The Animated short, fully designed, written, animated and directed by Caya Ryuichi Yossimi, is 11 minutes long and took 14 months to come to life. Featuring 3 fully rigged characters, 11 backgrounds and over a month of rendering, it is the result of endless hours of hard work, planning, problem-solving and a lot of learning. The project was Caya's first experience in creating a film with many characters, landscapes, emotions and voices. It was also Bia Gallo's first experience producing an animated film as much as acting as an animated character.
It first started as a single idea: creating the first-ever gay fairy-tale. The plan was to come up with an original concept of a fairy-tale, something fresh, but at the same time reminiscing of the classics, so a love story between 2 princes was the perfect plan, so was the idea of 2 different kingdoms that could never be together. From that point on began the process of script-writing, which ended only after the 8th version. The concept design was then created and, at the same time, producer Bia Gallo began the search for the perfect voices.
Meanwhile the digital puppets were carefully designed. Starting from the Character-sheets, the body pieces are drawn, fabric patterns are chosen, the 3D faces are created from an actual sculpted model and then turned into a digital model, hair is individually drawn and so are freckles, pores, eyelashes and much more. Next the puppets are fully rigged, from the movement of their limbs to every facial muscles: they have to be able to convey emotions and carry the movie.
The backgrounds were then created. Both the Lake and the Tree of Sorrow were drawn and composed during the rigging process, where actual spaces were needed to test if the characters would look good in them, however the other backgrounds were colored and cleaned-up by the talented illustrator Tathila Yamana. It was during this process that the amazing Pedro Bosnich, Ricardo Merini and Luciano Chirolli accepted to lend their voices, also the multi-talented producer Bia Gallo lent her voice to Corvo. Audio capturing took place at Tempo Filmes studio.
Thus the animation process begins, where every tiny little movement of literally everything has to be animated. Not only the characters, but the backgrounds, the camera, and much more. The lipsync was done by Marcus Yossimi(who is Caya's father, and he's a multi-talented engineer). Next up is compositing, when characters and backgrounds are put together, lights, particles and various other effects are inserted and the whole image comes together. The scenes were then rendered and sound design began.
The soundtrack was purchased on stockmusic.net, edited and then taken back to Tempo Filmes to be mixed with the voices and the sound effects. Oh look at the time, it's been 14 months!