Breaking down the robot | Golden Automata postscript

"A story about those marvelous things which we just happen to find by chance."

Did you watch it yet?

Golden Automata has been on the works for a year, so there is so much to talk about!

Story

I have received quite some messages asking about the meaning of the story, so I will explain it first. 

Phrase no.	Speaker	Phrase
#001	[Blue], thoughts	Where am I?
#002	[Blue], thoughts	This artifact...
#003	[Yellow] to [Blue]	"Don't worry, it's alive"
#004	[Blue], thoughts	Worry?
#005	[Blue], thoughts	I'm confused
#006	[Blue] to [Yellow]	"Where does it end?"
#007	[Yellow] to [Blue]	"It is ineffable"
#008a	[Blue], thoughts	How can it be?
#008b	[Blue], thoughts	I want to understand
#009	[Blue], thoughts	It is dazzling
#010a	[Blue], thoughts	It is ever-changing
#010b	[Blue], thoughts	It is growing, evolving
#011	[Blue] to [Yellow]	"Will it turn forever?"
#012	[Yellow] to [Blue]	"That is for you to decide"
#013	[Blue], thoughts	I am not special
#014	[Blue], thoughts	But now I understand
End	[Yellow] to [Blue]	"I'm glad"

In the story there are two speakers, [Blue] and [Yellow], represented by the two background colors (although [Blue] sometimes speaks over white and black backgrounds too). There are phrases which are said, shown in quotation marks; but also [Blue]'s thoughts, written without them. [Blue] is a character similar to us, while [Yellow] is more of a mysterious character, which seems to know everything about the Automata.

[Blue] is presented to a mysterious artifact, the "Golden Automata", and within some time he goes from not knowing what it is to being fascinated. The first phrase from [Yellow] intrigues [Blue], as it somehow suggests that there is something to worry about (somehow, this thing can die), but it's fine for the time being. Later, he discovers that it is not something eternal, but rather lives from the efforts of everyone. [Blue] understands now that, despite not having any particular talents, he can put some effort into making this thing that he now loves live for a bit longer. 

What does the "Golden Automata" represent? Well, I think it is pretty obvious! But it is vague enough that it can be interpreted in many ways. I want to clarify that the phrases are not related to the combos (I'm not saying that anyone is not special orz) and both characters are fictional, the names are just because of the backgrounds that I used.

It is a simple story, but there is some challenge in making this kind of short phrase narrative not look like a riddle. Many thanks to Padrace, who helped me with polishing the final phrases and to Narita (Zunda), which translated it to Japanese :)

Edit: I clarified a few more things in The Workshop, so I will also write them down here. The intention of the story and the text screens isn't to clearly convey everything, so do not worry if you didn't understand some (or all) of the details. The story is short by design and thus, very simple. If I were to show it very clearly on the CV it would come across as too basic, like a children's book. The similes and visual language are some of the tools that I used to obfuscate the plot. My intention was for it to create a nice atmosphere, and to hint the existence of some coherent underlying plot. Understanding the story without the explanation also depends heavily on having been exposed before to this kind of storytelling. You can see how my references do the exact same: End of the World Album also has an obfuscated story and Monogatari has some undecipherable rules behind the text screens.

RPD 3rd

"Golden Automata" started as the 3rd instance of my personal CV series.

Around April 2020 I sent ~12 invites with the hopes of continuing my CV series. RPD 1st has an endearing edit and I have a very nice memory of it, as it was the only CV in which I really tried my best in making it good at the time. On the other hand, RPD 2nd didn't have filter, the edit was delayed a year, rushed in a few hours, I lost a bunch of the combos (Gollumsk8, Sly...) and I didn't even record for it.

After some months, from those 12 invites, I received 3 combos. Of course if you don't know that I will put effort into it and check RPD 2nd you will think that the next one will be bad. It was hard, but the initial combos were too good for me to pass, so I decided to push through. I messaged Padrace, who had just made "Isolate" to see if he could help me out with the organization. I also made "Alba", as a test to see which combos I could get by submissions alone and take some rust off my editing skills. 

Why the name change though? Why didn't it stay as "RPD 3rd"?

