Introduction to Kouji_San Animated Videos

Contrary to the latest topics we published on NS2News, I'm going to post something a bit more different. A brieve history about a video maker amateur who keeps entertaining NS2 folks around UWE forums. I needed to relay what brought him to start making those videos.

A few months ago, I've found out some videos made by Kouji_San: former European Playtester Lead and current UWE Forum Admin, still very active in this regard - you've probably seen him roaming around UWE forums. However, beside those official duties, he makes some funny animated videos related to Natural Selection 2, a series called Unusual Selection. Since this topic is going to be about these videos, please have a look to the 4th episode released in october 2015. Pretty fun, isn't it?

To find the other episodes including the Halloween special one, I can only recommend you to have look at his official Youtube channel, here's a link to the Unusual Selection playlist.

Here's the story about the why and how that leaded him to create those videos. All begins with episodes from a series in StarCraft universe.(StarCraft Episode 1 linked) The inspiration taken out from this series brought him to attempt in the first place to create a kind of similar series in our beloved NS2 world. As you may notice, that's a success. His choice of making videos in the same style that what StarCraft episodes propose is mainly bound to a will to simplify and cutify the whole, making it also easier to animate.

The following texts are extracts from Kouji_San himself, interspersed with links that he provided me and more.

"Back in I think it was 2007ish I started drawing on my bamboo drawing tablet and completely sucked at it. I could draw on paper, but this new digital medium and being disconnected from your pen, so to speak. That was something I simply couldn't get my head around.I also kinda stopped work on my webcomic, with the occasional NS2 spoof comic from time to time and a first kharaa comic concept.

My webcomic is now the core concept of a game I am creating (Is it Contained?), after I finish my other game (Booster Z-Frame). So there is still a future for the webcomic and such.. And I did think about doing a webcomic or perhaps animation around NS/NS2 at the time, as a in between of my usual webcomic. But simply didn't get the drive or even time for that, what with working on my games on my own as a one made indie dev... So the drawing bits were left on a back burner.

The pause between the first two eps and from episode 3 and on was moslty because I didn't have the time and the drive to draw/animate in flash. The way I was working was quite... work intensive.That is until I found the new tutorials by Cartbot Animation, ironically. The similarities between NS2 and Starcraft are also a thing between UnusualSelection and Starcrafts.By simplifying the characters to basic elements and than cutify them. A nice side effect is, you do create your own style even though it is inspired by Starcrafts, but can make it different enough to steer clear of a complete similarity. These tuts made me finally push forward again to continue the animation. And probably also going back intomy webcomic itself and more I dunno crossover “unusual >insert name here<”"

You can find more on his preparation thread. Do not hesitate to contact him directly if you need any more information (he likes being bugged). I personally want to thank him for sharing all this information. On a last-note, you can follow him on Twitter to get advertised about his next videos or by suscribing to his Youtube channel.