003 . Finding our hero...

So we had this idea for a story (many of the surprises I won't mention here... I'm not big on spoilers but if you've seen my other movies you'll know I like to surprise my audiences) and now we needed to begin fleshing out the look of the world.

One of the things I'm not too interested in is creating photoreal people in CG. I think real life actors are more interesting than creating high-res photoreal people so if you're going to attempt to go for photoreal people (like in the Final Fantasy movies) you're better off just using real actors. I learned this the hard way when I was an animator for the short lived SONY television show, Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles. Some hard core Sci-Fi fans liked the show, but it took a lot of flack from the CG industry and animation community as a write off.

So the first thing my brother and I decided was to make sure this film had a strong presence of art direction and an idea of where it was going. Greg and I are big fans of classic Disney and all things animated. So we started thinking about how a human would have been portrayed if Walt had access to CG back in the 1950's. So we went about the task of designing and creating the hero of our film... Corporal Biggs.


One of the first influences we thought about was of the character of Roger from Disney's 101 Dalmatians (1961). If you look at the upper left of this sketch you will see some resemblance. Then we also looked into what we knew. We liked the look our father had back when he was in college so we tried adapting the character to look like him. He's the one in the top middle. But that looked almost too real. Then Greg began working in a sort of Quentin Blake hybrid style of illustration which spawned the Biggs to the right of frame. That was when we knew we were getting somewhere. He had style and character without being too real or cartoony.





This version of Biggs soon became the production design and was refined slightly to make him look a bit more weathered and disheveled.

The final approved design of Corporal Biggs was based off the drawing to the left. This design was also used in all of the storyboards and other conceptual items.

Soon after we both agreed this was the look for Biggs, Greg sculpted him into a CG model and we put it into production.

Until next time troops!

-Christopher

002 . The Duelists history and editing...

So what's the story behind the story?

Well... back in 2000 I was working on some ideas for a new live action short film. I was living in Valencia, CA at the time and there was a lot of scrubby desert area around me. So I started brainstorming simple ideas for films that had few actors and used the desert without being too cliche. That's when I hit upon the idea of a lone WWII, GI in the desert fighting... something. Being a visual effects artist I soon got the idea to have a live action person fighting a computer generated messerschmitt. I began preproduction and making tests. However 9/11 happened shortly before I could begin production and I was unable to continue on the film due to the bottom falling out of my job market.

Now about five years later my brother and I have teamed up with some old friends to take this idea to the next level as a completely computer generated animated film. I'm extremely excited about this because as an animation we will be able to have control over every aspect of the film and really make it awesome!

So where are we now in the production?

The entire short film has been storyboarded by my brother Greg and myself. It has also been edited into a primary cut that looks a little something like this...

Right now the film is clocking in at about 7-min 30-sec before credits... most likely around 8-mins when it is all done . I'm using the existing storyboards to edit the film, which is giving me a rough ballpark idea of the timings. Once the boards are all cut in previs and animation begins.

Here are a few examples of Greg's boards from the film...

001 . Welcome to the production diaries...

Welcome to the production diaries for the new computer animated short film, THE DUELISTS, being produced by The Desantis Bros.

I'm Christopher Desantis (the writer/director) and I will be posting notes and previews here for anyone interested in the production of this short.

The team is also composed of my brother, Greg Desantis (art director/modeler), Toby Gaines (lighting/surfacing/rigging lead) and Tim Ranck (animation lead/animator). We will also be getting a bit of assistance from other friends and professionals in the industry.

The film, The Duelists, is a seven minute long computer animated short film about a World War Two G.I who is miss-dropped over the north African desert and is forced to do battle with a rogue Nazi Stuka.

We hope you will enjoy it!

Please come back every so often for fun tidbits, images and extras that we will be posting here.

-Christopher