This outsourcing job.
Gu Xue had originally intended to handle only the fight scenes in episode eleven of Invasion. But when she decided to help, she discussed it with Misawa Hiroshi in the office. They came to the conclusion that the company's available animators—the batch of newcomers who'd been forcefully promoted to work on Ore-sama—weren't capable of drawing convincing robots.
They wanted to avoid having the work sent back by the contractor for repeated revisions.
So in the end, Misawa Hiroshi assigned Gu Xue all the shots from the moment the protagonist started piloting the robot onward, as long as they involved giant robots. They would all count as fight scenes, or action scenes, and were left to her.
Gu Xue agreed, but had one condition: once she'd drawn the storyboard, she would let a few newcomers try their hand at it first. If they couldn't manage, she'd do it herself. If they could at least make a passable attempt and showed talent, she'd give them pointers. It would be good practice for her future work as an animation supervisor.
But now Gu Xue regretted it.
Forget the newcomers.
She didn't have time.
After Mihara left, Gu Xue went back to drawing storyboards... or, more accurately, putting the images in her head onto paper.
She was... a little too into it. Or perhaps she was getting carried away.
She followed the script, but the shots she drew were all challenging, and the more she drew, the more she added. She made them quite detailed, too. To keep from forgetting the effects she'd come up with, she wrote a ton of notes in the margins. And true to her word, she'd even added a circus act for the protagonist—an extremely difficult one.
Gu Xue estimated how much time she had and