The eight cofounders of the nerdworld business Critical Role came roaring back to Prime Video with the November debut of “The Mighty Nein.”
The business’s eight cofounders first started out streaming their home “Dungeons & Dragons” game on Twitch. Then, in 2019, CR raised seed funding of over $11.3 million to create the animated series “The Legend of Vox Machina.”
“The Mighty Nein,” based on their second Twitch-streamed “D&D” campaign, is their second animated series on Prime Video.
In an interview with Business Insider in November, the cofounders outlined some of the biggest challenges they faced — and the lessons they learned — making the show.
1. Introducing the audience to a sprawling world
“The largest challenge was trying to figure out how we were going to reorganize, and how we introduced the world,” Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham said.
Converting a 141-episode campaign into a show for Prime Video meant covering lots of on-stream ground, Willingham said. The team had to make a “massive shift” in how characters and plot points were introduced.
“For us, the livestream campaign was so good at sort of feeding one little nugget at a time, and the world got bigger and bigger and bigger. We thought it was far more effective to just hit you with the larger pieces at play and let those things sort of inform the characters and the storylines as you go along,” Willingham added.
Willingham said these hints set the stage for more developments down the road.
“We are going to sort of peel back the layers of that onion as we go along,” Willingham said. “But we are certainly taking our time and saving things for season two as well. So we’re not in a rush.”
Cofounder Sam Riegel told Business Insider that the crew’s longtime game master, Matthew Mercer, had created an “incredible continent filled with politics and socioeconomic strife and war, and ruin, and religious exploration.”
“To show all of the antagonists, the villains, the political intrigue that’s going on around our characters, we needed a whole other plot line to show what was going on in the background,” Riegel said.
2. Not giving too much of the backstories away
Riegel added that another key challenge with the “Mighty Nein” was the complexity of some of the main characters’ backstories.
“We don’t want to throw all those backstories in the audience’s face right at the top, but we do want to tease out that they come with baggage and trauma and issues that they have to work through,” Riegel said.
“Luckily, we were afforded hourlong episodes in which to do so, and I think it paints a rich tapestry,” Riegel said.
Meanwhile, Mercer wove in information and plot points from the campaign that even Twitch viewers back in the day weren’t aware of. That included more information on the series’ key antagonists, the wizard Volstruckers, and the mysterious and enigmatic academic, Essek Thelyss, whom Mercer voices.
“We had the opportunity to dig in with the writer’s rooms and the rest of the creative team to collaborate on how best to see that now fleshed out and shown and explored with the audience through this animated series,” Mercer said. “So there weren’t too many changes. A lot of it was mainly just taking what was there or things that were sitting in my head and going, ‘Alright, now we get to actually show this. That’s really cool and exciting. Let’s do it.'”
3. Complex designs, intricate animation
One of the big challenges the team had to overcome was articulating the intricate aspects of an in-game world through animation. And that spanned character costumes and memorable campaign locations.
“When I sent Matt (Mercer) my idea of where Jester grew up and what the Lavish Chateau was, I had this strong visual in my mind,” cofounder and cast member Laura Bailey said, referring to her character, the trickster cleric Jester.
“And then to see it in the animated series, it’s so strange that they can capture exactly what it was that we’ve visualized for so long, and now everybody else gets to see these stunning set pieces that have existed only in this little world,” Bailey added.
Cofounder Taliesin Jaffe said that he’d been “very, very specific” as well about how the carnival his character, Mollymauk Tealeaf, traveled with — should be animated.
“I’m famous for making very easy-to-animate character designs — I say deeply sarcastically,” Jaffe joked.
The Critical Role team also had to look into how each character’s magic was represented on-screen. For Liam O’Brien, it was crucial that his wizard, Caleb Widogast, cast magic in a manner that resembled a “learned science,” complete with alchemy and specific components.
The crew, O’Brien said, was also just happy to have the “luxury of time” to go back and revisit moments from their old “D&D” campaign.
“I am in love with the complicated world that this show has created — and that Sam and Travis have helmed — as we’ve all, in an all-hands effort, just created everything with love,” O’Brien said.
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