hi there swaps :) iâve been a longtime lurker and occasional anon in your askbox. first of all, i am so sorry about the cancer diagnosis. getting medical news like that is never easy, and i am wishing you well through this difficult time.
speaking of difficult times, opus has helped me through one. around the time i was playing mass effect for the first time, one of my good friends passed away. i think i mentioned this in a previous anon ask, but your depiction of griefâfeeling it, accepting it, and moving forwardâhelped me process my own grief. i really canât thank you enough for all the entertainment and FEELS youâve put into the world with your work, but i hope a small gift will suffice <3
in my last semester of college, i took a class on digital art in blender. for our final project, we were instructed to create an animation that showcases the character and depth of a world/location/space in some way, whether it be fictional or real. a living space, growing and developing alongside the beings that inhabit it. and i knew that the space I wanted to show was the ssv myeongnyang, 2178-2182. cantata is absolutely the fic in opus i go back to the most, so i wanted to show how that ship could be a living space. one thing i loved about cantata was that the yang grew along with the gangâit was decorated with cross-stitches and poker cards and darts games and robots that chase you to steal your rank. i hope my depiction aligns with how you imagined the ship :)
i spent a lot of time on this, and I truly enjoyed every second of it. though, there are some things I wish I could have spent more time on (the character models! i would have loved to sculpt the yang gang, but i needed to graduate on time so i just used open source ones LOL). consider this a small repayment for the many hours youâve spent giving us an amazing story to read!
anyways, i hope you know that a random stranger on the internet wishes you well, and cares enough about your work to spend a semester animating your fic haha. much love and stay strong!
I cannot put into words how astonished and touched and floored I was to get this in my inbox last night. I had my second surgery in 13 days yesterday (it went well!) and spent the day feeling a lot of things that werenât exactly joyous.Â
And then I saw this.I could not even believe my eyes. What an incredible gift. What love YOU have so clearly put into it! Osegueraâs guitar. The capoiera! Stabby on the hunt! The cross stitch wall! The table in the mess, the darts. Oh my goodness.
This is even more special than you know - I am a terrible visual thinker. I donât have a concept layout of the âYang, because I just donât think that way. Iâm a terrible scene-setter by nature, and if this surprises you at all, you have my fabulous betas to thank, because over the years they have worked hard to get me to come up with a better answer to âwhere are these characters, Swaps?â than âI dunno, a room with stuff in it.â XD
So having someone visualize the âYang is an absolutely incredible gift. What a work of love, and that it was based on something I made is truly mind blowing. The music combined with the changing scenes gives it that extra sense of nostalgia with just a hint of melancholy - weâre looking through the window of a happy time and place we can remember but not go back to. Which is exactly what Cantata is, to me. I wanted it to be the foundation that Sam could root himself in when things were at their most desperate - the lit candle in the dark. This just captured that in spades. The echoes of laughter in the background, the happy people living their lives untroubled by the reapers. What magic you have made with this!Â
I remember you telling me about your friend, and I am so glad that I could have helped in even the smallest way. You have done a tremendous thing for me in return, and I am giving you the BIGGEST hug. <3
