It takes a Village

“The very first Villager News video came about because one of [our] animators was playing around making vehicles out of villagers and they were hilarious,” says Dan Lloyd, co-creator of Element Animation. “We wrote a script based entirely around the idea of turning villagers into an actual helicopter. It was by far the dumbest thing we’d ever made – and it was entirely voiced by me!”

So why make animations about Minecraft? According to Dan, it all began ten years ago when Element Animation was still in its infancy, consisting only of Dan’s fiancée Chrisi as well as their mutual friend Jason Sargeant, who they always joked would end up living in their attic one day. Together, they were learning everything they could about animation by making fun videos. Well, at least whenever Jason wasn’t busy playing a certain blocky game between his animation sessions. At some point, he even wanted to start making videos about his new experience. 

“It didn’t fully click until I’d played it myself,” Dan tells me. “Our next video was late. I spent three days solid playing Minecraft. I'd never experienced a game that gave the player so much freedom and creative control – the same thing that attracted me to animation attracted me to Minecraft: if you can imagine it, you can make it.“ 

Luckily, Dan & co had plenty of imagination! The result was “An Egg’s Guide to Minecraft”, a series about (I’m sure you can guess) an egg’s guide to Minecraft. As of episode four, Element Animation began including villagers as side characters. The problem was that they lacked a voice.  

“I decided to substitute my voice in for animation,” Dan remembers, “then get a new voice actor to dub over my lines once we found one. The voice was really silly and monotone, and it was never meant to make it into the final video. We didn’t manage to find a voice actor, so we released it with the placeholder voice.” 

Placeholder or not, the first Villager News hit one million views within its first week – the biggest video launch they had ever released. People loved it and kept asking for more, which they also got! Ten years later, we’re still getting videos with Dan’s monotone villager. 

Today, Element Animation is sporting a channel close to four million subscribers on YouTube, which I must confess is pretty impressive compared to my four subscribers. We could probably end the story right here with Dan, Jason, and Chrisi living happily ever after in the attic, but let’s not, because there is still a lot to tell. 

As their channel has kept growing, so has the scope of their projects. When they’re not busy helping us with Minecon and release trailers, they create music videos and even short movies. One of their latest, “Villager News: War”, is a whole 14 minutes long and became far more ambitious than Dan and team ever expected.  

“The original script was supposed to be 25 minutes long and included a huge battle between villagers and creepers,” says Dan. “There was no way we were going to finish it in a reasonable time so it ended up being split into two videos. Each part took around 6-8 months which is far too long for a YouTube upload schedule, but we felt these videos needed that time to make them as good as they could be. We had to learn how to do crowd simulation, voxel fire and explosions, and make lots of fighting animations for the crowds. With every video we try to do something we’ve never done before, to make each one better than the last!” 

Once animation is done for a particular shot, several processes follow: crowd simulation, physics simulation, Jason playing with fire, and rendering. Rendering is where all the lighting is applied to the models, which can take hours on detailed shots for a single frame. “We would never have a video out in time if we used our own computers to render,” says Dan. “We send them to a render farm, a huge cluster of over 100 computers. The computers render a frame each and then send us back the finished frames.” 

Many, many computer renditions later, that is to say six to eight months, and you end up with a beautiful, hilarious piece of work ready to be shared with excited subscribers. By now, Element Animation has done well over a hundred animations. The fact that they haven't yet made a full-blown musical is a mystery, but possibly it’s just a matter of time. 

“That would be the dream! I’ve always wanted to do longer content, to be able to have a more complex story and fit more character development and really get the audience to connect with them. Over half of our team have a musical background and we all love making little jingles. In our spare time we make little riffs and musical ideas and send them to each other, every now and again one of those feels like it would fit the channel. We also work a lot with other channels on some of our music videos; Dan Bull is a hugely talented musician and his work sparked off all of our Minecraft rap videos.” 

The only problem, according to Dan, is that music videos take too long to make, and that the YouTube channel can’t fund bigger productions like the ones the studio wants to do. “But if we had the budget, we’d definitely spend a year or two and make something epic! Hint to any producers out there reading this!” 

Ten years of eggs and villagers, and Element Animation is still going strong. Despite their ambitions to go bigger, they’ve recently started to experiment with shorter content to get videos out faster. If we’re lucky, we’ll get at least ten more. 

“Once Minecraft became a part of our channel it was here to stay. It's a huge part of our lives and always will be. There’s no official storyline in it – you make of it what you want. This makes it the perfect vessel for storytelling.”