Theme and story

What is RPD 3rd? What is any spinner's nth? To me, my 1st is memorable for being the first, and my 2nd for being bad. Well, those aren't very good reasons, aren't they?

In these last year I have noticed a problem with many CVs, which is especially acute with the "spinner nth"s. If you don't have a theme that goes at least a bit beyond the visuals, the collab will be forgotten in a week. That's true for every piece of media: successful youtubers are those who connect with their audience, good TV series are those who are able to deliver more than a bland story. Aesthetic coherence is to be expected, but it won't make the video good by itself.

The "spinner nth" naming format is lazy, it doesn't push the editor to think about what he will make any further. If you are forced to think about a brand new title, the theme will follow, and with a bit of effort you will be able to continue that into something even bigger. Of course not all "nth"s are unmemorable, but I think that it is a common trend. JapEn's are great, for example, but I think that it is obvious that JapEn organizers put a lot of effort each year into trying to make each new video unique and different from the last one.

I wanted to give Golden Automata a story, not too detailed but not unfinished like in End of the World Album. I thought that it was a nice way of breaking the "nth" curse.

"End of the World Album" is a masterpiece

When I came back last year and saw End of the World Album, I was amazed. I had seen good CVs, but this one was different. It wasn't just good combos, it wasn't just a clean edit. The atmosphere and small messages made it something much bigger. This emotional theme is what I think puts it over, for example, _NighT. Although _NighT's edit is undoubtedly better, the delivery feels dry.

Because of these reasons, the project was rebranded to "Golden Automata". Again, we sent a few invites and got a mix of nice combos and rejections. At this point we had 6 videos, not counting Padrace and myself. We had the choice of sending more invites or opening the submissions, and we opted for the latter + a last invite to MG. This meant that the filtering was going to be incredibly harsh, but it would also allow me to make a better combo arrangement.

Bakemonogatari

The second inspiration is the anime "bakemonogatari". Aside from a lot of nice aspects which can't be replicated in a CV, I thought that their use of kanji and text screens were phenomenal. One problem with "story-heavy" CVs is that too much text needs to be in the screen for a long time to be read, so it drags out the video a lot. There are two options to combat this, to write very short phrases and to make the CV enjoyable without needing to read all/most of the text. I tried to do both.

Arrangement

The combo arrangement is one very overlooked step in the editing process. A CV is about raising and lowering tension, having some highlights, not making one combo overshadow another and of course, the music sync. I think that Lotus is a master of combo arrangement. I am still learning how to do it myself; it was one of the main focuses of both Alba and Golden Automata.

Music

As always, finding a good song is a mess. For Alba it took me a few days, here I spent months looking for one that matched my idea without any success. That is, until I found "Exit" by CandyBox, a Chinese music producer. What is up with artcore, that songs as good as this get no recognition? There's so much terrible electronica out there with millions of views and meanwhile, CandyBox sitting just at 117 Soundcloud followers. I get that the music producing world is incredibly saturated, but still. I wanted to mention the artist earlier than in the credits, but it didn't look good anywhere I put it, as any text clashes very harshly with the story lines. 

Textures

One of the aesthetic features of Golden Automata is the use of textures. Solid colors can look nice, but many of the combos looked very good on 16:9 without any frame, so the clean wood grains of the desktops went nicely with the cardboard and gold leaf textures. I found some very high resolution pictures, so I chroma shifted them to different colors and made various backgrounds and overlays.

Assets

I am sure that somewhere there is some plugin to make gear animations. But I just made all the assets myself and animated them by hand. My main worry was going through all this trouble for them to look "stock", but I think that the weird, synced motions + the aesthetic coherence make them distinct enough. I didn't end up using the 6-tooth gear on the video, but well, I made it.

Japanese

I wanted to include some more Japanese text in the video, because I love the language and I love how it looks. However, after extensively talking with Zunda I learned a lot about what Japanese actually like, and how different it can be from what foreigners like. Since I didn't want the CV to look like a SuperDry sweatshirt or like Delhi Attack, I opted for deleting all of that, and just leaving the subtitles. As far as I understand, they aren't particularly appealing for Japanese people, but at least they don't look bad. I don't think I will be able to do any design with Japanese text that appeals to Japanese so I'm happy with this result.

