The Smash Bros. Lawlorial: How to make a Lawl Moveset

Hi, I'm Skapokon, and today I'm going to do a tutorial about how to make a Smash Bros. Lawl moveset.

You see, a lot of people have been telling me that they want to make their own Lawl, and asked me how do I make them. And while I tell them which programs I use, I don't tell them how to because it's a very long process. This is why there are differents steps you have to follow when making your moveset. I'm also going to provide examples for this, mostly from my own movesets.


So, let's begin with the first step:

STEP 1: PLANNING

This is the most essential part of a moveset, the character itself. You have to think what character are you going to make. Since most people that are watching this haven't made any moveset yet, you may also think of more characters to fill the Roster, that you can even show in the video if you want. When thinking of characters for Lawl, there's one thing you have to keep in mind: Lawl is not your Smash Bros Wishlist. The characters you add in the game must be extremely unlikely to happen in a real Super Smash Bros game. Be creative, think of the characters of your favourite TV Shows or movies, Internet Celebrities and webshow characters, parodies of the Smash characters themselves... You can even check suggestions given to other Lawlers to get ideas. You shouldn't add characters that already have a good moveset. Comparisons are hateful, and remakes should be limited to bad movesets.

Anyways, once you have decided your character you must think of the moveset. For this, you need to be creative, and you don't need Sony Vegas to do that. There are two things that are essential for a moveset: Faithfulness and Creativity.

Creativity means that the moves are moves or concepts we have never seen before. Even if you take inspiration from attacks from other characters, you need to make them different. Toon Guybrush for example has his Neutral B: Pirate's Pocket. This attack allows him to take items from his pocket like CD-i Link. BUT! Unlike CD-i Link, the regular items rarely appear and you will mostly get special items with their own habilities, making the attack different. Heck, CD-i Link's stuff might be based on Peach's Turnips. With asdfguy, this is notable on his Down B, which is in a way similar to Ophelia Chill's Book of Ages, but the effects are totally different, and allow me to add a bunch of elements from asdfmovies. Speaking of that...

Faithfulness is giving the character moves he or she is known for. For example, what do you think when you think of Yzma? You think of her potions, her assistant Kronk... Oh! And that funny scene where Kronk pulls the wrong lever and she falls through a trapdoor. Or her plan where she smashes Kuzco with a Hamma'. You can't say, “Hey, this character punches in this scene from this episode, that must be his Neutral B!”. No! Bad Lawler! That could be his Jab, or his Side Tilt, not a special! Speaking of episodes, when you're making a character that comes from a TV Show, you should try to use stuff that appears in many episodes. Captain N uses his Zapper like all the time on his show, so that must be an attack for sure. There might be stuff that even if in the source material they weren't important, it might have become a Meme. This is important for characters that don't have much material by their own, like The King. With asdfguy, I added a move that's called “Puke”, as it's a running joke that the characters in asdfmovies puke. No matter if it's rainbows, cats or other guys.

I'd continue giving tips for the moveset itself, but you're probably watching this for the “technical stuff”, so let's move on.

Once you have thought of the moveset, remember to write it down on a document, so you won't forget any details about it. And once it's done, we can go to the next step...

STEP 2: SCRIPT

Well, this is something that I used to not do when I started, and started to do it in Worst Herc's moveset. This is where I write down who is going to appear in every part of the moveset and where. If this is your first moveset, you probably won't need it because you'll only use the character you're making and a Sandbag, and you're probably going to use Smash Bros stages, but this is really useful when you have made more. I basically use a template that looks like this:

Move

What happens

Opponents:

Stage:

And I fill this with the characters and stages that will appear. I often try to use the stages and characters the same amount of times because if not people would say I'm biased towards or against some characters. The “What Happens” part can be used several times, depending of how complex the attack is. asdfguy, for example, has this move that affects both himself and what's around him, so it would look like this:

Up B: Screw Gravity

Show

Opponents: Timmy's Dad

Stage: The Turners' House

Gravity affects other things

Opponents: Doofenshmirtz, Sheldon Cooper

Stage: Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.

