#godzilla #airforce #animation #blender #kaiju #parody #spoof #fanfilm #kingghidorah #rodan #mothra #gigan #anguirus #mechagodzilla #hedorah #ebirah #airplane Part 1: Part 2: This is only a half-length episode because I was sick and wanted to get a video out while I still could. I already shared a preview of this animation a few months back, so I guess that makes this a quarter length episode. I would have liked to get this video out much earlier, but I was barely alive for the past couple weeks. Also, apologies if the audio mixing is particularly rough in this episode. I suffered a partial (but temporary) hearing loss in my right ear due to an infection, so I can't hear noises clearly, everything sounds muffled and warbled to me. This episode was animated back between October and December of 2015, which was one of the most difficult periods of my life. You can stop reading here if you don't care about personal details, but this is something I've kept inside me for nearly a decade and I wish to share it with those who might care. It was in late November as I was animating this particular shot: 2:07 when my Mom called me and my brother aside to tell us that our Grandma had passed away a few days prior. I remember it took time to process the news. I sat back down and spent a few hours modeling one of the jets, until the weight of the news hit me with full force and I cried. And I could never fully process the loss since then. To this day, I still cry over and have very vivid dreams about my Grandma and her countryside village house where I grew up. She was the one who introduced me to the concept of silly spoofs as she read old children's books to me but ignored the text and simply made up ridiculous stories based on the pictures. The stories got crazier with each read and I even added my own spin to them, filling out the pictures with increasingly absurd pencil drawings. She also helped me create my own stories and characters, which have since ballooned into an entire little personal universe that I still keep expanding even today. One of the biggest pains of my life is that I never said goodbye to my Grandma, never paid her a visit to the hospital. Summer 2014 was the last somewhat normal day that my family had spent at our old house, meeting my Grandma and our beloved hens we had been raising and tending to for years. A long period followed during which we lacked the funds to do any more family visits. My Grandma was already getting sick by then. The worst day happened in January 2015 when I had to visit her alone. It felt like the world itself conspired against me. I only spent a short time with her. Our hens had died just days before, the place was deserted, I was upset and stormed away in tears from my Grandma without any proper farewell. I couldn't have known that would be my final time seeing her. She was admitted to a hospital to the distant city where my uncle lived, and my Mom discouraged me from visiting her, as my Grandma had become sickly, frail, and lost all her memories of our family in her final months. The rest of my family fell apart afterward, and I haven't really felt like myself since my Grandma's funeral. I spent the last day at our house drawing a tribute to her. We had to sell our old house and I lost all my belongings kept there. Several crates and boxes of my childhood belongings and presumably most of my old drawings. Characters, stories, thousands of papers, including my first Godzilla art and even the tribute drawing I dedicated to my Grandma. All thrown into fire without my knowledge or consent. I lost myself several times over during those few months. I still keep having the same dreams of traveling the exact same roads to the village and staying at her house, practically on a weekly basis for the past ten years. I never moved on. As silly as this sounds, working on this dumb animation became my main focus for several years because I needed something to do. I still made stacks upon stacks of drawings but this animation project was the main anchor I had. It was also around late 2015 that I picked the Godzilla movies as the subject for my university thesis. I read books and articles about the franchise (which I now know were rather obsolete and full of misinfo) and composed an over 100 page text summarizing the brand's history. That period also inspired me to add more real life commentary and a modicum of thematic depth to my animation. There isn't much of that in this part of the video yet, but later scenes will go into more meta commentary on the Godzilla franchise. To anyone who read this far, thank you for your time and attention. Don't be like me, living with regrets. It is also surreal that I write this a year after my Grandpa (on my father's side) had passed. Sorry for dumping this much genuine pain on you, but it's been consuming me for nearly a decade and I just had to open up.