Production Notes

Chrono Trigger Unglued: Episode 12

This episode was actually around 70% done for the longest time and began production shortly after 11 came out. However, other stuff got in the way. The great length of Cryo's scripts (and Cryo's scripts are often depressingly long) was sufficient to make finding the proper time and will power hard to do. Eventually I decided it was better to put something out rather than nothing at all and cut it off before the "Ding Dong Memories" sequence which involved a lot of work, and which I wasn't fully sure of how to pull off yet. The joke involving the chest and the narrator speaking directly to Crono, which became infamous, was based on an injoke often carried out between me and Laserkid on the phone. Also, originally the music during the interactive scene was supposed to be RUN! RUN! from Terranigma, but a suitable copy of it could not be found at the time. Lastly, for those of you wondering, I did make the game Tales of Cirque 1. If you're wondering why the text in Crono's reaction to one of the 'clickies' links to it, it's because the hero in the game can kill himself for no good reason by sticking his hand in the fire if you command him to. Because the ability to do this seemed like such an odd inclusion, many people at the time playing it killed themself over and over this way because they assumed there had be a secret to the fire place. Thus sticking your hand in fire places, merely because they existed, became a running gag between me and some of my friends. The now famous song in the secret scene, which is currently being rerecorded professionally to become the theme music for the replacement sequence to the current lowkey opening animation of the series, comes from a man named Dan "Mystik" Scannell whom I met at the Chrono Compendium shortly after I posted a link to Episode 11 there. At the time I was pondering paying the infamous Andrew Pants (whom did the audio the NG animation, "Touchtone Genius") to compose a proper original theme song for CTU, but Dan interjected saying he would do it for free. This started a dialogue between me and him that is still going on to this day. Lastly, the preloader introduced here that some of you seem to really hate (it'll be replaced in Episode 16, I think) happened because Cryo introduced me to YTMND while working on Episode 11 and I fell in love with the "Safety not Guaranteed" fad.

Chrono Trigger Unglued: Episode 13

This episode was started shortly after the release of Episode 12, but remained largely only 5% complete up until two weeks before it came out. Due to the fact that episodes had really gotten slowed down for a variety of reasons, I felt that people needed something to remind them of what happened the last time. To this end I got Dan Scannell, the man who did the song in Episode 12's secret scene, to be the voice of Gaspar the Narrator. Gaspar's voice was heavily based on the narrator in the game Space Quest 6. As the feature was very well recieved, it became a regular feature (as opposed to an every now and then idea as it was first thought of). The flashback between Fritz and Jenny, although written by Cryo, was suggested by me because originally all the script had was Fritz telling Crono that he had sex with the mayor's daughter Jenny and Crono being disgusted with him because of her age. In my book that's not funny, it's just uncomfortable. Cryo said it was funny because it showed that Fritz was an idiot because he couldn't tell. I said we should show that more properly with a flashback. Then I asked Cryo which sprites we would use for Jenny and he showed me some, at the time I mistakenly thought they were the sprites for Fritz's sister which I was against (Cryo didn't realize I was wrong when I misidentified them, and didn't see anything wrong with people mistakenly thinking he was banging his sister *SIGH*). So I set about recoloring the sprite sheet in what was my first real sprite sheet recolor effort which I think turned out far better than originally planned. Jenny first appears in Episode 12's opening as this flashback scene was originally going to be part of Episode 12. I knew since during the construction of Episode 11 that I wanted to use Ding Dong Song here, but wasn't yet sure how to put it to animation. I would realize how to do the animation end of it after seeing the opening to Saturday Night Fever. There was some worry that people would get angry that I put a movie theather there as such was never seen in Crono's hometown in the game, but fortunately no one complained about my use of the scene from Secret of Evermore. Naturally we had to change the software shop as they definitely didn't see people have personal computers at the time, but the decision to change it to the UP office came out of wanting to spite someone who reviewed Episode 12 while I was animated this that claimed I had turned CTU into nothing but Marathon references (so I put in another by having him on the logo to our offices, which then became the logical place to put the clickie). By the way, the scene of walking through the street and then up to the fairgrounds on the map are the first two cases where I experimented with putting an entire animated scene inside a flash object so that I could then move the entire animated scene across the screen as an object to effect a form of camera control. The scene at the fair itself was also my first time experimenting with animated scenery which had always been in high demand in many critical review of the series at Newgrounds. I also experimented here with not having a song loop back to it's beginning, something that wouldn't really be put to interesting use until episodes 14 and 15. The entire flashback was suggested to be in sepia tones, but I didn't feel like doing that as that would have negated the entire value of my recoloring the sprites that now represent the character Jenny. At the end the guards were supposed to castrate Fritz upon recapturing him and then cut off his arms and legs. I argued that this wasn't really funny, and that we would probably want to use him again later and that this wouldn't be prudent because of this. Cryo eventually agreed, although he still believes random mutilation is simply funny in it's own right. This episode's secret scene is one of the least liked in the Flashed Together series, and is actually an extended version of the intended secret scene for episode 11 that wasn't used back then because we didn't get to the end of the Fritz sequence in it.

