The Dark Side of the Sun: About noise and signal

I managed to finish this animated project called "the dark side of the sun".
I will make an extensive post about it soon.
Right now I have the urge to tell you what I discovered drawing for animation.
Basically, animation punishes you everytime you make a wrong choice of what it's really important and what's not.
Did you put a detail that wasn't necessary in your character design? Now draw it a thousand times!
It's like having a brutal old fashioned teacher sitting on your back!

That brought my style and the whole idea of drawing, expecially drawing characters, to a very new place.

The images above are the key pose drawings I had to do to let the animators to their job without having to guess by trial and error how and what to draw. They are only a sample (I had to do many, MANY more drawings doing the preproduction) of what I discovered.

I'm very proud of the results, and it may seem stupid to you that I consider the drawing above the biggest step forward in style I've ever made in years, and probably the best drawings I've ever made. People usually like my work because it's very detailed and complex, so the drawings above may look cheap, worthless 10 minutes sketches (and I actually had 10/20 minutes to decide/do the shots so it's partly true :) ).

These drawings are very important to me for their consistency and, at last, a good balance between noise and signal: that's my only goal when I start a drawing, illustration or comic panel.

What's next? Using my new skills doing comics as soon as possible!

The dark side of the sun | Model Sheets

Starting to archive my studies in a more organic way.
Here are some files from the character design.
Mckenzie (redesigned from scratch):



And Rachael:

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN

The Dark Side of the Sun is a film about children that have a very rare disease, XP.
In people with XP, sun causes skin cancer and other serious body damage even with very short exposure to it's UV rays.

Dan & Karen Mahar decided to make a dream come true and founded Camp Sundown, a very special place in the woods north of new york, where all the children with XP could play together in a UV free environment.



Carlo Hintermann (Citrullo International) went to Camp Sundown to shoot what it started as a plain documentary.
Things changed a lot :)

I was asked to try a completely different take on the narrative and develop an animated side story.
Now I'm so involved with this project I don't think I will find the time for anything else unless It's finished (march 2011, very optimistic).

The whole project will end in a 30/40 minutes 2K animated story, done in 2d traditional (but paperless) animation.
I'm now biulding a small and fast super hero team (4/5 people at the most) to help me with this ridiculous amount of work to do (8-12 fps hand drawn stuff!).

NHK, Japanese TV, is co-producing.
I'm VERY excited.

Here are the first studies, hope you'll like 'em!

Father Night:




Katie:


Hannah:


McKenzie:



Rachael:



Chris:



A first study of all the characters:


And a style/quality test render:

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN | 3

I finished the animation process, still have to do the post production, but I built a sort of beta of the whole animation. Many errors can be spotted here and there and most important: keep in mind that post production is TOTALLY garbage, it's more a placeholder for things to come, but it gets to the point for a demo presentation of the project.
I will post the final thing (no ugly flares popping out from nowhere etc etc) as soon as I have the time to fix everything.
The whole promo of "the dark side of the sun" will be shown early this week at the international documentary market "the sunny side of the doc" (no it's not a joke, and it wasn't intentional) in la Rochelle, France.
In the end I'm very happy for what came out in five days of work (thanks to Gabriele Gianni who helped me with the colour fills for the cels), I hope I will have the chance to animate again soon.
Here is a frame of animation and the whole thing on youtube HD (only the animation part, the full promo will be online very soon). Watch it fullscreen and HD, please.
Hope you'll like it.

Music by: Carlo Hintermann and Mario Salvucci
Editing: Piero Lassandro
Assistant animator: Gabriele "Hundred Paintbucket Fist" Gianni

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN | 2

First lineart animation test.
Please watch it fullscreen for better resolution (HD available).