For Pearl’s song “It’s Over isn’t it?” the scene is about Pearl accepting a loss. As the series has progressed, she’s learned that she isn’t always right, and that there are things about herself that she’s has to reevaluate. This all comes to a sort of climax in this scene where she accepts and admits out loud that her relationship with Rose was never as deep and complete as she wanted it to be or told herself it was. This is where she’s left at the end of the scene, feeling lost and out of place.

In the outline written by Ben Levine and Matt Burnett, this is how the scene looked:

You’ll notice a lot of things ended up changing compared to the final version. Most of that was due to time constraints. When we started storyboarding the episode, all of the rough demos of the songs were recorded so that we had an idea of the amount of time we had between each song (which ended up not being very much). The result was that we had to basically be transitioning constantly between songs, but doing it in a way that felt natural and as gentle as possible.

In addition, Rebecca remembered a part from the 1982 movie “Victor Victoria” starring Julie Andrews that she wanted to use as reference for the feeling of the scene:

Right away we latched onto this spinning 360 degree camera move. I loved the energy and focus it gave to the character and I immediately roughed out a version with Pearl.

If you’re ever stuck during a scene this is what you do: Don’t start from the beginning, find the moment you see clearest in your mind and build out from there. From these rough thumbnails I built the rest of the scene outward. I brought back motifs like her sword skills and her dance style to help evoke the past events of the series, and I tried to give as much time as I could to each shot and make her acting as expressive a possible.

Below are my rough boards set to Rebecca’s demo. At the end, i added a pause for when she throws the Rose into the air. It felt like a good spot for things to crescendo ring out. Deedee Magno Hall’s rendering of this blew us all away when we heard it.

From there clean up was pretty much straight forward. The scene didn’t change much except for tweaking her acting here and there. I’m super proud of how this scene turned out, hats off to Nick DeMayo our animation director and to the team at Sunimin in Korea where they draw the entire episode on paper:

Colin Gibson (Production Designer): You bet your sweet… George — unfortunately — doesn’t like things that don’t work. I have in the past built him props that I thought were just supposed to be props, and then he goes, “Okay, plug it in now.”

The first version of the guitar which — I think I put too much into the flame thrower, not enough into the reverb. And yes, the flame throwing guitar did have to operate, did have to play, the PA system did have to work and the drummers… Unfortunately, I did get practice in all positions and I’ve got to tell you, the drumming was very uncomfortable at 70 [kilometers] an hour, eating sand.

[…]  George actually had the guitarist come over, fairly early on in pre-production in Africa. And so he had a month or six weeks of getting used to it, of actually being able to play at full speed, while bungee jumping and blind.

im fucking screaming this movie is so coool