The first time I show the attack I always write “Show”. Right after the first part, I show the inspiration clip, but I'll explain that in later step. Once you have made the entire script, you're ready for the next part:

STEP 3: ANIMATIONS

For this part, you'll need Pivot and any program to edit pictures (MS Paint, Photoshop...). First you'll need the poses for the characters. For that, you need to make Screen Caps of the poses. Not only one per pose, of course. You'll need to make more to make the illusion of animation. Once you have a screen cap, you need a program like Photoshop, and use one of these two tools:

With them and a bit of the paintbrush tool you'll have something like this:

Of course, sometimes the poses won't be complete, so you can either “finish” them by yourself, like I did here with the Time Machine, or mix it with another pose. ASDFGuy is a perfect example to talk about this as in asdfmovies the guys often don't show their legs, but they do sometimes. So you pick the pose and paste the legs there. In ASDFGuy's case, arms don't usually matter because... Homestuck logic. But remember that they sometimes have arms, and you'll have to “complete” those as well.

Some Lawlers use their programs to directly record the animations, but I don't know how to do it in Videopad. Once you have made the poses, you'll have to make the stages too. Sometimes, like with Kuzco's Palace, you only need to make an screencap of said stage. But sometimes you'll have to edit the stage as well. I said Kuzco's Palace as I use that stage as a “base” of the animation's size.

Now that we have the poses and the stage, we now can use Pivot for the first time. Here's how it will look:

(I added annotations explaining what does everything do)

Congratulations! We now are on the most important part of the entire moveset. First, I really really recommend to make a “Template” animation. One that only has 3 frames: an empty stage with 2, 3 and 4 HUD boxes respectively. I recommend having this because when making the animations, the HUD won't look off if you have the mugshots on the same position everytime.

Also, to make the mugshots, you can use these bases made by a fellow friend. Logos can be made on Photoshop with the “color replace” tool, and the names of the characters just with the text tool. Keep this tool in mind as you'll also have to use it to make the characters flash in blue before using their Final Smash. Percentage is easier. Just use the text feature, or directly rip the numbers from Smash Bros here. Percentage is important for me. Part of the charm of a good moveset (except for Joke Movesets) is the “I want to play as this character” feel, and percentage makes this easier to get. If you have trouble finding out how much damage do attacks deal, just go to Training Mode in Smash with a character that has a similar attack and see how much does it do. For example, asdfguy will have a move where he uses a bomb, so I just pick Link and see how much his bombs deal.

With this out of the way, we can make our first animation, the entrance. To add the poses, you have to go to the “File” tab from Pivot and select “add sprite”.

 

There you can also find “add background”, which is exactly what you think it is. If you already have a “base background”, when they ask you if you want to change the dimension of the animation ajust to the background's size, select “no”.

Once you have placed your sprites and background, press “next frame”. When you do this, if you change anything, you'll see a water mark showing how the previous frame looked like. This is basically Stop Motion: make small changes one by one to make the illusion of animation. Take this in mind to make your animations more fluid.

Once an “action” is done, I recommend you to add several more identical frames, as not doing that would probably make the moveset look awkward as it would go from one attack to another too fast. Even then, you can later edit this with VideoPad.

Basically, this is the whole animation process. Repeat several times with each of the attacks, KO Sounds and Taunts. I'd explain how to make it animation per animation, but it's not really that complex. Add sprites when you need to, change background when you need to. That's it. Well, now that you have finished all the animations, it's time for the next step.

STEP 4: RECORDING

Pivot's files do not count as videos, so we will have to turn them into them. The easiest choice to do this is with Pivot itself. File>Export Animation, change the settings, and your animation is now in Avi form. For some reason, when I do this in my computer, the animations end up being laggy, but if in yours they don't, use this. It's so much easier.

However, if your computer is like mine, you can record your screen with any screen-recording program and they play the animation in Pivot. I use Bandicam, but since it has a water mark what I have to do is make the recording square bigger and then crop the animation in VideoPad to remove the water mark.

If you have a better program, use it instead. Camtasia is very good, but it doesn't go well in my computer. And once your animations are now videos, you can go to the next step.

STEP 5: EDITING AND SOUNDS

This can be done with pretty much every editing program ever, but I use VideoPad v3.22.

In VideoPad, the most important functions are “Add File” (allows you to include images, videos and music), “Add Text” (No question), the Scissors (allows you to cut the clips), the camera (takes a snapshot of the video) and “Export Video”.

First you use “Add File” to add all the animations you made on Pivot. Before dragging them into the video, I recommend to make the intro itself. Intros can vary in many different ways. Sometimes they can be just sentence mixing (cutting different parts of the audio to pretend that a character is saying something), or will require to edit the video. This is why I'm not going to explain how to make them in this tutorial. Same with the “Character Select” clip, as it can be done in many different ways, and it's also not required for a moveset.

