The early stage of development. Declined scenes

Hello there once again!

Today is my  turn (Spiritto) for posting production art. So here I bring you  some scenes that we decided not to include in the Animatic, or to modify.

Scene:  Under the bridge.

We did like five or six compositions for this scene counting thumbnails and digital media.  This is one of my attempts to it , but it really didn't worked in a sequence. Because the beat was too fast. The idea was to show that there is more than one pony under the bridge, which are not reacting to Luna's song, but the foal get's "called" by the moonbean  just like the others.

This one is from Lion, it was a different view of Luna's flight through canterlot, but we decided to delete it, for not reading as well as it should.

And last but not least, anouther of Lion's propositions. Showing the Pegasi guards falling asleep outside of the castle, if you check closely,  you will see Starswirl the Bearded snoring next to the telescope. 

So that's it for today!  See you on the next post.

Spiritto, signing out. :)

I'll Show Thee the Way

Hello everyone!  Lionheart typing...

We did quite a nice amount of work today!  Plus I managed to finish an extra shot pertaining to Luna. It's the shot we refer to as 'Shot 8' where she makes a dive towards the camera.  Below is how as saw the sweet midnight-colored alicorn making sure nothing was out of place.

With our already pre-established work setup the background was already painted by the time I got to the shot and thanks to that, once Luna was animated and ready to take off, only the effects and ambiance was left to add over the rendered frames.

What you see above is the composited shot which I rendered to make sure I was not cheated by the editing program's compressed preview.  So much work went into a character that is small on the screen.  but I figured: Never underdo it.  Never give it up!

The list of things to do keep going down and the amount that's put together as final keeps going up.  We're well on our way to finishing and I'm.. I mean WE are quite proud of what it gives so far :)

Stay tuned, we'll update as regularly as we can!

Lion, Signing off.

Children of the Night, The Foals

Here are the character charts for the children that are going to follow Luna through the skies.

Six fillies, six colts, a total of four of every kind (Pegasi, Unicorn and Earth ponies).

Fly-By-Night is a design provided by our good friend Trish Forstner, which ponysona happens to be Gari as well.

Now, let's add some fun to this: Some of them are 100% pulled out of my  designing hat, but most of them are directly inpired in an existing pony or a famous cartoon horse, are you able to tell the refereces?

Even if they don't have much screentime, for the challenge of character design I have each one of them a distict personality, hopefully, if I did my work correctly, you can get a good hint of it just by looking at the charts.

On a side note, just as an anecdote. I considered including Wildfire in COTN as a surprise in the project, but after becoming an official canon character, that would have been an anachrony (meaning that it would be an element that cannot belong to the time period in which the events unfold). So, I developed Maggie instead, and I must say, I am very happy with her. She is a pegasus with a very particular coat, and a slight obsession over shining things.

The production gears

Aaand, here we are, hands at work in our work stations ( it doesn't seem so i n the photos, but we are in the same room, which is fairly small). Lion is in the first picture, animating Lulu and I am in the second one, taking care of shot 15.

Animatic now Available!

Heythere!  Richard here.. (y'know, Lionheartcartoon)

And have we got a treat for you!!
The animatic has just finished uploading to Spirit's youtube channel.

Let us know what you think!


Keep in mind that this is our main reference and that suggestions are likely not to affect the final product.  We're already in production as you could see from the still frames we are currently showing.

It does give you a good idea of what's gonna be done, however, and also reveals the song we chose :)


Some shots in there are upgraded shots from what was originally draft to make sure the layout was still working with a detailed version of the background.  The keyframe animation in there was all done by me for timing purposes as well as reference for final animation.

So there you go!  Enjoy! :)

-Rich signing off

Designing a character, Moondancer

Here you can have an insing in our design process.

Moondancer is one of the six fillies for our movie, (six fillies, six colts, making a total of twelve foals).


She is a character that comes from the G1 ponies, and we had a lot of fun redesigning her. Again, every character in the shortfilm is carefully tinkered and reviewed several times by the two of us. 

(Please, don't get confused by my design sheet) Moondancer is NOT gonna appear as a ghost in this project)

Developing a character, Filly Gari

We have several foals In "Children of the Night". One of them is Gari (short for Cougari). This one is a little bit different than the rest, because it is a ponysona from our friend Trish Forstner (she was a finalist in the Hasbro Pony design contest, and we sure hope her to win, she definitely deserves it, :)  )

For a change, when I started working on Gari's design I had a starting point, and that was the original art from Trish.

Originally, her ponysona is a variation from her Cougar character, so it had a lot of animal features, which I had to remove in order toblend it with the rest of the cast, for she is a regular filly).

 It was a very nice surprise to find that she drew her character with the modifications that I introduced afterwards.

Here you can see an example of her original art

 parting from the original cougari, I watched some CMC episodes and some of Sabrina Alberghetti's sketches, to come up with a filly version of Gari, modifying the cougar pattern to make it suitable for Flash animation.

I did a full development sheet for the matter,  exploring the personality and seeing how the design worked when in pose, I did this for every one of the characters.

Once we are happy with the design, we start with the Flashbuild, which is kind of a slow and painful process (for the record, FLASH doesn't love Cintiqs, so we have to jump through hoops and modify our Nostromo keyboards just for our deares vectorial software).