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The Replacements: Character Design

Howdy Folks!

A lot of people who have seen the show have wondered how much the look of the show has changed from my original pitch and truthfully I'll have to say that I don't think it changed too much. 

It was to be expected that it all wouldn't look EXACTLY like my work. I tend to think that my work is so rough and painterly that it would be hard to translate for animation. It's like that old kid's game "Telephone" where you whisper something into one persons ear and they whisper it into someone elses ear and so forth and down the line you get a completely different response from the original line. Same with artwork.  People draw their own way and you take one character and  put it into different hands it's going to change. 

Thankfully everybody at Disney wanted the show to look like my artwork (which I found to be pretty flattering) and director extraordinaire 'Heather Martinez' made it a strong point to look as closely to my style as possible.

Now I'll get off my soapbox and show you all some sketches...

Here is a  poster of the family for the initial design of the show. As you can see Agent K is a redhead, Dick Daring has a bigger head and shorter neck and Todd and Riley are quite modified from the final designs. Still, they all share many similar traits that still exist in the show as we see it today.

Here are more sketches of the characters...

Dick Daring

Riley

Todd

Agent K

Tasumi

and Buzz

Director Heather Martinez and I soon after my project was optioned updated the character designs to be more "animatable"

Here is a rough image of the characters pulled from our 'Leica Reel 'because I can't seem to find the old files (NOTE: The drawings in this leica reel are not how Heather and I draw on a regular basis. This was a rush job and the design sheets look a lot better)

When the show was initially picked up for a full season Disney then asked animator and designer extraordinaire Mike Moon (Annie Award winner known for his HUGE contributions on shows such as" Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends" and "PowerPuff Girls") to take a stab at my designs and he made them...well.... AWESOME!

Mike took a caring approach to improving my designs by making the animatable characters just stylistically more cool and better proportioned. Honestly, my style is very rough and would probably look pretty ugly on a TV screen for a prolonged amount of time. Mike took a pass at the Agent K design and I knew I wanted her redesigned because I quite frankly suck at drawing sexy women (It's not often called for in children's books).

When the show staffed up we ended up acquiring a real gem in David Cutler (art director for "Home on the Range", character designer for "The Critic" and "Nightmare Before Christmas") to be our character designer.

Basically, who was I to tell this industry giant how things should be done? David was a really cool and humble guy and he really respected my opinions and ideas and he came up with what you see on the show today (which includes a much sexier Agent K)....

So that's it. From one design to another you have seen the evolution of the design. I'm pretty pleased with who I got to work with and I'm proud of the results. I hope you all watch and enjoy the show!

Now I leave you with an old painting of Agent K being chased by ninjas....

SYNERGY!

Humor me for just a moment... Open up your iTunes (if you have iTunes) and look at the front page of the iTunes store.

That's right.... "The Replacements" are for sale and can be downloaded to your iPod or Nano.

I'm such a Mac nerd I found myself even more excited about seeing it on iTunes than on TV.

When Disney gave Steve Jobs that huge bag of money to purchase a new boss I knew that there was going to be a huge "synergy" between Apple and Disney, and now I see that they've followed through quicker than I had anticipated.

I'm seriosuly overjoyed right now.... This is like seeing the birth of my son all over again. (Years from now my son will read this and will one day step into my studio in tears and say- "Fuck you old man!")

Oh, and if you do decide to buy the videos please leave a nice comment in the comment section. I could use the kind words.

First Impressions of "The Replacements"

And I quote from www.cynopsis.com....

RATINGS

The Replacements, Disney Channel's new original animated series, premiered last Friday, September 8, 2006 at 9p, and delivered 2.1 million in the K6-11 demo, and 1.5 million Tweens 9-14, making it the most watched original animated series premiere with those two demos in the network's history.

Hopefully those numbers hold and we thank you so much for watching!

Oh, and for those of you who are interested in reading the glowing New York Times Review you can download at the link provided below....

Download NY_times_review_replacements.pdf (291.1K)

Premiere!

Hey folks!

So the premiere went pretty well this weekend. I just had a nice quiet evening with wife and baby boy watchig it in our living room. No party, no guests...just some peace and quiet. 

Anyway, I just got word form the Executive Producer, Jack Thomas, that we managed to pull in about 3.1 million viewers in our premiere! WOO HOO! Way to go guys! Needless to say, we're all very excited by the good news and we hope you all enjoy watching the show!

With that said, I just recently recieved some more fan art! This piece comes from Russell Beuc, who made this killer piece. Thanks Russell!

