We're seeing these amazing designs coming in.
Rooms and taverns and courts.
Locations and color palettes.
It's gorgeous, it's epic.
It's beyond all our expectations.
To see it all for the first time
I went and I sat in my car
and I just started crying.
'Cause I was like, I can't believe this is real.
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The trajectory of this story over the years
is constantly defined our expectations.
The size and the scale of it
has felt so large and sweeping to us in our minds.
And so you think, what could possibly live up to it?
And the team at Titmouse,
has really been answering the call.
Titmouse is one of the best animation studios around
period.
They check all the boxes.
They've got animation cred up the wazoo
they've worked on funny shows,
dramatic shows.
They've done it all.
It truly feels like a company made of nerds.
Just like our company.
We instantly felt a kinship and a shared language.
It kind of lowered the barrier to entry.
The people at the top who define the culture
and the attitude of the studio
are themselves huge nerds.
Super into this stuff.
And not just for me,
but for them,
this is kind of the dream project
because we're sort of living out
our dream of finally getting
to create this type of property.
They aren't wanting to take,
something that we've created
and turn it into something completely different.
They wanna honor what it was that we did.
Everyone else seems genuinely as excited
to be a part of this
as we're excited to have it happening.
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I'm proud to count myself among the Critters.
I was one of the 90,000 to back this project
in the first place.
I had no idea I was going to be on it.
I remember very distinctly
getting my eyes on some of Arthur Loftis,
our directors first background pieces,
and just being stunned.
Not only is he a professional artist and designer,
he's also a big Critical Role fan.
So, the fact that you've got somebody
who really knows the show,
who's designing things even down to minute detail,
like even Matt Mercer is like,
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
But Arthur hasn't forgotten about it.
Like he has put it in the show.
And that's something you just don't get
in any animated series.
Usually the executive producer
has to explain to the art director,
the feeling that he's trying to evoke
or she's trying to evoke,
but Arthur knows that feeling
because he watched it live.
A lot of the vision does come from Arthur,
but then where I add to it is
how to make the world seem really alive and believable.
My role as supervising director
is to really coordinate work with the story team.
We're literally translating idea into visual
and finding opportunities that really push
those moments to make the world feel
that much more integrated.
Sung Jin works on all the episodes.
And he's got the big picture, the 10,000 foot view
about where the story is going
over the course of the season,
where the story is going over the course of the series.
He is so dedicated to making sure that
it feels right for "The Legend of Vox Machina."
I have never felt more confident
in letting other people handle a vision of mine
than already seeing what they're doing with the whole team.
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We're getting to revisit all these great locations
that we explored in the original Vox Machina campaign
that we played through live.
Locations like Emon.
Emon is very much the central fantasy Metropolis
of this continent,
at least from a human society standpoint.
And so, these first episodes really kind of introduce us
to that place.
The initial sketches that Arthur did of Emon
were so striking and so epic
in scale and scope
that we had to go back and look at Matt's original drawings
and be like,
is this right?
Does this match?
And it does.
He took what Matt did on a 2D piece of paper
and turned it into a 3D world.
I think when you think of Emon
compared to other fantasy cities that you know,
like Rivendell,
there's gonna be a certain familiarity to Emon
because it's kind of like a fantasy New York.
There are elements to it
that I think everyone can recognize.
Stylistically.
We just wanted to give people a nice way
to sort of slip into this medieval fantasy world
without being too challenged with the weirdness of like
all the other stuff that's going to come later.
Beyond Emon,
there are a few locations that we get to explore
in the animated series first season.
Early on we get to visit the Shale Steps,
which is a place that was not seen in the campaign
streamed wise
it's a coastal fishing city
among a unique looking cliff range.
That itself looks like waves frozen
in the motion of crashing onto a shore.
And then Vox Machina as you know,
makes the journey from Emon to Whitestone.
And even the journey that they take.
Arthur has taken again, early maps
that Matt drew up and turn them into real places
with transitions,
from forest to desert,
to jungle, to mountain.
We're looking at different landscapes
existing in the real world.
Taking ideas from each of them
and sort of assigning them locations
within the Critical Role world.
For example, when we get closer to Whitestone,
things look a bit more like Yosemite,
it's the Alabaster Sierras.
So we picked from the actual high Sierras
and took those shapes,
and the way the trees look,
and the way the vegetation spreads across them
and assigned it.
Our other large location for season one
is going to be Whitestone.
The architectural language we really wanted to play with
and make sure that it felt authentic.
He went back into the history of the world
and the history of the continent
and thought,
if people had sailed here via a boat,
what would their architecture like?
So, all of our buildings kind of have
this feeling of like a ship's bow coming out of the ground.
All the rooftops have sort of that sloping ships hull
sort of shape to it.
And that's something that
none of us would have ever thought of.
Not even Matt, really.
You can't really mention the city of Whitestone
without mentioning the Sun Tree.
The first time I saw the Sun Tree
(sighs)
It was so epic.
I've seen some fantastic iterations of the Sun Tree
but what Arthur dropped on us,
the first time that we saw the Sun Tree
literally made our jaws drop.
I'm personally more a fan of the small moments.
So, Gilmore's Goods.
It's something that we've pictured in our head for so long
of what Gilmore's Glorious Goods looks like.
There's so much detail.
It's very specific.
That was another thing that kind of took me by surprise
is sort of the work that everyone put in
to understand the world
that we've been playing in for the past five years.
And it's beautiful.
It's so good.
All of our locations are very unique from each other
and we've gone to great lengths
to make sure that every element we include in every scene
really expresses the world as clearly
and takes it further than whatever
we were originally seeing in the stream online.
You really feel like these are drawings of real places
and not just a quick sketch of a random temple.
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All starts on paper,
a bunch of just words describing characters in a story.
Then we start to try and visualize it with Arthur's team.
It's a multistage process.
We start with storyboards
that we're working off of
that sort of give us an idea what the shot is,
where characters are gonna be standing
and what the general action of the scene is.
And then a background designer
is going to take that storyboard
and just really flesh out the composition,
figure out what design elements we want in there.
A background painter takes it next
adds lighting.
That lighting is basically used
to enhance the storytelling moment.
A really good background by itself without anything else,
evokes emotion.
It tells you instantly
what the scene is going to be like.
It's a lot like a DP for live action.
You're trying to express
what the story is telling you
through light and color.
when it comes,
not even just to animation,
but film in general,
framing is everything.
Wherever you place your characters
and wherever you place your action
is going to have an intense impact
on how the audience feels
and how the audience relates to what's happening.
It's wild to do all these different things
and then have them slowly converge
into one final piece of media.
We have many, many more months of production ahead of us.
We're getting into the nitty gritty of it.
It's a never ending circle of
work, and creativity, and energy
that's going into the series.
Finally, all of this work,
it's all come to fruition.
We're really trying to elevate ourselves
to create an animated show
that even we've never done before.
I think the fans and Critters are gonna be floored
by what we've made for them.
You ain't seen nothing yet.
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