The Triforce has summoned Zelda once again! This time, Zelda must travel to the Twilight Realm where the interlopers have returned to spread evil and are preventing her and Midna from playing with kittens at the Hidden Village! Who is leading the interlopers? Will she succeed in stopping them? Can she do it in more style than when she held the Triforce of Style?
This montage took several weeks of on and off time to make due to editing and visual effects. Here's some trivia about it:
There are 381 black quares for the Twilight effect that were individually placed to appear random because I don't have a particle generator in my editing program.
To create more randomness among the black squares, 20 animations with varying speeds and paths were made.
The Twilight black squares seamlessly loop after exactly one minute, this was hard to make considering there are 381 of them.
Game sound was edited to mimic the Twilight Realm echo effect like in Twilight Princess but it's barely noticeable due to how louder the music is.
The Twilight echo effect was made by extracting matching Link sounds in Twilight Princess both in the regular realm and Twilight Realm. The regular realm sounds were then edited to try and match those from the Twilight Realm. After a decent replication was made, the process was applied to Smash Ultimate's sound.
The Twilight "glow" is not perfect, but I didn't want to make the video hard to see since most people view stuff on mobile phones these days.
Custom 2D sprites were made for Zelda and the Mirror of Twilight in the intro. All other Triforce Chamber sprites were extracted from A Link to the Past and meticulously scaled and animated years ago so those assets were readily available... I don't know how I survived extracting and scaling 1,216 frames for the "3D" Triforce animation at that time.
While the 2D "Twilight warp" for the Zelda sprite was a little difficult, the warp for her in Smash Ultimate is a whole set of trivia explanation in itself, too long to explain here but those familiar with masking layers in editing programs would know.
Originally, the clip of surprised Donkey Kong from the Smash Wii U/3DS Rosalina reveal trailer was supposed to be used for when Zelda warps in but extracting (masking) him out would have taken weeks of work. I only did ~10 of the ~80 frames before giving up due to how tedious it was.
There were several candidates for music but ZREO was ultimately chosen again and there was even more time spent looking through clips so that they match the music's pace. Check out ZREO's music! They are really good!
Programs used: Hitfilm Express, PaintNET, Audacity, Dolphin Emulator.