Combos

I won't go into much detail, if someone wants more advice on his combo please message me!

Akai - Beautiful angle and flow as always, the index + wrist rotation pushed trick gives a lot of energy to the combo and is my favourite. The double bust could be a bit smoother though!

Jiv - It's a very well arranged combo, I like it! It's not as technical as Laku's combo, but it was easier to sync and do interesting edits on it regardless of the music used.

Freeman - One of the combos that motivated me to continue with the project. I like how complete it feels, it has a nice feeling of closure. The execution of the tipped sonic is not very crisp, which would be my main comment.

Laku - More technical than usual, the setup is very clean and pleasant to the eyes! I feel like the action is a bit corner-centered (when I did the zoom I zoomed to the top left corner), although not offcam. I don't usually like grey mods, but it looks great on him.

Tetora - I was worried because the two finger twirl was also done by Freeman, and having two combos with the same highlight can be problematic. Well, thanks to the nametags it isn't as noticeable. It synced very well with the music, and the video quality has an interesting grain to it that is surprisingly aesthetic. The finisher was cool too, it reminded me of Leigun.

RPD - ザコテ

Lol. I spent quite some time preparing that combo, it has a mix of my usual linkages and new ones. The hand motions are a bit too big, but I didn't think it looked bad. Maybe it does (?). I thought that they added dynamism, I could have easily made it with a more stable hand position.

Darkt - The exposition of the camera is too low so it doesn't have enough motion blur, but the combo itself is very cool! I will never understand how a human being can just pick a pen and do that...

Ence - As always, the hand motions are very pleasant and the pen looks like its floating. The camera resolution is not very large, so it has quite some noise when rescaled, I wish that the video was at least 720p. The tricks that Ence did also synced nicely with the music, so it was fun.

Tchus - Is it a tradition now to put Tchus after Ence? It seems like so! A very interesting combo, the more I see it the more that I like it. It may not be the strongest (that's his FPSB 10th IMO) but I think it is one of my favourites.

Blue - !!!! I was so happy when you sent me the video! It is unusual for a style to hold strong after so much time, but I think that it looked amazing even surrounded by combos from 2020. That is something to be proud of.

Sigre - The aerial and catch is very clean and the rotation + zoom nametag animation is my favourite from the whole video. Although Sigre is the only spinner maining wipers in the CV, it fits very well and puts the bar very high for the two last players.

Padrace - Probably your best combo to date. It is technical, creative, well executed, and is very satisfying to watch. You just got it all.

MG - !!!!!!!!

What to say about this, it's a mesmerizing last combo. Even the "bad" version was very good. The planes of rotation, the pen acceleration, it just looks like the pen is going through your fingers. I don't believe that humans can do that.

Released filtered combos:

Of course I don't want to talk about those that haven't published it, but for those that I have seen sharing it on twitter:

Mei - It's a very beautiful combo! It was the #14 on the list to enter the CV, but because of a lack of time it wasn't in... I think that a stable setup could have helped too. The angle is interesting but I like it, reminds me of Esaya in End of the World Album, which is one of my favourite combos from him.

ShakziiP - As he said in his twitter, the tricks could be a bit more complex or stand out more. I think it is a cool combo, although I think that I liked more ShakziiP's submission to Alba. Well, I am not an expert in comssa so it is hard to know if this judgement is correct.

Sweg - I appreciate going out of your way to try and fit the theme! The idea is nice, with the pacing changes and all. Maybe it could have been polished more to make the end result feel more well constructed I feel.

Coffeelucky - Some motions feel a bit too accidental, but the idea is there and I like it. I still think that if you focused your efforts into making 1 or 2 very high level combos you could make something great, as your execution and trick base is phenomenal. Well, the skillsets of making a FS and making a planned combo don't fully overlap, so I understand how daunting it can be...

I think that those were all of the ones shared on twitter, but again, I can give some more advice if asked. Sorry if I was rough, I focused on the bad aspects but all of your combos are phenomenal! A collab just as great could be made with the filtered combos.

Conclusion

I'm glad with how it turned out! I didn't receive any critics about the pacing of the video and Patchwork praised the combo arrangement, so I think that the overall result is positive. I will not edit another CV in a while, but I hope that the next one can be even better ^^