Ballad of Ferris the Self-appointed Knight and Smokie the Fire Breathing Dragon

When I was very young, my older brother made a full knight's armor out of paper for me. Back then in communist Bulgaria only one kind of hard cardboard was sold and it was green. That's why my knight's armor was green. The armor didn't last long, probably two hours at most, but I still remember it. Maybe I've been fascinated by knights and knight stories since early childhood.
My brother Sotir and I meet every day and take long walks around town to discuss the films we're working on, to come up with and develop ideas for new films or books we want to make.
That's how we came up with the idea of telling what would happen if a flashy knight met a very tiny dragon. That idea wasn't enough for a film, so we decided to tell the story of a man who isn't a hero but really wants to become one.
Sotir wrote a true knight ballad in which the hero, a poor peasant blacksmith, doesn't much like the life he leads, finds it boring and insignificant. So he decides to change his life and become a knight. He forges a suit of armour for himself, sets out to find exploits and glory, meets a monstrous dragon and defeats it in a fierce battle.
We thought it would be fun to make a film where the text tells a heroic story, but something different happens on screen. That's almost always how it happens in life - the events are different from the stories about them. Sometimes we trust ourselves so much that we unconsciously change even our memories.
I wanted it to be obvious at first glance that this was not a serious story, so I drew the characters in a comic style. But this film is not pure comedy, so I tried to find a balance in the drawings - to make it clear that it's not entirely serious, but not to expect us to laugh all the time.
We considered doing a traditional 2D film, but we're a small team of three, so we kind of abandoned that idea.
I drew the backgrounds by hand, the classic way.
Then we did a 3D animation, with an effort to make it look as much like a drawn animation as possible. We came up with a combination of renderers and two-dimensional effects to create the outline of the image. We made sure that the animated characters and the hand-drawn backgrounds blended well, creating a sense of stylistic unity.
We made sure the music was easy to remember and complemented and emphasized the idea of the film. I think it's the most accurate music for this film.
The goal was to make the vision of the film fit the fun nature of the story.
I think we've managed to have this film told in one breath, it doesn't show how much work and effort went into it.
As I mentioned before, the main authors in the film are three of us. I am the director, but I am also the art director of the film - I created the overall visual concept. I drew the characters, made the 3D models and created all the textures. All the backgrounds in the film are my work. There are about a hundred and fifty of them, some of them are for panoramas and I painted them in several parts.
Blagoi Dimitrov is the animator of the film, but he also edited it, did the sound, wrote and played the music, and even sang the song. He sings the part of the blacksmith-knight.
Sotir Gelev wrote a ballad of one hundred and twenty quatrains, it turned out very impressive, but it was not possible to use all the quatrains in the final version of the film, so we shortened it. He also did the compositing and some animation.
This film turned out almost exactly as I had imagined it beforehand. That's something that doesn't happen often. In some ways, it even exceeded my expectations.

Penko Gelev