The Rise of Otaku
chapter-114

Chapter 114 Self-made Animation

Zhou Yu’s naming skill had always been commonplace. The name “little paradise” had always been ridiculed by Zhou Fu. It was so lame that there were countless places online having a similar name. It was like the name of a street vendor in Wutong village. Now that he needed to come up with a name again. It really gave him headaches.

The name of a company could be changed if they didn’t feel like it. But once the animation base’s name was set, it could not be changed again. It was not a game, that he could use the money to rename his character. Unable to come up with anything, he called the villagers of mini Luhua Village together to think of a good name.

However, it turned out that it was a terrible decision. Sure enough, there was no remedy for these little Chuunibyos. Names like “Flying Dragons” and “Asura” etc, were clearly filled with Chuunibyos flavor. However, since he also didn’t know any better names, in the end, he decided to use the oldest way to decide the name – draw lots.

Finding a pile of words that sound seemingly knowledgeable, he wrote them onto papers one by one. Folding them up and throwing them into the air, he grabbed them randomly.

Unleashing... The hand of a miracle!

The first word – Qin;

The second word – Zhuan.

‘Hmmm... Qin Zhuan? What does it mean? Who knows. But this is it. Anyway, no one will know what the word means. But it sounds cool. So people wouldn’t make fun of it, right?’

After setting the name, the stonemason monkey immediately carved it onto a big stone at the base entrance. Henceforth, the “Qin Zhuan animation base” was born.

Originally, he thought that the upgraded animation base could produce tier four or five animation, and at most, all he needed would be some additional teams such as actors, cameramen, and other special talented people. Tier three animation was already the top-level animation in the real world. It made Zhou Yu wonder what the animation above level three would be like.

However, it didn’t turn out as he expected.

The upgraded animation base could still produce the first three tiers of animation, the previously required conditions unchanged, but there were no other tiers above tier three. The only additional feature was “self-made animation”.

Self-made animation: must have a director, an actor, and a cameraman. In addition to that, it must recruit a production team. And the last requirement was: Must have a completed script.

In the past, all the plots of the animated movie were automatically generated by the animation base. All he needed was to write a short story. Since it was automatically generated, the dialogue was naturally not that great and the characteristics of each character weren’t that distinctive. But the self-made animation was much more strict. It was a must to have a complete script that needed to be in the correct format as well, otherwise, it would not be able to make it.

And there were two ways to get scripts, one was to raise a scriptwriter himself, the other was to hire wandering scriptwriters or hire scriptwriters from some other places.

In fact, there used to be a wandering playwright in Luhua Village before. At that time, Zhou Yu simply wanted to increase the population of his mini Luhua village, so he wanted to make the playwright stay. However, although he tried all kinds of methods, he still couldn’t make the playwright who called “blood has dignity” stay.

He could still remember, that the price of the script was very high. A C-rated script would cost 1000 Moe Coins, and it also required some special items before he could buy it. For example, there was an A-rated script called “Final Decision”, in addition to the Moe Coins, which was several times more expensive than the C-rated script, it also needed the item – “Sharingan”.

Did it mean that he needed to get it from Sasuke?

It required luck to raise a scriptwriter, and even if he got a scriptwriter seed, he still didn’t know what talent the scriptwriter he planned would have. With bad luck, even if all the training was completed, it might just be an ordinary scriptwriter or an even worse one.

If it was so easy to raise a good scriptwriter, the prices of scripts would not be so expensive. Xia Huan was lucky that he could get an A-rated script in Star Light city. If he wanted to buy a script now, Beidou could only afford a B-rated script.

Zhou Yu’s plan was to cooperate with the management companies of the ACG world before he had his own scriptwriter. Luhua Village would provide shooting venues, actor little Muli, director Yang Kui, cameraman Qi Yulin, and the production team, other companies could provide other actors and scripts. In this way, they could make self-made animation.

However, this method would not work well with big companies that had a lot of money. After all, not everyone was as poor as Beidou, who needed to borrow shooting venues from other people several times. Especially Nandou, they lacked nothing, but new talents like Little Muli. If they couldn’t get Muli, there was no need to cooperate with Luhua village. After all, there was no benefit for them to promote an idol that didn’t belong to them. However, they would still come back when little Muli was famous enough.

Having a great talent does not necessarily mean that one will become successful. Many management companies were not optimistic about Luhua Village. To give some monetary help was to establish a good relationship. In fact, they were looking forward to the failure of Mini Luhua village’s movie studio project. By that time, Zhou Yu might want to sell Little Muli.

Therefore, it was still faster to cooperate with Xia Huan. After all, they had worked with each other a few times already. Besides, It was very troublesome to find new partners, then negotiate terms and other stuff.

To test the quality of the new animation, Zhou Yu immediately sent a message to Xia Huan. The things that Beidou had, that were better than other companies, were a legendary director Ling Daoran, and most of their actors had reasonable qualities. Even if they bought a B-rated script, it would still be much better than the ones that were automatically generated by Zhou Yu’s animation base.

Surprisingly, it just happened that Beidou also wanted to take advantage of the popularity of “Fruit Pirates” to make another movie. Therefore, both sides quickly agreed on the plan.

Zhou Yu naively thought that the self-made movie would only take one day or two days more than the time that was required for making a tier-three animation. He thought that he just needed to casually wait for the movie to be finished. But soon he realized that the making of the self-made movie was not as easy as he thought was.

The next day, Xia Huan took his crew and arrived at Luhua Village, Zhou Yu arranged them to stay at the animation base, and then selected the script, production team, etc, and then clicked on ‘Start Production’.

However, the red light, which indicated the current status of the animation base, did not light up, nor did it appear a countdown timer.

It was silent.

‘Very strange, did something go wrong just after the upgrade?’

Calling over the carpenter beaver to have a look, but it looked around and shook its head to show that there were no problems with the animation base.

‘How strange...’

After half a day, the leader of the Diligent Beifeng team, which had just been recruited by Zhou Yu using Moe Coins, said angrily, “Boss, do you still want us to work it not? Brothers are still waiting for the instructions. Are you forcing us to loaf around?”

It was not that he didn’t want them to work. He didn’t know how to start.

In the end, this leader explained to Zhou Yu that the self-made animation required them to shoot the scenes personally. From the scenes that could be shot within the studio to the scenes that needed to be filmed outside, they had to do every step by themselvs.

That was to say, that Zhou Yu needed to make a movie shooting venue model according to the plot immediately. And only after that, the director, the actors, and the production team would begin shooting.

The process was exactly like shooting the movie Fruit pirates.