POLLYANNA: An Animated Earthbound Tribute
POLLYANNA: An Animated Earthbound Tribute
To start off: A big hello to everyone, all you new folk and those who have been waiting almost four years to see this finished! The patience of Earthbound fans continues to demonstrate its legendary stamina. Project PK Flash began in 2010, when I was still a student at animation school. After working on it on and off between freelance jobs, including a nearly two year-long hiatus, it was finally completed in the fall of 2014- just in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Mother 2 in Japan (August 27, 1994). The final product is an animated re-telling of the major events of the game, set to music, in a way that I hope captures a bit of the whimsy and adventure of the original story. The concept I had in the back of my head was, “If Earthbound was a Saturday morning cartoon, what would the opening theme look and sound like?” with a colourful children’s pop-up book quality to the visual style.Please enjoy (in 720p if possible), share, and visit the project Tumblr below for more information on the process and future updates. I plan to post the full-length rough storyboards and hopefully some more rough animation so you can see how far it's come!UPDATE: Shigesato Itoi Tweeted about the video, saying "Shugoi desu no da" ("Fantastic!" in Saturn-speak)! Thanks to Spinningrobo/SuperRi for sending it to him! And here is me replying in probably grammatically awkward Japanese (feel free to Follow if you're so inclined): PRODUCTION BLOG Thanks so much to everyone for sharing it around; I'm blown away by all the responses it's been receiving. Perhaps it will even inspire someone at Nintendo to bring Mother 3 to North America!MUSIC STUFFThe tracks used in this video, “Pollyanna” and “Eight Melodies”, are vocal versions of songs that play prominent roles in the Mother series. They were introduced in the first game in the trilogy, Mother 1, but to me they represent the musical essence of Earthbound generally, and they fit the vibe of the animation as well. Pollyanna was performed by Catherine Warwick and Eight Melodies is sung by the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir (thanks to commenters for the correction).POLLYANNA LYRICS (English and Spanish) /post...TECH STUFFI used Adobe Flash CS4 for the animation (because I have some custom scripts that don’t work in the newer versions), Premiere for editing, and Audacity for sound stuff. The Earthbound font I used is Orange Kid (although there is apparently a more accurate one now called Apple Kid of which I was unaware at the time), and the Mr. Saturn font is Senor Saturn. Check the Tumblr for links to these fonts.DISCLAIMEREarthbound and Pollyanna are the property of Nintendo, APE, HAL Laboratory, Shigesato Itoi and Catherine Warwick. This is a fan-created work only.
