“Some Poses are Physically Impossible” Making of the JoJo’s Opening Sequences

I’m glad they released this as a news article. It seems like the sort of thing that would be a Blu-ray extra, probably towards the last disc.

CGWorld has released an indepth look into the making of the Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency opening sequences. It’s a whole special about how it was made to the creative process behind certain chosen scenes. You even get to see Caeser’s motion points under his model.

There’s a lot of technical discussion, too. Plenty of information about what kinds of software were used to get the right effects. After Effects, Photoshop, certain video editors and all that. We get to get down to the grit of drawing a 2D scene and the layering of different parts of the drawing.

And that’s only a few of the steps

It’s cool to see where they had to get tricky with the models and lighting. There’s a whole section about the police shooting Dio scene and the difficulties of getting things like the lighting to work and playing with the models so they’d all function together. There’s even some things I would never guess. The arms that reach out for the Red Stone of Aja in the Part 2 sequence? Photoshopped picture of a real arm.

Still, the thing that caught my attention the most was Caeser’s pose when Joseph and he confront the Pillar Men on top of their rock.

Innocuous as this pose is for JoJo’s of all things, the article notes that this arm position is a little impossible for the human body. You can’t take it out, though, and swap it out for some pedestrian pose where his arms are just sort of around. Posing is part of “JoJo’s Charm” as they put it. So what do you do?

Break anatomy a little. It’s ok; this probably falls under the same position as Zoom Punch and Caeser’s able to do that because of the ripple. That or he’s a secret Pillar Man who already became an ultimate lifeform and is trying to stop the others because only one person can stand at the peak.

It’s a cool article. There are even more pictures, insights into the creative process, and weird models of characters they could recycle and probably make into an indie XBLA game.

I love the stretching boxes around the sound effects

Make sure and check out the full article here.

(Images Copyright Kamikaze Video, Luckyland, Hirohiko Araki, Warner Brothers, and CGWorld. Thanks to Graphic Jon, the guy who made the OPM Facebook page you should totally be a part of, for sending me the original)

A Peek at JOJO Royale Stage 8 “QUIZ” Questions and Question Schedule

Has anyone decided to try their hand at Stage 8? I was a little skeptical about it because of the nature of how you answer. Fandom questions like this usually aren’t too hard, so a lot of this would come down to who’s watching for questions constantly if they were questions like, “What’s the Kakyoin noise?” But now that we’re a little further in, we can take a look at what some of the questions are.

Questions are almost entirely image based and are ranked by how many star points you can get for answering correctly and first.

Level 1 Questions are generally the sort of thing I thought all the questions would be. Simple trivia about events that are pretty big in the JoJo’s story. They even give you the chance to roleplay as Koichi, and I think we all have plenty of experience with that.

Level Two Questions are a little more daunting. That grave does revolve around a very notable event in JoJo’s, but the grave itself probably isn’t what stands out the most about that event. On a very different hand, you could figure out which number is a prime number just by trial and error with a calculator or searching it, but you don’t really have enough time to do that. Everyone is going to be jumping at the chance to answer the questions and get those points.

Level Three Questions are where things get really hairy and you have the most room to snipe because they take a lot of thought to really work out the answer. Considering how briefly Jotaro is in Part 5, do you remember what his hat looked like then? The Part 3, 4, and the Part 6 hats are pretty easy to remember, but the order and a hat that was only seen for a very little bit make it a lot tougher. The rectangle question it like the prime number one. You can measure out each figure to find out which one is 16:9, but do you feel like you have enough time?

So that’s where we are in how Stage 8 works. There are two big plus sides to it: One, they’ve posted a schedule for when questions will be asked:

Schedule of question posting
-Weekdays 12:00~13:00 & 22:00~23:00
-Weekends 22:00~23:00
*it will be changed.

They’ve also stipulated that if a question is not answered correctly within ten minutes of posting, the question will close and no points will be awarded. They also reconfirmed that anyone can join this stage and progress, but a maximum of 25 people will be allowed into Stage 9 from points in this stage.

Two, we have a sense for how many questions are being asked. We’re only just about a week into this Stage, and there’s been 59 questions, one of which was asked six minutes ago from when it is right now. So there’s a lot of opportunity to grab some points all day. There’s a block of questions going on right now as I’m writing this, so give it a shot if you see it in time.

(Answers: Erina is washing off the kiss from ME, DIO, Yukako is A, it’s Danny’s grave, 7001 is a prime number, the hat order is f→c→e→d→a→b, and I have no idea which one was the golden rectangle.)