet, I already knew a lot about the style.

Here's a short trailer for Project Thundercloud, a fan film about Derpy Hooves I'm making for the panel. Right now I'm still searching for a voice actress for Derpy, as the one who was supposed to work with me is busy with another project.

I made a short movie for the panel showing the steps to make Flash animation that will be the first part of Project Thundercloud, but as I'm using 7 seconds of animation from the show to make an example, I will probably have to cut some content out of it if I want to post it here. I contacted Tom about it but I didn't receive any answer, I can't blame him, he's doing a big job making sure the site is fully operational.

As I said in my earlier posts, the film is still inspired by the visual style of Yoki's Story. Like every episode of Yoki's Story did before, I use exaggerated angles for the characters, so the characters will be seen in 3Q more often than in profile. Instead of circles under the characters I will use more realistic shadows having the shape of the characters like Yoki's Story VI did. Technically, they are not rendered the same way so there are no static shadows anymore and it's the same for reflections and refractions. Of course, this wouldn't be my project if there wasn't any 3D animation, but this isn't the biggest part of the film. The only thing that won't return from Yoki's Story is from the soundtrack as I won't use anything from Final Fantasy in this.

For Yoki's Story fans, two weeks ago I said I would write a little something about it. Well, I did eleven pages just for episode VI : part II. Here's the link. It's in PDF, so you will probably have to download it, I'm sorry about that.

Also, I finally decided to join Twitter. I don't know why I didn't do this before, but I'm going to use it now.

First, let me thank you for all the support all these years. I didn't want to have to say this, but I just can't continue Yoki's Story anymore. I'm terribly sorry, I hope you will forgive me about this. There's a few reasons behind this choice, but most of them are related to sprite movies.

As you see, I don't like sprite movies like I used to, at first it was interesting for me as the processing power and file sizes were limited. At that time you could use the post processing effects introduced in Flash 8 in realtime without any significant frame drop only with sprites, as rasterization was way too complex to do with the CPUs of that time to be done in a bitmap cache. Tale of a stupid plumber is a perfect example for this, to get a good framerate I had to reduce the resolution to 600 by 300 so I could use some blur effects on it. The use of the V-CAM didn't help for this either, as this disables lazy rendering with Flash. It was in 2008, but with Moore's law stating that the processing power of a computer doubles every 18 months you can get the same effect with vector graphics. There is also GPU acceleration available, something not offered at that time. It was also a lot easier to use sprites at that time as I couldn't draw, but as all the sprites were prebuilt I couldn't do a lot of complex things with them. Yoki was a sprite puppet so I could make him do more complex actions but for most characters I had to improvise, I had to change the script many times as I couldn't make a character do a specific action. This was also very hard to give emotions to my characters.

Surprisingly, the first movies I made were not sprite movies, they were not even made in Flash. The first animation I made was with Powerpoint on the Thinkpad of my father where a man was participating in a car race. It was not very good, but my parents were impressed.

This is not only about sprites, I am just tired of making Mario movies. I haven't made a single movie not related to video games since the beginning, and I want to do something else. I have to admit that the reason I started making movies here was because of SMBZ, I was so impressed and jealous of this action packed series I wanted to do my own. I did mine, but I wanted a story with more depth so I built my own characters and settings for it. I wanted to end Yoki's Story in 2009 with episode 5, where Yoki would have met Reswob for the last time but I didn't because I wanted to make the story last a bit longer. I don't really regret this, I'm really proud of Yoki's Story 5. I have to admit that Yoki's Story VI : part I didn't have the same reception and could have been better, but I still like it. It was hard working with a story I started in 2008 as I don't have the same views and inspirations as I used to, but it was a good challenge. It was fun, I experimented with a style, tried to add my own ideas to it and pushed the limits way farther with more complex effects.

I am now working on ROOT project, the biggest project I have ever made. I accidentally got the idea from Thierry37 (The voice behind Yoki) last summer but I only officially started it in January, just two weeks before Yoki's Story VI : part I was officially submitted. For the first time I will make the project under my real name rather than going with my nickname like I used to. I can't tell you a lot about it for the moment, but I have a 20 seconds long trailer I'm really excited to show you. All I'm waiting for is the authorization from the rest of the team. I think you will like it, the movie is mixing vector animation, hand drawn artworks, raytraced animation and maybe more if I can. For the moment here's a screenshot of complex layering used for the movie, where every layers are rendered independently to be mixed together in After Effect, with this I can make complex effects that couldn't be done in Flash like complex shadows, displacement maps, blur graphics, apply transparent effects and adding reflections to objects.

There is still a copyright problem I have to deal with for the moment, not really big, but this could mean the Newgrounds version of ROOT project might be seven seconds shorter than the original. I contacted the admin about it, as this is more a problem with the understanding of the rules of the site than with the law. I will keep you updated on it.

Thanks
Player.exe

Edit : This was an April fool, there's nothing serious about it.

Hello everyone, I got a new project based on Yoki's Story I'm proud to present you.

