It looks like we’ve spotted some of the first items available for the Solo Leveling anime series, but pre-orders will close in two days, so if you’re interested, get your orders in NOW! A4 sized acrylic stands are pretty huge. I’ve never actually seen any that big…

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There are a couple items available for pre-order from Loppi x HMV for the new show Solo Leveling (俺だけレベルアップな件).

▶︎ Sales Schedule

• Orders Opened: Tuesday, January 9 from 10:00am (JST)
• Orders Close: Sunday, February 18 at 11:59pm (JST)
• Delivery Date: Thursday, April 18

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『俺だけレベルアップな件』
オリジナルグッズご予約〆切間近！
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BIGアクリルスタンドや缶バッジセットなど
美しいビジュアルが映えるグッズをお見逃しなく！

受付期間🗓
2/18（日）23:59まで⚠

詳細はこちら⚔️ https://t.co/FB41B4j2Tp#俺レベ#SoloLeveling pic.twitter.com/6JdAlAk4Ad

— HMV&BOOKS（HMV）公式 (@HMV_Japan) February 16, 2024

▶︎ Items Available

• BIG A4 Sized Acrylic Stands – 3,850 yen
  Shun Mizushima
  Shizuku Kohsaka
  Kenta Morobishi
• Acrylic Panel – Key Visual – 3,850 yen
• 3 Pin Button Set – 1,650 yen

Pre-orders for the Vol.1 DVD/Blu-ray will also open on February 18.
You can see what all comes with that here.

EDITORIAL

For anyone interested in what happens behind the scenes on the development of CG anime, here’s a great look at what’s generally called the Vcon (short for video conte or storyboard), which takes the original still shots from the storyboard and translates it into video as it’s meant to be seen on screen. This is an extremely vital milestone that any show goes through during production. Let’s take a closer look at the Vcon for the Solo Leveling opening sequence!

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• On a side note, I will be using the Japanese names of the characters in the anime rather than their original counterparts in the Korean manhwa. Lastly, this is a bit of a long post, but I sort of wanted to take a really close look at everything and sort of express my excitement for this show! Please read on at your leisure!

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First of all, to begin this discussion, we need to take a look at the Vcon, which Atsushi Kaneko, producer on the show, shared on his Twitter account, which you can see below.

Thanks for this opportunity made possible because of this work. You guys did a great job.
I am proud to have had you guys involved.
Thank you so much,Choi Inseung & His team！！@Crunchyroll#SoloLeveling #俺レベ pic.twitter.com/nOi9oa8wnw

— 金子敦史 (@kanegone_1006) January 13, 2024

First of all, let’s identify the various things that are displayed on the screen at all times throughout the video. I am also not a pro at this, so I will try to explain things as best to my ability.

• Cut # – This is the number of the cut sequence, which always starts at 001 and goes up from there. For a full-length animated episode of roughly 24 minutes, give or take a few, generally have around 250 or so total sequences. If you’re not too sure what a cut sequence is, a simple way to describe it is whenever the shot on the screen switches. This is not a very precise description, but will do to get a very rudimentary idea of what we’re talking about here. Cut numbers are often labeled with a small c and then the cut number: ie. c001
• Timecode – A sequence of numeric codes generated at regular intervals by a timing synchronization system, used extensively for synchronization and for logging and identifying material in recorded media. [wikipedia] A colloquial term for this would be something like “timestamp”. Breaking down the numbers we first have HOURS, MINUTES, SECONDS, and FRAMES. Please note that the FRAMES here only goes up to 30 and is reset back to 1. These numbers are super important because animators need to know how many frames to animate per second, which will be determined cut by cut. This is all pre-determined by the storyboarder.
• Frame # – This is the specific frame in the sequence. Anime generally runs 24 frames per second.

Also, taking a look the symbols and storyboard arrows for storyboarding camera moves from this blog would also be extremely beneficial to deconstructing the storyboards and implementing it into the Vcon. I might also discuss some of these camera movements where applicable.

▶︎ Deep-dive look at some amazing cut sequences

I’m not going to discuss every single cut in the opening sequence, but I will pick out many to discuss in greater detail below.

▲ c014 – This is the shot where Mizushino is going through the item list on a display. The writing in red, although I can’t quite read what it says below (it might be written in Korean), indicates that this section is meant to be the UI on the item menu display.

▲ c016 – This cut is interesting because of all the moving parts in it. We’ve got various cars driving different directions on the road, people playing basketball in the court behind the character in the foreground, and said character is also walking to the left as the camera pans to the left along with the character.

▲ c020 – This is an interesting cut because you can see how the background shifts and you can see how they manipulated the camera with the blue and red boxes that move on the screen.

c023-032 – This set of sequences go by so quickly and there’s so much happening on screen, you really need to slow down the video to see everything that’s going on. The perspective for each cut in this sequence is hugely important and changes often, enhancing the feeling of movement of each character through the space. It’s a long set of sequences, so I’ll break it down into some of the more interesting parts that I can notice.

▲ c023 – This is when the character runs right in front of the camera which shakes to give the impression of the power behind his jump. This is an effect that is added into the Vcon with Premier or whatever video editing software they’re using. For professionals who know how to use editing software can pull off this sort of movement very easily, but for those who are just learning, getting the right camera movement in a shake like this can be quite difficult (speaking from experience).

▲ c024-025 – What I really love about these cuts is how amazing this action movement feels when you add in the background skyscrapers with the character running under the bridge that quickly whips from left to right to indicate such speed (there are also some camera shakes here), which leads into the next couple of cuts when he gets punched by the monster and flung into the building. The red square that is drawn on for the perimeter of c024 indicates from where to where the camera will pan left. The perspective of c025 which shows the interior of the building as he’s flying through that space looks and feels amazing.

