My Dragon Warrior tribute project

Way back in 2005, I was listening to a song and a flood of epic visuals came over me of a young Descendant of Erdrick aimlessly walking the lands of Alefgard, encountering a fierce dragon, being beaten, rising up from defeat with renewed determination and purpose, taking on numerous trials and tribulations that would give him strength and courage, leading him to the ultimate climax of facing the dragon one more time to emerge victorious, with the music setting the emotion and flow of the visuals. Though the song didn’t quite fit, I still couldn’t stop fantasizing about seeing this music video play out in front of my eyes. The time and skill involved in making it a finished project would prove to be too ambitious, but that didn’t stop me from at least creating a visualization of it to just see what my vision would actually look like on the computer screen. This is the result of a few months of painstaking work using computer animation software to create the 3D assets I would need to make this visualization.

 

This project officially began in July 2014 when a friend had offered to take me in as an “apprentice” in exchange for doing work for him and his family. He is a designer by trade and a skilled artist specializing in sculpting, but has extensive knowledge, facilities and equipment to do just about anything involving arts and crafts, digital as well as traditional. He provided me with the software (which cost almost a grand if I wanted my own license), as well as clay to sculpt by hand, which is how I got the reference source to make the 3D dragon.

My mentor gave me useful advice and direction on how to go about a production, as there are many ways one can waste time if one does not have experience with animated video production. So I started with a storyboard on paper and worked out what assets I would need.

Since this is a tribute project of the NES game Dragon Warrior, most of the assets could be obtained by using the game’s original art as a reference, so all I would need to do is create 3D versions of them.

Once the assets were made, I began work on the animation. One month later, this neat music video! And then I decided to never work with computer animation again and became a chef.

The end.