Making of: Critical Role CMV

October 08, 2026

Making of: Critical Role CMV

Sooo. I made a CMV(cosplay music video). Here is a post about the process and all craziness involved!

The poster. Can you find the hidden drawing?

The video

Goal: Make a CMV of Jester from Critical Role which looks cinematic, feels like the character and is filmed with minimal amount of people involved (and without getting any new camera gear🙃)

Why minimal amount of people? Because I am only just practising videography and I didn't want to waste many people's time on a project that might require re-shooting and lots of tinkering. It would feel horrible to have a shooting day where the material came out completely unusable thanks to some user error or oversight.

I have always loved music videos, ever since I got access to them when we moved to city with more television channels(MTV!) and later on through internet. There is something about creating a story and a visual theme that fits to few minutes. Music videos can push editing and specific style further than normal videos/movies. And there just happens to be a thing named CMVs. I could combine several of my hobbies from camera work to cosplay to crafting! The idea of Critical Role CMV brewed for a few years, and this year I decided to try to tackle the challenge. Damn, I even got my new-old camera three years ago with the idea that I want to make videos. NOW WAS THE TIME.

Phases

For me the process was pretty much:

Come up with the idea, decide on a song and plan the scenes roughly
Ask Nevara if she wanted to partake in this crazy project and be my Traveler👉👈 I'm glad she agreed as she looked absolutely amazing as him.
Gather or create materials = costumes and costume parts, decorations, props
Plan shooting days, location scouting
Create more detailed story boards
Practise shooting: get to know All Things Camera Settings
Shooting! Endlessly thanking friends and family for the assistance
Editing!
Self-doubt
Post video online

Plans and locations

I wanted to shoot the video close to home. The goal was to shoot everything in one day, so any lengthy travel would've instantly taken out of shooting (or break!!) time. For locations the important things were that indoors I could control the light, and outdoors that we could minimize any modern structures, and have a clean background.

I ended up choosing the local church, and nearby flower cafe, who were okay with shooting. For location scouting outdoors, I utilized Google maps and various internet resources, but I can say that it's always best to go see the spots yourself on the location.

Indoors I ran around with my camera to see if my kitchen area would fit the image, and to decide on what I would need for dressing it up.

Props and stuff

This CMV included quite a bit of prop-work and preparing. I don't really own too much pink stuff and Traveler needed his costume too. And trying to create the feeling of a bit prettier-fancier place took some effort.

Some things I had to make/get/gobble together:

Traveler costume, consisting of ages-old blood elf -ears, a green cloak bought from Middle ages --shop and a dirt-cheap wig gotten from online marketplace. I made a traveler-symbol brooch for the cloak and sewed some golden bling around the hood. The eyebrows were made from the wig while lovingly reminiscing the days of WoW-costumes.
Jester's outift is a handmade costume bought from another hobbyist. I wanted her level 1 outfit rather than the next one and I didn't want to 1) buy some cheapo china-costume 2) craft something half-assed for this. I love the design but didn't have time or tbh, the will to make it myself. her costum wasn't the main thing in the video for me, but to bring the whole project alive.
3D-printed things. The Traveler brooch & same thing in smaller size for Jester's necklace, few unicorn-hamsters and a small but very important lollipop.
The big lollipop was a quite fast build from Finnfoam, PVC-pipe, newspaper with glue and some Ikea curtains sacrificed for the big bow.
For decorations I thrifted some curtains and tried to set up our dining area to look like it belongs to a fancy mansion. A friend loaned to me the Tusk Love -book. The Lavish Chateau -calendar I had bought from CR shop some years past, alongside the Der Katzenprinz -notebook. I appreciate if someone spots all these "easter eggs"!
And of course it's not Jester without pink cupcakes. The cupcake container cardboard thingies were leftover from my Jester photoshoot some years past. The cupcakes itself were also quite yummy.

I'm hobbit-sized, but Nevara is luckily taller.

