In 2019, We teamed up with Adi Shankar and Ubisoft to put together the perfect pitch for turning Ubisoft’s video game characters into the best adult animated series on the platform.
We worked on an early version of the first two episodes, and had to create the whole retro-futuristic visual identity that would make the project strong enough for the streaming giant to give it the green light.
Our mission was to reinvent all those characters and bring them together as a team of believable, wild, unforgettable renegades.
The first drawing we did was Rayman and Laserhawk.
At that point, we still hadn’t won the contract. It was just a test illustration to pitch for the job.
We needed to impress them by being fearless, so the smartest thing we could do was overshoot completely.
Make something so insane they’d have no choice but to say:
“Alright, alright, we get it. You can take the Orient Express all the way to Istanbul… but let’s get off a couple of stops earlier.”
What impressed them most about our work was the way we reimagined Splinter Cell.
In the early drafts of the script, we had a kind of G.I. Joe-style team made up of four or five soldiers, all men in their thirties or forties.
But we knew the fun of drawing is that you get to create all kinds of wildly different characters, so we felt it was better to let our imagination run loose.
When it came time to reimagine Splinter Cell, we thought it might be interesting if Splinter Cell wasn’t Sam Fisher this time, but his daughter, Sarah.
We also thought it could be a great opportunity to explore her relationship with her father, and what had happened to him, in one of the episodes.
Watching the finished series, it was incredibly rewarding to see that our take on the character had been respected, and that it had even helped inspire an entire episode built around them.
The spider legs came about pretty naturally, because it felt like they could lead to some really spectacular chase scenes. We usually think about our characters like the toys we would have wanted for Christmas growing up, we want them to feel full of story potential, and packed with action and emotion.
At that stage, we also brought in the Beyond Good & Evil leads, Jade and Pey’j.
As we started digging through Ubisoft’s catalog, we realized that game had a lot of personality, and that felt like a really good match for our series.
Did you notice Pey’j has kids’ handprints painted on his shoulders?
(A brilliant idea by Enol Junquera)
We like making up stories for the characters while we’re designing them.
It gives the writers more material to play with later on. Sometimes those ideas make it into the final show, like with Splinter Cell, and sometimes they don’t. In Pey’j’s case, they kept the character, but not the dramatic backstory we had built for him.
If you want to know more about the studio behind one of Netflix’s best adult animated series, email is the way in.
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