For the past 2 years I’ve been on and off working on this fan animation of the *Spoiler Alert* final battle of Izumi Shion from the Gantz manga.
I always wanted to see the vampires in action and Izumi deserved to die so this is the best of both worlds lol. Izumi was one of the biggest monsters in the story and I want to make that clear that this is in no way a glorification of the character, but rather a come to justice.
With all that aside, this is still a work in progress, and it might take me 2 more years, I dont know, but this is the progress so far and a bit of an explanation of how I began working on this.
I started small with a “simple” 4 panel scene, vampires running towards Izumi in the subway, Izumi preparing the blow, the slashing of the vampires and lastly the split of the Subway train entirely
this short animation took a few months, I knew from the start that i needed a way to animate the splitting part, so my best idea was to make it in 3D, major mistake for a short video, but of great help for the later major project.
A major hurdle was to replicate the subway accurately, I wanted to remain true to the style to the best of my ability. this desire would come back to haunt me as you can see the manga has a particular grain/scan texture, I loove this texture so, naturally I wanted to recreate it, but I will touch on this mistake later.
Once the background was production ready I had the most fun doing the hand drawn animation, the 1st scene was pretty intense, 6 different vampires running and I couldnt make every run the same, so i had to make each one a bit different. I experimented with Procreate and Procreate Dream, honestly Dreams is not production ready, it’s getting there but it was a disservice to realease it as is.
anyway, I do stick figures to sketch the animation, then I cheated a little bit using blender to map out the inbetweens and pin the head drawing in to reuse it and not have too much jittering
Actually I started to rely too much in Blender, i was basically rotoscoping the Vampires animations lol, but i believe it still looks 2D, not CGI anime.
For Izumi i did create a more complex and feature rich Izumi model, but again, Only used it to sketch out the animation and finish the details handrawn.
I made many mistakes, for instance the 2nd scene that zooms in I made it entirely in 2D and it was a nightmare, I had to figure out the hair movement AND the smooth zoom, so I wasted a lot of time. I should have animated the character and THEN zoom in. lessons learned and that is exactly what I wanted to make this project for
In the end I had to cut back in a lot of details from the final animation, i know i know, but this got me exhausted.
to finish this I went with random naruto voices and foley sound which kind of makes me proud.
Hope you all like it!
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