SORRY /// Series Proof of Concept

SORRY is a live-action + hand-drawn animation series project.

12 rounds. 12 episodes.

Two synthetic boxers face each other for the world title.

One seems ready to kill the other.
The other refuses to fight back – he only tries to get close enough to clinch him and whisper one word:

Sorry.

Over the course of the fight, each round opens another piece of their past and slowly reveals what happened between them.

At its core, SORRY is a love story about the moment care becomes control, a romantic Faustian pact where tenderness, ambition and the desire to help someone slowly turn intimacy into possession.

It is also a world where synthetic bodies behave nothing like the robots we have learned to expect.

They don’t glitch.
They don’t spark.
They don’t break into metal parts.

They bruise. Swell. Stick. Melt. Heal badly.

They have too much body.

Love and violence can literally leave traces on them.

What you’re watching here is not exactly a trailer, and not quite a pilot either. 

It’s a visual proof of concept – an attempt to find the language of the series and answer a very simple question: Could an animated character really take a punch, fall in love and bleed strangely inside a filmed world?

Robert Zemeckis already answered that brilliantly with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I wanted to see what happens when you ask the same question today — with less cartoon physics, more flesh, and a world where artificial beings beginning to move from fiction into everyday life.

The project actually started almost ten years ago with something much smaller.

A hug.

The original idea came out of conversations with Camille Beauplan around a song built around an apology – a love story that could feel powerful, tender and dangerous at the same time.

The concept was almost stupidly simple:

two boxers in a ring who never really punch each other.

They only clinch.

In boxing, a clinch is practical. 

You grab the other fighter to stop the action for a second. Catch your breath. Survive.

From a few meters away, it also looks suspiciously like a hug.

The track was never released and the music video disappeared with it.

At one point I even considered trying to turn the idea into an alternative video for Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” – mostly because by then I clearly had trouble letting the thing die.

But I had already started experimenting with drawing 2D animation over filmed boxing footage, and something about it kept bothering me in a good way.

There is something strangely moving to me about seeing a drawn being occupy the same physical reality as us: touched by the same light, standing on the same pavement, suddenly capable of making something impossible feel mundane, and then emotional.

So I kept going.

The music video slowly mutated into a fiction.

Then a love story, a world, a series concept.

And somewhere along the way, those two boxers became synthetic humans, artificial beings with bodies more sensual, unstable and strangely organic than our own.

The original image survived everything:

two people holding onto each other in a place designed for them to fight.

SORRY is now being developed as a series, with the bible, characters and larger world currently taking shape, while conversations are beginning with producers and partners about how to bring it into production.

This film is the first real piece of that world.

More soon !!!

Live action + hand-drawn animation
Adobe Animate / Adobe After Effects

Music by : the great Captain Kid

Artistic Shaman, Partener, Support : CamilleBeauplan

Colorist : RomainLoiseau

Editing : JAAACK

Animation : myself + the amazingly kind-hearted @JulesNaleb

Produced by : Avec Amour

Thanks to Thibault Belouis for the precious feedbacks.

Thanks to Marc Bodin-Joyeux for the kind little helper.

Live Action Footages sampled from boxing films and mostly Ali (2002) by Michael Mann.