Now for what DOES matter, the animations for the moveset itself. To add them, you must drag them from the “video files” folder to the timeline which is seen below. Once it's put, I recommend you to take snapshots of the first and last frame of the different “effects” of the moves, and add them at the beginning and end of those portions of the animation. That way, the audience will have time to understand what's going on with the moveset, as not doing it will make it hard to read once you add the text explaining what the moves do. However, you must not make these too long or else it will feel like a waste of time.

As for inspiration clips, I recommend to put them after the first time an attack it's shown, but some put them right at the end of the move, so anything goes. Just don't show it before the move appears or in the middle for no reason. Once you have done one, repeat for each one of the attacks. I don't like putting ICs for Entrances and Final Smashes, but you can. Speaking of Inspiration Clips, keep them short for the same reason as the snapshots I mentioned earlier. If you have Copyright Troubles you can avoid using Inspiration Clips.

Now it's time to explain how to add text and sounds. For the texts, go to “Add Text” and the text you write will be added as an image in the image folder. For the movesets, I use Arial 6, with black outline and white interior. To add texts, you must drag them and place them over the clips. Sometimes you can put text over a black screen to mention obvious things or just to avoid showing the same thing twice. If you watch my movesets you'll know what I'm talking about. However “Show, don't tell”. Avoid using too much text with showing little to no animation. Don't forget to show the text during a few seconds to avoid Pause2Read.

I used also to add the texts in the animations themselves, but I don't recommend doing that anymore. Seriously, just don't do that.

As for sounds, you need to use two kinds of sounds: The character's source sounds (which are obtained by cropping the sound you want and unlink the video from the audio) and sounds from Smash Bros, which can be found in pages like Sounds Resource. I have a Fangame called “Super Smash Bros. Crusade” which has almost every sound from Brawl with recognisable names, so I recommend downloading it to get the sounds for the movesets. I also recommend the game a lot, it's very good. I used to add sounds after adding the music, but now I recommend to do it before adding the music in case you have to edit something from the moveset to match the sounds (most specifically, the characters saying something). Sounds also have layers, like ogres, so if you want to add more than one sound at the same time, you'll have to place it right below the other sounds. As far as I know, there's no limit.

Now that we have reached to the Final Smash, I recommend making the KO Sounds, Taunts, Victory Poses, Codec (optional) and extras (who's next, voting polls, endings...) for another file, and then put them both together in another file in the next step. VideoPad tends to crash if you add too many things to a project. KO Sounds and Taunts are made on the same way as the Specials, but Victory Poses are a bit different. You can either do what I do, just using the clips from the original source with the “WINNER: (Character)” added using the “Add Text” function. But if you are good at animating, you can animate the Victory Poses themselves with Pivot. Victory Music can be added now or in the next step. Much like with the Roster and the intro, I'm not going to explain how to make Codecs as they are optional. Not to mention that they can either be done with Sentence Mixing (Game Grumps, Jameson...) or asking a friend to dub (Red & Leo, Skapokon...).

At this point we are almost done. All that's left is exporting these two parts of the moveset and one last step:

STEP 6: MUSIC

Open VideoPad, add the two parts of the moveset you made in the previous step, add the music to the second layer of the project, below the two parts' audio. It's that easy. For the music, I recommend to put two songs: one for Entrance-Final Smash and one for KO Sounds-Taunts. Of course, you can add more for miscellaneous stuff. The Menu theme, add a song in case you have to make an announcement, maybe the Final Smash will have a different song... But the basic number is 2. And that's it. Also, use music that has SOMETHING to do with the character. Do not put Undertale music unless it's an Undertale character.

Now you have the two parts together in one video and with music. Now you have to export it and upload it to Youtube! Oh, and by the way, try to pick the highest quality when you want to export the videos. Or else, the two parts will lose quality when you export them.

STEP 7: FEEDBACK

“But this is unnecessary!”. No, it's not. Feedback is very important. Not only to see who the viewers want to see in moveset form, but also to see how can you improve. If you get a negative comment, don't overreact, just keep it in mind for the next moveset. Even if it's a destructive comment (like “THIS SUCKS HARD”), ask why and how can you improve, unless the comment was given by a troll. Try to reply to comments as long as they have something to reply to. One-worded comments are worth ignoring, even if the word is “Cool” or “Great”.

And that's all... or is it? Because like Mr. Bones' Wild Ride, the Lawlorial never ends!

OK, not exactly like Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. What I'm saying is that you can ask me questions about doubts you have about moveset making, and I'll make a sequel to the Lawlorial answering those questions. I can also give you tips about how to improve your ideas for movesets.

And that's it. I hope you enjoy what I have been requested to do the most ever since I started making videos.