WES ANDERSON animated ad now ONLINE!

As promised here is the link for Sony Xperia commercial, a charming and wondefully animated stop-motion short featuring some of the talents behind Fantastic Mr Fox, with Wes Anderson at the helm.

And here are some of the boards I did for the project.
This is about a third of the panels produced as the animatic needed several poses per character in order to time the actions and cuts accurately, as Wes usual attention to detail required.
I started the storyboards directly in ToonBooms' Storyboard Pro, as I received a couple of thumbnails from Wes (see image at the very bottom) and several notes on what was required.
I worked remotely from the rest of the team so there was a lot of back and forth by email, skype, phone conversations and texts.
The storyboards were mostly done at night, over a week, as I was working on the Cartoon Network series for TeamTo, with some tweaks and adjustments done over a weekend in order to get a cut of the animatic to the client for a Monday morning delivery.

Hope you enjoy the animation!

WES ANDERSON directs Sony Xperia ad

The 24th of March sees the launch of the new Sony Xperia campaign, and although I have little interest in this brand of mobile phones, I am quite excited by this commercial as it's a return of sorts of Wes to the beautifully handcrafted animation that made Fantastic Mr Fox so unique.

more info on the Xperia Blog

Along with myself (storyboards of course) Wes gathered around himself key members of the Fox team to produce what looks to be a wonderfully charming work.
In Portland, with animators from Laika, Mark Gustafson, animation director, and Nelson Lowry, art director, helped  bring Wes' vision to the small screen, the first from Sony of their new campaign 'Made For The Imagination'.

I'll post the ad once it is on general release along with the storyboards from concept to completion.

In the meantime enjoy this little teaser which has a wonderful track by Icelandic Jonsi from Sigur Ros.

a small tribute to a grand artist

Last week, on the 10 of March 2012, French comic artist and legend Jean Giraud passed away.
He was known to a multitude of fans as Moebius, or Gir, and will always be one of my greatest inspirations.

As a child my first comic book love was Westerns, very popular in Italy from the '50's on, and although I was a fan of Tex Willer I came to read the Blueberry series around this time.
I came to love Moebius' style, which seemed to vary from comic to comic, as he dramatically changed his graphic style as he implemented innovations to his techniques.
I was very taken though by his surreal, sci-fi and fantasy comics, influenced by his experimenting with drugs and New Age philosophies, and his works were amongst the first to inspire me to follow a path into any form of drawn art work.

It is because of great artists such as Moebius that I wanted to draw, to have a career in comics, animation, films, and for this I pay my respects to the man who, through his marvellous creations, gave me so much pleasure in my youth, and still does today.

I raise a glass of vin rouge to the great Jean Giraud and clumsily offer this pastiche of a Moebius inspired sketch to him.

FRANKENWEENIE TRAILER finally out!

Hello all,

the first Frankenweenie trailer is finally out.
A day after Disney posted online the teaser poster with release dates for the movie, the trailer finally hit YouTube and other sites.

Out on the 5th of October Frankeweenie will be Tim Burton's return to stop-motion and I can't wait to see the final cut since it's been a few months now since I done working on its storyboards.

see the trailer here

FRANKENWEENIE

As soon as it's possible (and the Disney big chiefs allow) I shall post some storyboards from the movie.

Enjoy


All images and videos are Copyright © 2012 Walt Disney Pictures, Tim Burton Productions and Tim Burton Animation Co.