Written by Eddie Guzelian and storyboarded by Stéphane Robert, cover by Gaëlle “Galou” Autin.

“Sing for me” is one of the very few episodes in the show that successfully mixes magic and music in its plot. And there’s a black crystal dragon in it ! What’s not to love ? 

When this script was written, with its choir of singers, its dragon, lake and mountain, the designers were both happy and a little worried at the same time. Sure, all these elements were great to create, but they were also very specific and hard to reuse for other episodes, meaning it would require more time to do it than they had, and it wasn’t even an investment for the future… Indeed, being able to reuse elements is a lifesaver on series such as ours, and we try to think ahead as much as we can to reuse elements : characters, fx, backgrounds, etc… even whole scenes if we can. To lighten the workload a little, we chose to remove the new auditorium from the script and instead we mixed the backgrounds we already had : 

• We reused the one Iris has her audition in for the beginning of the episode, changing only part of the background rather than reusing it all. We only had to create the outside of this building.

• And we also put the final concert of the episode into the usual place, so it would match with the clip “We Are Magic”

And even though we didn’t reuse the mountain and in the end (it was really too specific…), this episode was the occasion to start thinking seriously about Mephisto and Praxina’s lair. Regarding the characters, since we were creating a full choir (and there was no avoiding it), we at least made sure to be able to use the characters again in other episodes (in crowds, things like that…). 

I think it’s also the first episode where we go in the princesses’s magical library, searching for a cure for Iris. Now this place was reused a lot during the show, but it was a really confusing place to create : because it’s a triangle that lacks enough easy-to-find points of reference, some designers thought it was a circular room, other and hexagonal room, some forgot the waterfall while other thought the walls were half bookshelves / half waterfall.

The fight scene, which doesn’t occur in the Battle Arena for once, was a bit of a challenge too : a lot of special effects, Iris who tries to stop the voices from going in into the vortex, Talia aund Auriana fighting the twins… and, oh, “Dragon !”

We wanted to show a glimpse of Iris’ latent power at the end of the fight, once she finaly transformed. :) That’s the true meaning of “Punch like a girl !” for us !

Fun fact : unfortunately for us, this episode was the second broadcasted, right after episode 1 where Iris learns magic. “Iris grows too powerful too quick !” was a comment we get a lot, and that encouraged me to try to correct it by giving everyone the right episode order, encouraging to share this list.