Eleven minutes of animation, 120 shots and twelve weeks of production with a team of ten people. These are the figures behind “The Sad Figure”, the first episode of Contanimation TV with Magnific Originals, in which Contanimation Films brings the universe of Don Quixote de la Mancha to an audiovisual production developed under the Magnific label.
The short is directed by Guillermo Miranda and Javier de la Chica, directors of Contanimation Films, and uses one of the most recognizable episodes of Cervantes’ work as a starting point: Don Quixote’s charge against giants who only exist from his particular interpretation of reality.
The communication of the production has highlighted the dimensions of a project of these characteristics. From the storyboard to the delivery, twelve weeks passed and the final assembly is made up of 120 shots. Ten professionals worked on them: three members of the studio and seven collaborators.
Beyond the production process, Contanimation Films has built the episode around a narrative decision: “taking the delirium seriously.”
Instead of presenting the giants as a hallucination and then showing what happens in reality, “The Sad Figure” directly adopts Don Quixote’s point of view. The giants appear on screen exactly as he experiences them and the comedy is born from the distance between the epic adventure that the character is experiencing and what really happens.
Furthermore, Contanimation TV considers the choice of Don Quixote as an anthology around the different ways in which people escape reality, and Miranda and De la Chica understand Cervantes’ character as an especially early and recognizable representation of that behavior.
The Choice of Don Quixote is an anthology of the different ways in which people escape reality
“He is also the original escapist: he does not flee from the world, he rewrites it in order to live in it”explain the directors. The charge against the mills thus offers a particularly clear image of the concept on which they want to develop the anthology.
There was also an intention to start the project with an internationally recognizable reference. “We wanted to start with something that was ours and everyone’s at the same time”point out from Contanimation Films.
Magnific Originals as a framework for production
“The Sad Figure” inaugurates Contanimation TV’s collaboration with Magnific Originals and also puts on the table the time and resources necessary to develop the piece: eleven minutes finished from 120 shots in three months of work and with a small team.
Contanimation Films does not detail in the information provided which specific Magnific tools have been used or in which phases of production they have intervened, but the project is expressly presented as the first episode of Contanimation TV made with Magnific Originals.
The study will delve deeper into the process in a future installment. Miranda and De la Chica have announced that they will show how “The Sad Figure” was made shot by shot, which will allow us to know in greater detail the workflow used to develop the episode.
For now, the figures offer a first approximation: 120 shots, twelve weeks and ten professionals to produce eleven minutes of animation and recover four centuries later one of the most universal images of Spanish literature: Don Quixote throwing himself against giants that, this time, the viewer can also see.
