A King and his Visions

As I made quite clear in one of my earliest posts, Lino En Kuldes is one of my all time favourite video game characters. I love his backstory, and I've decided to make an animated sequence specially based on his relationship with his beloved wife, who died at sea. This is actually a prequel to the animated movie that sees Lino, Akaghi and the hero fighting against skeletons in the Rune chamber.

Here's the published result:

The dream scenario is not intended to be an accurate depiction of how the Queen of Obel died in the video game - its a dream. Sometimes we do have dreams about loved ones who have passed on (hopefully, these are usually pleasant dreams that remind us of how the deceased person touched our lives) but for the sake of making things more dramatic, I chose to have it as a sweet dream that turns into a nightmare.

The idea is that Lino is haunted by the memory of losing his wife and being unable to save her, and this compels him to help the hero, who now carries the rune of Punishment, as they travel to find out what secrets this rune hasn't revealed yet. Is the queen trying to contact Lino through the rune? What important message does she have to give him? Will he finally be at peace if he does learn the answers to these questions?

But these are all questions I'll answer as I make progress with my fan fiction (which could take years so don't hold your breath!)

Storyboard for King Lino's Dream, originally intended to be a dream within a dream sequence.

If you look at the storyboard above, you may notice that intended for Lino to have two dreams. I may do an extended version at some point, but for now I think one short dream is enough.

Most of those shots have appeared in the animation up until when Lino wakes up. You can see a couple of shots when the queen disintegrates into ash in Lino's arms and the ash scatters across the ocean - I did in fact animate several versions of this scene, but they sucked and I just was not getting it right, so I cut it down to just the first person shot when Lino is caressing his wife's cheek and she disintegrates and then it cuts to Lino waking up in his palace.

The speedy version works just fine for me - I don't think we need to many shots from loads of different angles showing a woman crumbling into dust. Keping it brief is dramatic enough, I think. And it works quite well, seeing Lino's hand reach out from the first person shot, and then jumps up in bed in the next scene with the same arm reaching out at the camera, so we can see the horrified expression on his face.

The ship and Lino's royal chamber have both been created in 3ds Max, using photographs I took of the gameplay as reference.