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Not as easy as it looks! The making of viral video “Mario Jumps into Battle”

Philip Kendall Aug 5, 2014
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Just under a week ago, a fan-made video featuring Nintendo’s Super Mario appeared online. Titled “Smash Bros. Mario Jumps Into Battle”, it showed the portly plumber doing a bit of shopping in a real-life Tokyo store before realising that he was late for his appointment in Nintendo’s upcoming brawler, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, and dashing across the capital city.

Due to its incredible animation and clever blending of real and computer-generated images, the video was quickly picked up by a number of gaming news sites (and shared on our own Facebook page) and scored thousands of hits in the blink of an eye. But even short videos like this don’t just pop out of question-mark blocks; they take weeks of hard work…

The video, which put a 3-D Mario into real-world footage taken in different parts of Tokyo including the famous Shibuya Scramble intersection, absolutely oozes quality, so it was little wonder it got so much attention online.

In case you somehow missed it, here it is in full.

But how does one make a video like that? The technicalities will be lost of most of us, but 3-D artist Dean Wright recently shared a couple of additional videos and titbits about the its making-of process.

After taking photos and footage of the locations he wished to have Mario traverse in the video – even going so far as to capture the following spherical HDRI images to ensure he got the lighting right – the Nakano-based artist spent four whole weeks putting the one-minute-three-seconds film together.

“Using only my laptop, I spent the following 4 weeks working intensively on the project during the day and rendering over night to get full use of the limited machine time I had and complete the project as soon as possible,” Dean writes. “To stay true to the games I used the real models from the Smash Bros Brawl Wii game as a base and rebuilt and reworked the textures to improve the quality for full HD rendering.”

Oh, is that all!?（ｏ。ｏ；）

Check out this snippet of making-of footage taken from Dean’s blog. Seeing how much time and effort went into the video certainly makes clicking that thumbs-up icon on YouTube that bit easier, doesn’t it!?

▼ Mario using his “Suica” card to pay his train fare

▼ Wait, you mean he wasn’t actually dozing between those two people!?

Oh, and when you see Mario dashing around corners and hopping down those steps in the video? That’s all based on footage Dean took of himself running around town like a madman.

“I’m a big believer in using reference footage as a basis for animation, so I’m used to acting a fool on camera and this project was no different!”

Say what you will about Nintendo, their fans are a passionate, hard-working bunch! Fingers crossed Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS will be worth the wait!

For more info, be sure to visit Dean’s blog or follow him on Twitter.
Photos and video © and used with the permission of Dean Wright