Rainbow Flash CS6 contacted me two weeks ago for a project called Yoki's Story : Equestria, a fanfiction retelling the story of Yoki's Story with the characters and the settings from My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic. I must admit that I like the show, but I was not expecting an idea like this one at all. She told me she got the idea while watching the episode Dragon Quest, sharing a few things in common with Yoki's Story.

I was skeptical at first, not sure if it could work, but I decided to give a chance and asked her to write a few pages I would read to see if it would be good. To my surprise, it was already written, and I must say she's very talented. She found a way to retell the story without changing any character or setting. I pitched a few ideas too, mostly on the structure, as Yoki's Story has a very irregular structure it was harder to split it in chapters of the same length. There is also a few extra chapters telling the events of the three months between episode 3 and 4.

For the characters, every important character from Yoki's Story got an equivalent :
Yoki is played by Spike, as both have an identity problem.
Shion is played by Twilight Sparkle, both purple, OCD and genius.
Ao is played by Rainbow Dash, both cyan, fast and athletic.
Aka is played by Pinkie Pie, both red-ish, creative and unpredictable.
Yoshi by Zecora.
Toadette by Cheerilee.
Toad by Sweetie Belle, I don't know why, but she told me I would understand as the story develops.
Princess Peach by Princess Celestia.
Bowser by Princess Luna and Reswob by Nightmare Moon, it's strange putting two different characters as a single one but it's working great in this case.
Bowser jr. by Princess Cadance, both seen at first as an antagonist that ended helping the main characters.

The rest of the Mane 6 should have their roles too, but as it tries to follow the same actions from Yoki's Story, they will only contribute to the story by giving more information rather than influencing the events.

For the settings :
Yoshi's Island as Ponyville.
Toad city as Canterlot.
Bowser's castle as the Everfree forest's castle.
The ice village as the crystal empire.
Koopa city as Manehattan.

The first part should be available in a week on her Deviantart page.

Here's the first teaser for my next project :

First, a few facts about my previous project that I wanted to share :
- Remember Tale of a Stupid Plumber, that weird movie I made in 2010? At first this had nothing to do with it. I wanted to make something between Luigi and Sonic, but instead of an action packed SMBZ-styled fight, I wanted to make something inspired by Road Runner where Luigi would set traps for Sonic.

- The original scenario for Yoki's Story 2 and 3 was about Bowser asking Yoki to steal a star for him at Peach's castle in exchange for information about Reswob. Bowser would have taken the star and used the power to cure himself and to get rid of Yoki.

For Reswob :
- Until Yoki's Story 3, I had no clear idea of what could be Reswob, all I had in mind was "A giant koopa".
- I only wrote his back story in Yoki's Story 4.
- For Yoki's Story 5, I started building more in depth the character because I wanted to put a flashback talking about his attack on the ice village.
- For Yoki's Story 6 : part 1, I finally used the back story I had in mind to build the crazy koopa I wanted to make.

- For Toad, you cannot see him at the end of Yoki's Story 2 on Bowser's side. I had in mind to show him in silhouette but I was not sure if I would make Yoki's Story 3 around him or not.
- His return in Yoki's Story 5 was not planned at all, it was not even supposed to be a robot. I originally wanted to make a fight with Reswob but I was not ready to make something as complex.

For locations :
- In Yoki's Story 4, the fight between Bowser jr. and Yoki was supposed to be outside but in a school trip I got the idea to make a fight scene in a mall. Ideas mixed together and it became a fight in a warp pipe station.
- In Yoki's Story 5, the star launcher was not on the roof, but inside. I wanted to make a roof opening automatically but couldn't with Wings 3D.
- For the old communication tower, it was originally an observatory I had in mind. As it was too complex for me, I made it look like it was the ruins of one instead.
- In Yoki's Story 6, the boat is not inspired by the flying aircraft carrier from The Avengers. I made the model for it before the movie was released and when I saw the movie with my friends I couldn't stop thinking about it.

- I wanted to make an episode 3.5 too, focusing on the horrible nightmare Yoki did between the third and the fourth episode. I also wanted to make an episode 0, focusing on Yoshi's back story.

- Yoki's Story 1 and 6 were the only two episodes I made with somebody else. I was supposed to make Yoki's Story 4 and 5 with somebody else too but both got cancelled because of the lack of time. The fight scene for episode 4 was originally not my task and the episode 5 had to make a crossover with another sprite movie.

- The visual style for Yoki's Story 5 was based on the one I was making for a joke RPG in Flash that I lost, but that game was inspired by a french RPG called Aedemphia.

Now for my next project, I still can't tell a lot but I have a beta screenshot just for you. The project is more of a tech demo than an actual movie but it has a story. I didn't want to use 3D at first but I realized it didn't turn out bad. I want to say that it's gonna be epic and I will work hard to make it epic, but this is going to take a lot of time to do and this means that Yoki's Story 6 : part 2 might be delayed until 2014.

Oh, and btw, I now have a Youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/user/Playerdotexe