Secret movie project, 2004 (part 1)
I’ve waited a while to present this one, partially because I wanted to post other things first, but also because it’s a tough one to talk about. It was a project that started out as a dream and descended into a nightmare. Everyone in the entertainment biz has at least one of these stories, and this was mine.
Let’s travel back to late 2003. I’d been in the TV cartoon business for almost eight years, most of which had been spent at Sony Animation Studio where I made friends, honed my craft, and learned all the most important lessons. I’d just finished my first year on a WB project (season 1 of Xiaolin Showdown) and was looking for my next job.
Promo pamphlet for investors, 2004
The most common way to get hired in the TV cartoon biz (then and now) is via referral. Someone hears about a job and recommends you for it. If you bring what’s needed to the table, you get the gig. (Which makes it important to stay in good standing with as many of your fellow pros as possible.) In this case, sometime in the month of November, my mentor Audu Paden got wind of an independent movie project and recommended me as the director.
The catalyst for this was a screen writer named Brooks Wachtel, who had written for some of Audu’s previous shows. Brooks had completed a screenplay for a fantasy film, created and developed by a Korean producer named In-Hyung Hwang. Conceived as a CG-animated feature, it depicted a battle between undersea kingdoms and went by the title Twin Princes.
Prior to this, Hwang’s company Ani21 took the project through pre-viz, creating character, creature and environmental designs. CG was already commonplace in 2004, but still pretty expensive. In order to cover that bill, the movie needed investors and international appeal. To help achieve that, Ani21 hired Brooks to write the script and went looking for an American director to transform it into storyboards.
That’s what brought them to me. Audu recommended me to Brooks, who set up a meeting with Hwang and his LA-based coproducer, an indie filmmaker named Youngman Kang. We met in December ’03 and I showed them what I could do. The centerpiece of my portfolio was my homemade animatic for Grease Monkey, which was produced to the highest standard I could reach with early 2000s technology. (You can see it for yourself here.)
Despite belonging to a completely different genre, it convinced them that I had the expertise to pull this off. They asked me to submit a project plan with a bid and we would go from there.
I’d only worked on TV episodes up to that point, so this would be my first feature. I didn’t know how someone with movie experience would budget it, so I just applied TV metrics. Our three cost areas would be voice recording (5 actors plus a day of studio time), storyboarding (me and two other artists) and animatic assembly (by an editor). The goal was to have it all done by the beginning of April, 2004.
Once I tallied everything up, it came to a little over $54,000. Fortunately, that was within Ani21’s budget. We initially talked about doing it in color, but shaved off that idea since it would have doubled the storyboarding cost. They still wanted the best-looking animatic possible, to serve as a pitch to a major studio.
I’d already learned that walking into a pitch with a “complete package” like that wouldn’t insulate it from being further altered and tampered with, but you have to start somewhere. The producer agreed to the price and gave me the green light. I was going to direct my first movie.
The script
The first guy I wanted to bring on board was my friend Jeff Allen. We’d worked together on Dragon Tales and season 1 of Xiaolin Showdown, and we were both itching to do something different. A realistic fantasy action film was right in our wheelhouse.
We sat down to examine the materials Ani21 had turned over to us and…were not excited by it. The design work was competent but not inspired. Their primitive CG pitch video was far below the standards of even those early days. But was just a starting point. We wouldn’t let the raw materials hold us back from making a good movie.
The first day of work was January 1, 2004. We talked through the script with Brooks Wachtel and Youngman Kang, getting all our questions answered and suggesting ways to streamline the story. I go through the same process with every episode I direct. Scriptwriters can think visually, but as a director it’s my job to drill down to the micro-mechanics of what makes a scene work. A good scriptwriter is flexible enough to allow modifications once the rubber hits the road. Fortunately, Brooks is a good scriptwriter.
In a subsequent meeting, the voice actors (friends and friends of friends) gathered at my house for a read-through of the script so they could all get familiar with the story and characters. We assembled again a few days later at a professional recording studio. It took the better part of a workday to get through the whole thing, and gave us the audio tracks we needed to create the animatic.