▲ c025 – At first, I thought something burst out of his hand that he used as a sort of magic rope to help him stop his momentum through and out of the building, but I believe he actually grabs onto the wire of a utility pole. We also a bit of a diagonal pan down to the bottom left.

▲ c026 – Here we see him wrapping his hand and arm around the electric wire, which he pulls at and completely severs it. You can also see that they’ve added a blur to the background since they want to focus in on him wrapping his arm around the wire.

▲ c027 – The next part of this sequence uses some interesting video effects to depict the currents of electricity that’s shocking him as he gets flung into a utility pole.

▲ c028 – Here we apparently see him running along the electric wire which still carrying the live wire behind him, and as the camera pans to the left, we see the monster punch at him, and it’s this arm that he begins to run up in the following shot.

▲ c029 – The main thing that we notice in this shot is both the speed at which the monster is still throwing his arm plus the forward momentum that Mizushino is heading toward the monster. There’s all sorts of movement in this cut alone that it’s difficult to catch all the camera movements. earlier at frame 6, we can see a green boarder line, which we haven’t seen yet (we’ve seen red, blue, purple thus far).

▲ c030 – Here we see Mizushino flying forward and sinking his knife into the monster’s arm and then down the front of its entire head.

▲ c031 – This has got to be my favorite part of the whole opening sequence when Mizushino keeps the momentum going backward as more and more things around him whiz past him, clearly illustrating just how fast he’s moving backward. An interesting thing to note here is how many colored boxes come into focus only to get smaller and smaller, depicting the sheer distance that now stands between the monster and he. There’s like five or six of these boxes that zoom into the background. This part looks absolutely amazing.

Here’s a quick look at the rough genga version as shared by Atsushi Kogane:

OP animation
担当：Choi Inseung & His Team
excellent works ➄
Landing and checking for wounds@Crunchyroll#SoloLeveling #俺レベ pic.twitter.com/Gz1VIZsngB

— 金子敦史 (@kanegone_1006) January 15, 2024

▲ c033 – There’s not too much to say about this shot, but I thought it was interesting as the red arrow shows the direction of movement of the cars and other stuff on the road coming toward him.

▲ c033 – This shot I thought just looked cool and somewhat symbolic as it shows a bunch of crows on a utility pole. There could be many ways of interpreting this but here are some of the more common symbols of crows:

• Death
• The Afterlife
• Wisdom
• Intellilgence
• Adaptability
• Prescience
• Fortune
• Destiny
• Transformation
• The Future

The majority of these, I think, could speak a lot for the main character, what he’s gone through and what lies in store for him in the future…

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There’s still a lot of that I’d like to talk about, but for the lack of time at the moment, I’ll skip on down to Cut 051 where it seems like these frames are much more rudimentary and rough. Just as with everything else in production work, somethings get finished sooner than others, so for this particular version of the Vcon, it seems as though these final cuts weren’t quite the finalized version that would later be spliced into the next version of the Vcon. This process repeats over and over again until the whole thing is complete.

I’ll try to come back and talk more about these middle cuts when I have more time!

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▲ c053 – Here you can see what I mean about this looking like much more rough sketches than the cuts above. The background has yet to be added along with whatever special effects they want to add into the scene. The red text at the top reads “image BG”, simply depicting that the BG image hasn’t been added yet. If you pay attention to the red and purple boxes, you can see how much the camera is moving and shaking here.

▲ c054-060 – This continues on from c054-059, where c060-061 shows the normal Mizushino and then the powered up version of him later, depicting a sort of Before and After sequence of his rebirth, in a way.

▲ c062 – This next shot was interesting to me because again we see some red text pointing toward his dark dagger as he’s pulling it out of some monster.

The next couple cuts shows Mizushino fighting a bunch of monsters in his typical cool gymnastic fashion, and then…

▲ c066 – We get this creepy thing. I had seen someone else online talk about this, and I assume that it’s supposed to be foreshadowing something, but I don’t know enough of the story yet to know what significance this may have. I’m going to guess that this is sort of where his “stronger self” comes from, sort of like its coming out from within.

Actually, when you watch the completed opening, you can see more that this figure does resemble the new, powered-up version of Mizushino:

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▲ c066 – And here’s something that I didn’t quite notice or realize, but there was definitely something in his hand. So, the pink rope or whatever that seemed to come out of his hand must have been from this, whatever it is. It looks like a gaping mouth with many small teeth inside… Super creepy!

▲ c069 – Lastly, we get the title screen as the camera shakes and zooms out from a close-up to faraway shot of our main protagonist.

The opening sequence officially ends with Cut 069 at 1:28:12, 114. This last cut also apparently has the most frames as well, even though I think the majority of them are simply during the fade to black, which begins around frame 60.

Now that you’ve gotten through all of that, why not check out the no credit version below:

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So, all-in-all, I thought this was a really well structured, designed, and implemented opening sequence that does everything an OP is meant to do. You’re supposed to be introduced to the main character(s), get a glimpse into the action and what to expect from it, all the while sort of telling a progressive narrative, a sort of path of the hero, if you will, from his origins to the present. Pretty darn cool and I’m all the more interested in this show just by looking more closely at these sequences that rush by you at lightning speed. Sometimes you really need to put it in slow motion to be able to catch the minuscule fine details that really enrich the world and these characters.

Also, definitely let me know what you think of the show thus far and if you’re already a fan of the original work, please try to avoid spoilers! Thanks!!

▶︎ Related Links

• Atsushi Kaneko – Official Twitter
• A-1 Pictures – Official Site
• Storyboard Camera Movement – Tips and Techniques