Both the Bard Song and Legend of Luik go back to when I first discovered newgrounds in '03 and was catching up on all it had to offer. One of the things I stumbled on were the flash cartoons by Charlie Zero. Overall, I didn't like his work, especially the Mourner, but I believe we were already over that. Still, many of his projects did seem to have a lot of potential, or at least something that really provoked me to think them over quite a bit and form my own take on them. Those two cartoons in particular were the Bard song and My Angel
If you'll notice, "My Angel" is essentially a storyboard for a very basic, but generally appreciatively little fable, and it was begging to be fully animated. For a long time, that lay in the back of my mind.
My more Ambitious idea was a full on reinterpretation of the Bard Song, where the bard who narrates the story to his audience, turns out to have been one of the victims of the story he told (victim in an emotional sense). He is also a very Ignoble and bloodlustful Villian, which becomes appearent after he finishes his story around the bodies of those he slaughtered during his tune. He is confronted then by a different hero and the two fight with no clear winner at the end. It all tied well with the lyrics to the song, and I felt it would be a pretty good project.
I wasn't sure I wanted to start it on flash at the time, so I had started mainly by doing a lot of concept sketches for how the scenes would play out.
I also did a little concept sketching for the My Angel Remake (but we can get to that in another post.)
My first hurdle was hit whilst storyboarding the first scene and I realized I had no concepts for how the bard should look.Some designes were worked out, but I began to realize that at that time I was far to limited in my talents to produce the truly insane look I was going for...
I'd say my biggest problem was I just didn't know where to draw the muscle Straining in the right places. I couldn't get the right emotions out of his face, and I had no idea where to find out how to do that. Regardless, I whipped up more designs for the bard characters anyway...
Here we see a much older looking bard, I felt if I couldn't draw him crazy, I could always work on his aged and fading style. It still didn't look right, but I decided to address that problem when I actually start the animating.
This was going to be one of the knighs who tries to kill the other. In this case though, He's a simple blacksmith who is out to avenge his family or something.
This would be the other knight... honestly I probably wasn't going to have him look like that, but I need to start somewhere. As I said this project was probably outside of my limits at the time. Even though it was an adaption of another project it still needed a vast amount of development I wasn't aware of.The Summer of 2003 became the Summer of 2005 and by this time I had gotten my new computer and was ready to start some much bigger flash projects, starting with the Bard song. However as I searched for the song I became aware of a lot of the Lyrics in the song that just did not work, and in that light I became aware how flawed my interpretation of the song was. I decided not to pursue it any further. besides, there were already 2 other projects that had remade the Bard song, it just wasn't worth working on anymore.
Instead, I started on the full version of my Angel, but by this time, the concept had already drifted much much farther than Charlie Zero's Storyboard, and it would eventually lose enough of it's evidence of it's inspiration that the name "My angel" or variations of that were no longer right. And from that it got the title Legend of Luik.
Thus Bards song bowed out of the spotlight for a project that proved to have much more potential.
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