The complete thumbnail storyboard, 235 pages
Concurrent with that, the drawing began. Step one was to thumbnail out the entire script from start to finish. That would give us much more familiarity with the story and also allow us to pace ourselves accurately. If you know how many storyboards you need to draw, and you know how much time you’ve got, the math tells you how fast you need to go. That simple equation had kept me employed for almost eight years, so I must have been doing something right.
My goal was to get the whole thumbnail done in three weeks. It was meant to be a 90-minute film, so we had to cover 30 minutes a week. That was a lot, but I’d done it before. With Jeff’s help, we got it there on time. Barely. We now had thousands of little tiny drawings that had to be expanded to full size. That’s when the real work started. And that’s when the descent from dream to nightmare began.
You’ll find out why in part 2. For now, here’s the first half of the movie. Enjoy.
Animatic Part 1
Most storyboards by Don Hudson, Jeff Allen, and me
Animatic Part 2
Storyboards by Don Hudson, Jeff Allen, and me
Animatic Part 3
Storyboards by Don Hudson, Jeff Allen, and me
Animatic Part 4
Storyboards by me and Dell Barras
Promotional booklet
This is the document that was prepared for a meeting of investors in the Maldives, earlier in 2003 before I was hired. Most of the characters shown in the booklet did not appear in the movie script, but since it was titled Twin Princes “Part 1,” they were probably waiting in the wings.
Foreword
Beneath the big, blue sea…
My hometown of Yeomsan, Yeonggwang is a small fishing village with magical sunsets over a spacious open saltern. This is where I spent my carefree childhood years and is the place that has turned me into a foolish 40-year-old dreamer in search of a fairytale land. A fool, you see, is able to laugh no matter how lonely or sad he is and the angrier he gets, the louder he laughs.
This fool has taken a brave step forward by writing the oceanic tale TWIN PRINCES. Perhaps it is a self-portrait drawn over the years away from the eyes of others. My dream has been set to unite the whole world with the most fantastic animation movie.
In the Maldives, possibly the last paradise left on earth, the dream has come to figure as TWIN PRINCES. This was the perfect background for the story that had been roaming around in my head all these years. Most of all, it was the land of the opportunity to make my dream come true. My only hope is that this never-before-seen oceanic fantasy animation TWIN
PRINCES is able to make everyone in the world a little happier. Even all those people who have pointed at me and called mea fool all these years…
In closing, I would like to thank my staff and all those who have stood by me, both at home and abroad, until now. You will be the leaders who will bring Korean animation onto the world stage.
ANI 21 Co., Ltd.
General Producer In-hyung Hwang
What is Twin Princes
The Mysterious World Beneath the Sea: This is a large-scale marine-fantasy animation. Over 5 billion years ago, before man was created, conflict and dispute arose in a world filled only with light and darkness. Moving away from other types of animation dealing with the story of Earth or space, this novel animation takes us to the depths of the deep blue sea.
An Epic About Life and Death: Using characters which personify sea creatures, this animation conveys not only their love. friendship, hate, betrayal, reconciliation but also their battle full of exciting ideas against the backdrop of the immense sea. ‘Motion capturing’ and other state-of-the-art techniques are used to make the ocean come alive.
TWIN PRINCE? The Strength of the Characters: Infinite business opportunities regarding the characters from the TWIN PRINCES are possible. Even when the characters were being created, plans were in the works for potential games, comic books, action figures, stuffed animals, etc. Character products as well as a TV series will be released soon.
International Production and Distribution: The goal of this animation is to appeal to audiences around the world. To that end, the script was written in Korea, the script revision & character modification were done in Japan and the United States, and computer graphic work was done in India. The main theme music was composed by Japan’s Mu Yamamoto and sung by Vienna, a rising star in the Philippines. Prominent major distributors covering all around the world will be responsible for distribution.
