MMD Alice - Yume To Hazakura

You see the motion for the song Yumi to Hazakura quite often these days; and understandably so as both the music and the motion are excellent. Usually you see Kongou or one of the Kan Colle girls doing this piece and usually, especially in the versions that uses Kongou, she's equipped with a Japanese fan to give this work the Japanese touch that complements it well given the nature of the song and the dance. In fact, the person who made the motion; it's a very well made motion trace; is most noted for his other Japanese fan dance works such as Senbonzakura. According to the author of the motion, it took nearly 4 months to do and I can certainly understand why and the amount of effort that went into it.

That said, although I tried the motion with Kongou, it just didn't feel right to just do yet another version of the same dance using the same performer doing the same thing with a fan. Besides, I have Kongou already slated for another piece of work that is currently under development.

So I put on the old thinking cap and ...

Honestly, I love Alice. Well at least I love to use her for motions as she can do almost anything and her model is pretty solid. Plus I've used Alice for traditional, serious performances and she works, but giving her a fan to do this was just as cliche as using Kongou with a fan. OK, Kongou's got that shrine maiden like costume that works well with this motion set, but what about reinterpreting the same motion set using a ninja wannabe? Or rather samurai wannabe?

Now, the motion doesn't naturally work with a katana, in fact it had to be modified quite a bit to make it work; but Alice using a katana is just so much fun that it was worth the extra effort. Important thing was to make sure that the katana doesn't cut through her body, arms or head which just wouldn't look right, but once it was all done, it was worth it. OK, admittedly the katana does get tangled with her hair and a real one would have cut off those twin tails of hers, but hey, there's only so much you can do. And when you look at the whole thing, it doesn't really stretch credibility much.

In point of fact the katana is far more dangerous to Camera man-san who helped filmed this as he got in real close with the camera to get some really nice angles on Alice. So much so, that the motion almost looks like something completely new which was deliberate as we wanted to get the maximum mileage from that katana. And we put a nice shiny sheen on that blade too using a suitable MME; it looks almost like the real thing.

Anyway, please feel free to check it out and let us know what you think.


Cheers.



Video Link: youtu.be/yEsTb3ouXAk

Credits are at the end of the video.