Charlie Bean's COSMO for CNEurope

More of CN Europe Development Studio.
Back in early 2009, I've helped the talented Charlie Bean on his project: "COSMO". This was an interesting and very funny one, which was developped as twenty-two minutes episodes, telling one big story throughout, which is pretty rare now in animated TV shows.  The series follows the journey through space of a regular and unadapted family...in charge of the secret of the universe. Despite the qualities of it, the project was shelved.

We chose to do the opening sequence of the full animatic, as a fully fleshed out test to show how the series could look like. Only the main character was made in 3D for time and budget reasons.
As the first 3D project of the studio, I was responsible to hire a small team to complement my skills. I supervised the sequence, animated it, did most of the compositing and kept an eye on the schedule. This was a rich experience and challenge for me to find the right people and forsee their potential in the areas I had limited skills in.
It took around ten weeks to complete the sequence, including four weeks of animation.
I'd like to thank Charlie who gave me such opportunity and had faith in me, the talented John Martin who developed and managed the technical CG side, and all the talented people involved (Go on vimeo for full credits). We had good time doing it.

Here's the sequence:


"Cosmo" opening sequence from Sylvain MARC /Polyminthe on Vimeo.


Here's a selection of the development art I did for the project.
I've tried some environmental pictures. Charlie wanted to get a miniature feel to the space, as if it was small scale and made out of objects. This was later abandonned. 

Then I made a quick after effect test of the last image:

Planet test from Sylvain MARC /Polyminthe on Vimeo.

little aliens living on ice and desert planets.

The brief was to try many different styles.

 

Jerry as a space tourist and family man

 After trying a lot of different things, we finally decided the characters were better as Charlie was  drawing them, they felt right and legitimate with his own style, we then decided to go that route.

Ideas for the ship as a family car/camping car

Rendering test. Ship drawing by Dave Needham.

 Render test made with Ben Bocquelet

 This is a walk cycle I made to test the Rig as it was being made by John:

Cosmo walk test from Sylvain MARC /Polyminthe on Vimeo.

Finally, these are the low-fi CPU screens and 2D animations I've done to put on the different screens in the ship:

Cosmo CPU screens from Sylvain MARC /Polyminthe on Vimeo.

In addition, you can see the title sequence Stephane Coedel made, for a bit more backstory of Charlie's concept, here.

Charlie was the creative director of our studio and is now directing the upcoming Tron series for Disney. Good luck to him!

I hope you've enjoyed watching all this!