Outline
The sea was being dominated by the three kingdoms: on the light side, there was Light Kingdom and Mazento Kingdom, but on the other side, Dark Kingdom overruled the Sea of Darkness.
Neither the Kingdom of Light nor Dark had a successor to the throne. So everybody was expecting to have a prince’s birth. Fortunately, Light Kingdom had a prince’s birth. It was twins! However, when the older one was born, he was abandoned due to the prophet, Shinnon’s prophecy, “his birth will bring disaster to the Kingdom of Light.” He was secretly sent to the deep sea of the west. The place where the prince was abandoned was ‘Death Valley’ which nobody could escape from. Since then, the secret of the twin princes’ birth had kept confidentially.
After one prince was abandoned, his mother, queen Maya had lived under sadness. As the time goes on, Light Kingdom becomes the best kingdom of the underwater world by the king Kairo. Now, people of the Light Kingdom are living with happiness and in abundance. Tores, the younger one of the twin princes has grown up as a nice man. He gets great respect from his people as a successor to the crown.
Meanwhile, He falls in love with a beautiful girl, Sola who lives in the Rosemarine field. She is a daughter of the lady attendant of the queen Maya, living alone in the Rosemarine Garden. Sola is a beautiful girl who takes care of Rosemarine flowers to keep the fragrance. And Sola has a secret which nobody knows and the prince Tores doesn’t notice it too. Kairo, Nepos and the prophet Tumus’s men do not prefer that Sola and Tores are loving each other. It seems to include more reasons than the fact that Sola is just an ordinary person.
The Dark Kingdom attacks this peaceful territory of Light Kingdom. As a prince of the Sea of Darkness, Ares, self-proclaimed as “the conqueror of sea,” assaults Light Kingdom with his big army. Ares is a young man of same age as Tores, having his own superior fighting skill. By the sudden attack of the enemy, Kairo confronts the Light Kingdom’s danger and the sea wars between the two kingdoms continue. Ares is, however, defeated by a brave fighter of Mazento (Light Kingdom’s alliance), Kistan.
Sola helps the wounded Ares and he remembers the Rosemarine flavor from that moment. Sola’s beauty captures Ares’s mind too. Nobody knows that Ares is the secretly abandoned prince, and even that the King of Darkness Dargen found the abandoned baby Ares. He has grown up as Dargen’s son to be used for conquering Light Kingdom.
Ares and his family Kairo, Maya, Tores, Tana…in which direction will their fate run? Ares is going to keep his promise with his step-father Dargen. It is to conquer Light Kingdom.
The inevitable confront between Ares and his brother Tores…also, the mysterious thing which will happen in Sola’s body. The story of ocean fantasy animation TWIN PRINCES is coming up soon…
Production gallery: character designs
One thing that definitely made this project easier for us was the large library of finished character designs, which had gone through three different iterations during the previz period. The main characters each had a painted version, a CG render of the painted version, and a simplified “anime version.” In most cases, we drew the “anime versions” in the storyboards.
Tores, prince of the Light Kingdom
Areas, prince of the Dark Kingdom
Kistan, prince of Mazento
Kairo, king of the Light Kingdom
Dargen, king of the Dark Kingdom
Covelly, king of Mazento
Sola, keeper of the Rosemarine (Light Kingdom)
Shinnon (prophet) and Tumus (scientist)
Speaking of jobs, were you ever able to get that job at Flying Bark I showed you on Linkedin?
Still in play, fingers crossed HARD.
Your job in this proyect is awesome!, i love the 3D models, is like the Old times and makes me nostalgic. I have a one question unrelated to the topic. Why Ultimate SPider-Man’s Wolverine haves in that universe the John Bryne’s Brown suit and didn’t exists a x-men connection?
Hadn’t you wondered about that? Because I personally prefer the yellow suit. I want to see your job in Marvel’s Spider-Man (2017), your concept arts are awesome
Thanks for asking, but I have no opinion on Wolverine’s costume. I was not part of the decision-making process for that.