I frankensteined together an unicorn hamster from a hamster, unicorn and a dragon 3d-models

Storyboarding

The (illegible) storyboard.

Making the storyboard was definitely useful, even if I didn't end up using it. I should have taken a few peeks at it, as I did forget a few things. For the storyboard I tried to write down all the scenes with each framing, direction and focal length, if applicable. Then, on shooting day, no time would be wasted on planning as we could simply execute. This was one of the tips I took home from the numerous Youtube-tutorials I watched for this project. Value everyone's time, plan everything in advance.

Practising

Okay so. I have never made a video with a story before. Best course of action therefore was to practise. I tested out some shots at home which I planned to film at home, in those same locations. I tested with different times of the day to see when would be the best time to film, as I was mainly depending on natural light. I went outside to test cuts, and to just get used to filming moving picture. Pans, B-roll, everything. So that on shooting day I would know what I'm doing as much as possible. And also what was possible without a gimbal as majority of the footage would be shot by someone other than me.

I didn't end up practising much of the acting, but this is definitely a thing which should be paid more attention to. On the shooting day we did dry-run the scenes before the camera went on and figured out together the best positioning and poses.

Shooting plans

Self imposed rules! And nerdy tech stuff

For filming I set some rules for myself. My current camera's kit of lenses are 2.8 16-55mm zoom and 1.4 33mm prime. To have the images look consistent and not all over the place as can happen with a zoom, I planned to only use certain focal lengths. Note: These are APS-C numbers, I will provide the full-frame equivalents for comparison.

I tried my best during storyboarding phase to plan the focal lengths for the shots in advance, as we had multiple people operating the camera.

I ended up using only the zoom and mainly:

16mm(24mm full frame) as my wide lens. Could've used even wider lens but this is what we had!
23mm (35mm Full frame) as the main focal length
55mm(85mm) for extra close ups.

Other things that I took into account when shooting were the limitations that had to be planned around. I don't have a gimbal, so any manual camera movement had to be minimal. Mostly manual focus was used so that camera auto focus didn't have a change to fail (a pet peeve of mine to see that and Fuji doesn't do AF-C overly well). Overall the camera operating part needed to be as easy as possible so that any of us could take up the job, and it wouldn't cause any stress for the participants. Most of the shots were shot with tripod, where I framed the shot to be ready beforehand.

For fantasy-dreamy-look I wanted to use my black-mist-filter on whole video.

Shooting day

Outdoors

Date was set, plans had been planned. I wanted indoor and outdoor shots, so I made the schedule based on the movement of the sun. The windows were facing north-west, so indoor shots were for after 6pm. Outdoor shots were supposed to be taken before that, during the flower cafe operating hours. BUT.... We got to the first location and after 5 minutes it started raining.

Jester was sad, let-down and panicing a bit, Traveler just looked cool as always.

I was quite sad at this point since the sudden rain seemed to ruin half a shooting day. It wasn't supposed to rain before evening! We had the next day as back up -day, but these costumes did take quite a long to put on. No can do, back indoors we go..

Fun story: While we were setting up to shoot at the church parking lot, a police van arrived. They drove to the end of the lot, and seemed to stay there to stalk us. But it actually was accidental alarm at the church which summoned them. They did stop by us to wonder and ask what the costumes were though! And later when we were moping under the shed's roof wondering what to do about the rain, the priest who was leaving commented to us that "it is pretty bad weather to cosplay!". We were surprised that he knew about cosplay, but still, hey, thanks for noting the obvious!

Traveler isn't so sure if this is the best time for vandalizing church walls. Pic: Nevara

Indoors

Escaping the rain, we shot the less lighting-sensitive indoor shots first as the light was ~~crap~~ sub-optimal. I just set up a construction work led panel to help a bit. So the prank shots were shot, utilizing my hubby as the prank victim. We managed to film each prank in about an hour. When done, it was starting to be the time for evening shots. Sky was grey, but no can do. (Future me edit: I ended up only using one of the pranks in the final film)

Led panel was like this. It is a light. I got the tip from T&T's CMV-lecture.