Lastly, our friends from across the hall "Yin Yang Yo" pulled in outstanding ratings for their Jetix time slot over at Toon Disney. Congrats to all the guys over there! Yin Yang Yo is a hilarious show and you should all go check it out when you have the chance. If you'd like to find out more about the show mosey on over to www.rabbittakeover.com where Bob Boyle (creator), Steve Marmel (Exec Producer), John Fountain (Director), and the rest of the staff has created a "Survivor"-Esque parody to the show. 

SERIES PREMIERE TONIGHT!

Tonight is the night! 9PM on Disney Channel!
There will also be a new episode on ABC Saturday morning at 8:30AM and then next week the show falls into it's regular time slot at Saturday evenings at 8 on Disney Channel

Let's have some fun!

New York TImes seems to like us!

Free Episode online "Cinder-Riley" and "Skate Gate"

Howdy folks!

Well it appears s if Disney couldn't hold off till the end of the week for the season premiere of the new show and they're showing a free episode all this week on "disneychannel.com" The episodes are "Cinder-Riley" and "Skate-Gate" which were written by the ubertalented Nick Stanton and Devin Bundje a couple of nice guys who always made me laugh and are now working over at Emperor's New Groove. I have very little knowledge of writing for television animation but all the staff of talented writers on the show always made me crack up when I would read their scripts.

Check 'em out when you've got the chance!

Favorite scene in "Cinder-Riley"

Revelaing that Dick Daring's closet is filled ONLY with the same jumpsuit he wears in EVERY episode
Oh, and from here on out any scene with Sheldon Clutzberry is automatically hysterical in my opinion

Favorite scene in "Skate-Gate"

In Skate Gate there was a hilarious scene where Dick Daring does a skateboard trick and "Jumps the Shark" then out of nowhere "the Fonz" holds up his thumbs and goes "Eyyyyyyy!" (NOTE: In one meeting Nick and Devin had proposed that when the Dick is jumping over the shark tank that it was actually a bear with a shark fin hat that takes a swipe at him. I was laughing hysterically but Jack Thomas, the executive producer, made an excellent point that the joke takes the Fonz reference out of context and so he had cut it to just being a real shark which was the right decision to make)

Jetpack Jeopardy

The Disney Site for the show just added a new Flash game called "Todd's Jetpack Jeopardy" which has Todd stealing Agent K's old secret agent backpack and huffing it about town.
I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of product endorsement games but this game was really fun and KUDOS especially to whoever designed the front splash page.

You can play the game "here".

This game reminds me loosely of one of the sample episodes I wrote up when I was originally pitching the show where Todd felt left out because everyone at his school had a bike or got a 'new' bike. Agent K decided to make it up to him by giving him an old noisy decomissioned jetpack from the British secret service. The thing ended up being so noisy that it annoyed everyone in the neighborhood. I even had a scene written up where Todd used the jetpack as a leafblower when he had to do his chores.

Cool game!

Replacements Fan Art!

This put a huge smile on my face when director, Heather Martinez sent this to me this morning. To see fan art of any kind I think is really awesome and I'm thinking I might have to hold a contest or something. It just warms the hearts of everyone here at the show after all the hard work we've been putting into it. In any case, if you happen to see any fanart or if you have some fanart you want to share then email it to me at dsantat@yahoo.com and maybe if I have enough I'll start a Flickr page and post it in a big archive and we can all enjoy it in one big forum. I'm just a big fan of internet communities.

Fleemco.com

In addition to the updates to the Disney site there was a carefully hidden link to FLEEMCO.COM and from my observation this is even cooler than the official Disney site!
I don't want to spoil anything when you go there but here are all sorts of hidden clues (8 total which I only found 5 so far) that you can unlock and you will recieve a cool little reward. This site reminds me very much of how the show "LOST" is promoting their show with the fake Hanzo Foundation website.  My personal favorites on the site were the 'Dick Daring Fleemco ad' and the 'History of Fleemco'. You can even get a printed reciept for the things you 'order' from them!

Kudos to Disney for this cool little gem!

The *Official* Replacements website

So the excitement is finally hitting me and the surreal moment of all this is finally subsiding. Disney just updated the official website here.

The site has a full detailed description of the show, a better description then I could ever describe in my own words because I always seem to get into TOO MUCH detail because I'm not quite skilled in brevity. There are character descriptions (for all of you who were wondering who Tasumi was), free wallpapers, Instant Message Icons, video clips, etc. and it will eventually feature flash games and all sorts of other cool stuff. You can even write e-mails to the characters which may eventually get on television!

With all this said, I've been watching the message boards, because I'm a curious kinda guy, and a few folks have already been quite supportive for the success of this show and I wanted to say thanks for the support.

Take care!