Let's not waste any time.
First and fivemost, here's the video itself. As always, the lore is written below, along with my process in making it.
Why Necromancers?
I have the perennial, if not timeless, classic The Nightmare Before Christmas to thank for that. It's one of those things where "X Y and Z stuck as a kid, and so it has stayed put through my adult life. Simply having scary powers doesn't immediately make you a bad guy any more than Jack's role as The Pumpkin King did. So when given the opportunity, I generally enjoy summoning skeletons in particular. There's probably some meatier psychological bits in there, but that's not quite what you're here for, and I do value your time, so let's jump right in with the characters.
The trick with animating Paul is balancing his humanity and his profession. He should look, as the pun goes, dead tired, but he's not overwhelmingly cynical. In his world, Necromancy is a grimmer option than normal, but it is just an option. Paul is very grounded, since he represents what an average Maldenian Necromancer is like, embracing the normalcy of commonplace magic, but still having a full range of emotion.
Especially in his home kingdom, he'd be a qualified arcane professional, tapping into his family's ancestral reserves of corpses to do his work.
Not the least of which is...
I was kind of walking on eggshells with this one. A skeleton is fairly typical, and a skeletal butler is even moreso, so I popped the hood on his lore and changed a few things. Instead of implying "I wanted a butler, so I raised a skeleton," he became "I chose to stay behind as a mentor," adding a layer of symbolism to his role, and helping me double down on the whole "Necromancy begins as neutral as any other magic in this story." Though for Chauncey, the real challenge came with animating him. Every facial expression he dodged and every "just make the jaw move" was replaced by "you have to render each moving bone" and "they need to connect, bend, and fly realistically." By the time it was over, it was no longer easier, just more familiar to what I liked to do.
Speaking of what I like to do, I love playing melee characters, so let's welcome our next entry,
With a timespan that rivals most of the environments I built, hoo boy, did Reeves ever take a long time to put together. Making the joints of his armor, marrying melee and magic, getting the texture to look good while making the bendable parts bend well, Reeves is meant to be a non-condemnatory insert for the typical protagonist. From his perspective, he's doing the right thing, even though he'd have a rough time once he finds out that he was wrong. The goal was to evoke feelings of an approaching force of nature, so Reeves was shown chasing them, shattering obstacles, and most importantly, not being evil. He's just a human who chose to defend his kingdom, and, like gravity on a falling vase, if he catches you, not being evil doesn't change the consequences.
What About That Whole "World" Thing?
A Bright Future And The Road Ahead
You might notice that this page is structured a bit differently, and briefly, than my other pages, and that's no coincidence. This entire story takes place in a massive timeline, spanning multiple animations, stories, timelines, and even more than one universe, one which I've been developing since well before I knew what that was. The names and the story were fresh, but this was just an intro to an extremely large world, one which can be easily added onto. Post graduation, and especially with the Grad Tidings project in mind, there will be a lot of new content from this story, and not all of them will involve this same setting. So to answer my own question, this world was already a world, Dead men's Tale was just an intro to it.
Well, that's what I've got for this one! How about going back to the projects page and checking something else out?