The opening scene was something I wanted to put more effort into. I tried to use as few moving camera shots as possible as gimbal wasn't available, but the opening shot needed it. I wonder if it's noticeable from the video that in the end three different people operated the camera.

The drawings that are very first thing in the video and introduce the viewer to Jester's whimsy world. She is such an artist.

Shooting the scenes was very straightforward, as I had the storyboard well memorized in my head. We took wide&medium&close-ups of all(or most) the scenes to have lots of material to choose from. Close-ups were used as a means of highlighting something important to the current scene. Overall the story that was happening was important for me to deliver well. I hope I managed to bring it to life.

Outdoors! Again

The good part of Finnish Summer: Sun was still way up after we finished the indoor shots(around 6:30pm?). So we decided to stretch the day, be brave and go shoot the outdoors still on the same day! Quick food break, powered by thai take-out, and out we went. The flower cafe was closed already, but we just kept our eyes open and picked a random field on the way to the church.

The time constraints caused some sloppiness and rushing on my part, but we got the important shots. For next time: No rush. The feeling of hurry causes errors, even if I do want the shooting to feel smooth and snappy.

After church shots we drove few minutes to the field, which was just a regular field with handy tractor-track to walk on. The field scene was the last in the video, which did feel fitting as we filmed it last. Time for Jester to realize how beautifully strange she is allowed to be! I didn't try anything too fancy with the transformation-shot, only hoped for the best that my idea would work. There was way more elaborate setup planned, but it would've required way too much know-how of sfx-editing, which I own zero of. I did shoot these shots at 50fps compared to the rest shot at 25fps so that I could add minor slow-motion to the spinning.

Some random car really slowed down while we were filming to gawk at us, I guess the locals aren't really used to cosplayers...

After getting the last planned shots, we took few clips for the end credits. Everyone was spent but content after the shoot.

Editing

For editing I use DaVinci Resolve, which I have really liked. It can do all the things I need and my kinda old computer can handle it. Nothing to complain about. Internet is full of tutorials for this (free!) program.

The at times potato quality of my footage had the effect that in the end I didn't end up spending ton of time on any fancy editing as it felt like going to waste... next time, I swear, I will do better! Then the footage will be worth spending time on 😂

The kid-level SFX text animation is something that Jester would do so it kinda fits.

Conclusion

This project was a big undertaking, spanning over a long period of time. I feel like I learnt a lot about making a video project and I definitely want to make more! I learnt that having too many responsibilities for one person is a cause for forgetting things and making mistakes. Scheduling issues (sunlight running out) had the effect that I ended up rushing the outdoor shots, which wasn't optimal. In the future, I would prefer to either stay behind the camera all the time, or be responsible for other things, but not do ALL of the things at the same time. Luckily I had very helpful and fast-learning co-creators ❤️🧁

Few things I'd like to improve on and pay more attention to next time:

Lighting. Now I simply didn't have time to tinker with light too much. I had some negatives at ready for indoors, but for outdoors we didn't really have any extra hands for reflectors or such. Light is one of the most important things and should get a lot of attention during the shoot.

Acting practise, before and during the shoot. Again, too many responsibilities. Also, neither of us has lot of experience being on a video. I think it would be important to have more time for going through the scene during filming, and maybe try out two different options.

Technical issues. There were also some stupid stuff like not checking the lens of the camera. At one point I started to wonder why the footage was so desaturated.. well, the lens was fogged up. Also there was a tiny speck of dirt in half the shots that only showed on big screen so I had to add dust remover -fix to the footage... Oh well, these things are meant to happen so we learn from them! My next video won't look like it was filmed with a potato. Potato definitely isn't the intention.

In the end, my main goal was to create a story which would bring a smile to those who know Critical Role's season 2. I love cosplaying the blue tiefling, and I wish my love for the series shows. Second important goal was to get practise with videography, and to get a finished product to prove to myself that I can do this. I think that was successful!

Until next time.

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