Jared's Stuff

Got some new cuteness on my Patreon!

One of my side projects is starting to come together!

Back in 1978, Sanrio premiered a film they had billed as "Fantasia for the rock era", called Metamorphoses. The premiere was such a disaster, and the reviews so brutal, that they pulled it from release. Over the next year, they trimmed its run time by 7 minutes, rearranged its segments, added narration, and replaced its rock soundtrack with a new disco score. Now titled "Winds of Change", the film flopped.

For me, this film was just one of many VHS tapes I'd watched as a kid, forgot about, then struggled to find as an adult. Once I'd identified it and learned it'd been released on DVD in Japan, I imported the disc, and that was that. Until I learned of the film's history, and its original widescreen presentation...

Recently I got my hands on a laserdisc capture of the full Darkwing Duck pilot, Darkly Dawns the Duck, and decided to combine that with the episodes from the DVD set to make the highest quality version possible. Others had done similar edits before, but every version I've seen was over-compressed. Mine is resized to 720p, with a bitrate high enough to preserve the image without going overboard.

This set was difficult, given the circumstances - it was the first set I'd done for Dragonvale World, and the first animations I'd done in nearly a year at that point. Worse, I'd come to rely on reference as a way of hammering out animations quickly, only that wasn't an option this time. I had to think my way through these animations, and they needed to ooze far more personality than anything else I'd worked on probably ever. No pressure!