Chrono Trigger Unglued: Episode 14

This is, judging from Newgrouds, the least liked episode of the series. Originally it was also going to contain a scene in which Crono was seen stealing the Guard's armor that would have taken place before everything else in this episode, but the iea was axed when Cryo decided it was too much for the pacing. Here I really begin to play with not having songs loop back to their beginning by having Lucca's theme each time it is played only have the introductory fanfare play once and the main body, like in the game, be the only thing that actually loops. The opening conversation between Lucca and her father was originally going to be a secret scene before the demand of people wanting to see how Flashed Together ended lead to more of them being made. Besides, I always felt it was more appropriate as an in episode scene (rather than a secret scene happening right before the episode involving the Dragon Tank, being seen after Crono reunited with Lucca). Because so many people liked the voiced guard chant in episode 11, we threw another one in here when Crono was talking to the two guards on the staircase while in disguise. Fun note, if I had made the episodes to Cryo's insane length requirements, the scene where he talks to the guards on the staircase would have been the opening of episode 12. Although the least liked,and definitely the least watched, many people seem to love the 1337 tank manual even if they can barely fathom it most of the time. This episode was also the time the dreaded non animated torches went away. For those of you who kept saying this was a simple matter, you are wrong. Due to the way flash scales and moves stuff, I could not simply capture the sprites for the torches and have it look correct. I had to actually make the background one large animated image, and this involved a lot of screencaps in ZSNES coupled with stitching images together. Here we also see for the first time that Lucca is not entirely incompetant, which was never meant to be implied but many people assumed (a fact that greatly irked me). The secret scene at the end was written by me since Cryo was no where to be found at the time and I didn't have one from him already, many people consider Toriyama's Pizza to be one of their favorite Flashed Together moments, even if the rest of the episode is a major low point for them. Because of this we now have plans to have Akira Toriyama, and his Pizza shop with it's most particular customer service policy, appear again later on.

Chrono Trigger Unglued: Episode 15

With Cryo still gone, episode 14 was the last of his remaining script at the time. The bulk of this episode's script was actually written in my head while sitting on the back of a motorcycle in utter boredom while going to see Spiderman 3. For the record, I am aware that the bridge scene at the beginning is painfully slow. It was originally supposed to be a conversation between Lucca and Crono at the end of Episode 14 before they ran off, but it seemed like it was throwing off the pacing there. It basically wasn't very well paced here either. Originally the guy from Balloon Fight was supposed to flap by in the background as they ran, but it never looked good so I axed it. The discussion about prison rape between Crono and Lucca was an idea for a secret scene that originally would have been the secret scene for after the Dragon Tank was defeated had not Flashed Together caught on so well. The critically acclaimed part of this episode, which makes it so popular, is of course the entire part involving the Dragon Tank. The first half came from a desire to take what Cryo did while fighting the Nagas in the top of the Cathedral and do a far more complex version of it (down to a very accurate rendition of Crono's inventory, paying notice to the fact he was never shown giving the codec back). The most famous parts from this first half are course the second appearance of the narrator voice speaking to Crono (if you find the secret click), and Lucca speaking of her pyromaniacal past. Two things always struck me as odd about the Dragontank battle in the game: 1) The Sword Whirl looked as if it should send Crono flying off the edge due to the perspective, and 2) Lucca was adept at setting things on fire without ever having learned magic yet. Those two ideas, when combined, formed the highly praised event that occurs when you click the 'tech' option. The even more famous part, the real battle with the Dragon Tank itself, came out of my long standing desire to do a battle piece set to music as I had seen done in many other sprite animations. To this end I wanted a piece that was both short (so as not to drive me insane trying to animate to all of it) that came with lots of sharp beats to animate to key events in the battle to. Techno Fun 5 fit the bill perfectly, and letting it direct the flow of the battle I animated the entire sequence in the course of one long night of non stop animating (all the way to 6am). To get the camera to move around during the battle I first animated the entire fight in a seperate file, and then I put that entire fight inside a flash object. I then moved and scaled that object around in the main movie file to simulate the effect of camera cuts, pans, and zooms. So it wasn't as hard as some of you seem to think to achieve that effect, but it seems having animated objects inside of animated objects is hard for a lot of people to comprehend (people often ask me to help teach them Flash). The beloved victory moonwalk, often cited during reviews, came from the fact that when I played Chrono Trigger back in the day I would do something similar in the game after destroying the Dragon Tank and then ponder that if Crono stood there long enough that the chancellor really should have fallen down taking Crono with him. The second guard scene came because beta testers who saw an early copy of the episode (for testing purposes) liked the first guard scene so much they kept asking for a second one. The secret scene at the end of this episode, featuring blinky's demise, was written by Cryo when he returned halfway through this episode's production. This, along with the Flashed Together scene from previous episode, are currently the two most liked in the sub-series. Despite having more work put into this episode than others I've put together, the entire episode was put together in just 9 days of nonstop insane effort. No, I am not going to do that all the time, so don't ask.