Some other notes about the Hare Hare video -
I had to green screen/chroma key the first part, and animate the crest into the background in Adobe Premiere. That's why Wasabi is slightly blurrier at the start - I was trying to get as much of the green edge off her as possible.
Speaking of, I had to shoot/record the entire song 3 times, once with Wasabi alone on a green background, once with the three girls on the Yellow/black background, and once with all 5 on the classroom set. Obviously, I switched back and forth between the 3 shots in Premiere.
Kyon!Fade and Koizumi!Film re-use the Yuki!Ash and Mikuru!CeltZ animation data, except for the last couple seconds, where I deleted the existing data and actually keyed the transition to final pose myself. In the process, referencing the source material, I noticed for the first time that Kyon and Koizumi don't finish the same way - Koizumi enthusiastically hops into his final pose, whereas Kyon just kind of steps into it begrudgingly. I didn't perfectly match the movements, but I think I got the gist across. I also decided to make Kyon!Fade's final pose even more phoned in, because Fade doesn't like anything, and his give a shit obviously just ran out.
Film Fanatic's eyes are shut the entire time, but Celt Z uses her eyes like a normal person. Kind of an ironic switch given HFA canon, but I decided to lean more toward the characters they were portraying in this case.
I considered making Fade and Film taller than the girls, to better match the source material as well, but that was a bridge too far, I finally decided. In game, all 5 of these characters are the same height ("Medium"). The only tall characters with the right build would have been Eriol and Gusto, but I didn't feel they fit the video as well as these two guys. Besides, I have other plans for Eriol.
I took major shortcuts on both the boys' models as well, to get this video out the door >_< neither guy has speaking phoneme morphs. I'll take care of that later. I've figured out how to do "mouth transplants" pretty well. I found that to copy a morph from one character to another, you have to copy all the meshes those morphs are on, and delete the duplicate vertices on the target model. I got the idea from how I'm handling the skirt now. Ash got Wasabi's mouth copied onto her head (with the textures changed to Ash's skin tones), which is why she took so much less time to complete than usual. Moving forward, I plan to make two separate "mouth" files (one male, one female) with all the phonemes on them, so that I can import it into other models. I wish I'd thought of this sooner, but it wasn't until working on this video that I realized it was even possible.
The boys' shirt tails are almost as big a pain in the ass as the girls' skirts have been.
And finally, much like the game episode series, I'm fearful I may have peaked with Wasabi's video