So Let's Talk About Sylvia Noventa

I think it's been long enough now that all of you have had a chance to watch Ep.10. I've been holding off talking about my favorite part of this episode so as to not spoil anyone. But now, let's talk about it!

We chose to bring Sylvia back because we were so impressed with Natepeach's performance on such a minor character in Ep.9, where she honestly stole the show. Originally we had no plans to make her any more than she was in the original show: a single-episode character meant to be a sympathetic example of Heero's mistakes. In fact, way back when I first put together an outline of season one's events, I even wrote: "Sylvia Noventa plotline - Do we even need this? Can we cut?" True story.

But Ep.9 left things in the air, with her reporting Heero & Trowa to the authorities, all as a funny excuse for them to flee to Antarctica. When brainstorming Ep.10, we thought... what if we bring her back? It would be a challenge since Sylvia has an extremely limited number of shots in the show: those in her home, those in the street when Heero nearly runs her over, and those in the cemetery. We thought, what if we could use her home as a sort of 'base of operations' and have her contact our heroes from there?

This is the logic that led to the edits you saw. Essentially, I replaced her photo frame with an iPad, justifying her head-on shots in Heero and Trowa's cockpits. It was a simple enough replacement using the picture frame she holds in the show. In the script we had written that she was sitting in front of a computer monitor, but why make so much more work for myself, right?

For the pilots' side of the conversation, however, we wanted them to seem compromised to emphasize Sylvia's threat, and what better shot of a compromised Heero than when he's flat on his own monitor? This involved a lot of eye edits to indicate who's talking to whom and with what attitude, as well as making lipflaps where previously none existed. Heero's up-close shot in Sylvia's iPad was also a hodgepodge, using shots from his Ep.4 meltdown, Ep.5 crawling through the ducts and his hand from the opening.

It was quite a bit of photoshopping work to make it all come together, but in the end, I was really happy with the results. And I hope you all were too.

As for Sylvia's future appearances, none of those are planned in detail yet, as we want to move forward at a faster pace once all the Gundam pilots are in space. If I were to make a wager, I'd say you won't see her again for at least a few episodes. But who knows how we'll bring her back? Or what she'll be doing to chase down those meddling Gundam pilots next time? Evil laughing ensues.