NSPCC film

This summer Daniel Chester and I worked on two films for the NSPCC, in collaboration with the YCN agency. Eamonn O'Neill worked on one more film, so the three films should be hopefully up online soon. Here are some stills from my film:

Work at ETC

I have been at the Electric Theatre Collective the past month working with an amazing team of people on the new Talk Talk idents for the Xfactor. We ll be there for a little while longer, but in the meantime you can see some of the idents here:

Talk Talk "Idents" from Electric Theatre Collective on Vimeo.

Here is the super team at its early stage!

Hidden/Painful illustration for Page 47

I started a new blog with my two friends Daniela Negrin Ochoa and Iria Lopez! Its called Page 47 and its a platform for us to create a monthly illustration. We always complain we don't do enough self initiated work, so we thought we needed a reason to stop complaining. You can read more about it (and follow us!) here:

http://pagefourty7.tumblr.com/

Here is what i created for my first brief!

Back from SXSW

Last week we came back from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas where Maidentrip premiered. It was so wonderful to see the whole film with the animations on the big screen and meet the rest of the team. Maidentrip won the Audience award in its category, which made us so happy, and got some great reviews from film critics! We will be releasing the first map online next week, and the rest of the maps later in the spring.

The World In Your Mind timelapse

I received this nice film this week from the guys in Stuttgart, which documents our work in progress, the final pieces and the private view evening.



Exhibition "THE WORLD IN YOUR MIND" presented by Büro Achter April from Büro Achter April on Vimeo.

Working at Mummu

I ve been working at Mummu for the past month on several projects, but mainly on David Luepschen's last job for the new Sony Xperia phone. He created a series of funny films to show the phone's attributes and they have been so much fun to animate, as i have had to basically animate a different animal every day. Here are the films! I worked with my friend Gergely Wootsch on most of the films which was really nice, but also with lovely Janina Sitzmann who was assisting the illustration and art direction, and of course all the guys at Mummu, Sam, Matt and Karl. Im still there working on a project we cant reveal yet, but in the meantime, enjoy these!

Introducing Sony Xperia Ztests from Mummu on Vimeo.

Sony Xperia Ztests - Serengeti from Mummu on Vimeo.

Sony Xperia Ztests - Swimming from Mummu on Vimeo.

Sony Xperia Ztests - Space from Mummu on Vimeo.

Sony Xperia Ztests - Horse Racing from Mummu on Vimeo.

Sony Xperia Ztests - Ghost Walk from Mummu on Vimeo.

Stuttgart, again?! Yes!!!

Looks like I just came back from this fantastic place, but Dan, Dave and I will be going back out there in a month! We just found out that our WWF Cursor Swarm  film got selected at the Stuttgart International Animation Festival, which will take place between the 23-28th April, 2013! It will be shown at the Animated Com Reel on April 27, at 5pm in Gloria 2. Here is a screenshot of our good old fish! Thank you for travelling us back to Germany!

The World In Your Mind

I just came back from Stuttgart, where i was invited by Michael Fragstein and Turan Tehrani from Buro Achter April  to take part in a lovely project, together with four other artists. The project, called 'The World In Your Mind', is a collaboration between Buro Achter April and writer Tobias Hülswitt. Tobias did a series of interviews, asking what the universe was to different people. One of the answers was interpreted into an animation piece, called Undercurrents, by Michael Fragstein last year. This year, they decided to pick five more answers and to invite five animation artists to interpret them in a 2 metre long piece of paper, that hung from the walls of the Strzelski Galerie  in Stuttgart. 

The other four artists were my good friend Magali Charrier from France, Ule Barcelos from Portugal and Berlin, Edwin Rostron from England, and Lorenzo Fonda from Italy. We had two days to draw our illustrations, which are on sale through the gallery. It was a beautiful experience we all shared, in that wonderful city, with such wonderful hosts.

Below you can see the full details of the exhibition as well as the wall pieces we created for it. Better pictures and a time lapse film will follow next week!

Ule Barcelos

Detail from Ule's drawing

Edwin, drawing

Magali, drawing

Detail from Magali's drawing

Lorenzo, contemplating 

Detail from my drawing

Detail from my drawing

Maidentrip

From November 2012 till January 2013, we worked as Moth Collective on a beautiful feature documentary about Laura Dekker, a dutch solo sailor who was the youngest to sail around the world alone. The film, directed by American director Jillian Schlessinger, is a personal journey through the oceans of the world, and has been filmed both by Jillian and Laura, while on route. All filming at sea was made my Laura herself. Although her trip was a huge controversy in Holland and Laura was held from travelling for a whole year, due to her young age, she managed to set off at the age of 14 and complete her journey two years later, in 2012. 

Our role in the film was to create 24 animated maps, showing Laura's geographical and emotional journey through the seas. The film will premiere in SWSX festival in Austin, Texas, next week and we are very excited to be there to see it in its full glory and finally meet the whole Maidentrip team!

These are some beautiful posters that artist Leah Koransky made for the film. The trailer and our animations will follow shortly.

Storyboarding workshop at City and Guild's

I went back to City and Guild's of London Art School this month to teach the new students. This year, I decided to hold a workshop that was closer to my practice and that would give the students the opportunity to get introduced to a subject that they had not been exposed to before. I had one day and a half with each group of twenty students, and so in that time i decided to teach an intensive storyboarding workshop.
The students had to write a short story to begin with, which they then exchanged with their classmates. After getting introduced to basic film theory and terminology, they had to create a storyboard that endorsed all the subjects we had introduced during the class. I talked to them through the differences of scenes and shots, where to place the camera, the importance of sound, and gave them a short film screening, including graduation films from the 80's until today that cover different animation and most importantly, storytelling techniques.

Animasyros Festival

This year i was invited by the organizers of Animasyros International Animation Festival in Greece to attend the festival as a member of the Jury, as last year i was awarded the Grand Prix at the festival. I was very honoured by the invitation and very happy i could go back to Greece, seeing I don't get to go back so often since my parents moved away. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet some lovely people, watch some wonderful films, and feel some warmth on my skin, after a rainy summer in London...

The festival takes place in the beautiful island of Syros, in the heart of the Cyclades, between 4 days. I arrived late on a Thursday evening, and I had 3 days of films, sun and fresh fish to enjoy with the other great members of the jury, Juergen Haas, Patrick Smith and Eva Stefani. Juergen is a professor in animation at the university of Luzern, in Switzerland, while Patrick teaches at the NYU and in Singapore and Eva teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Athens.

Although our main occupation was watching the films, we had the opportunity to take a dip in the Aegean, and have some nice meals together in the sun. We only wished the festival was slightly longer so we could have enjoyed a few more days of summer...!

Thankfully, we all agreed on which films we wanted to award, and so we gave the prizes to the following filmmakers: The Best Student Film was awarded to Korean film maker Song E Kim, for her film 'Bite of the Tail', produced in the US. We thought that the design of the film was fantastic, but also the use of symbolism and the atmosphere that Song created was wonderful. We also loved '366 Days' by Johannes Schiehsl, produced in Germany, but as we could only award one film, we had to give him the Honourable Mention for Student Film. I personally could have given that film the Grand Prix, as it was so complete, honest and simple. I hope Johannes puts the full film up online soon for us to watch it again as it is a real treat!

The Best International Film was awarded to a film that made us laugh like no other in the festival, due to its wonderfully appropriate context and its simple and effective humour. The film is called 'A Furtive Tear' and is a US production by Carlo Vorgele. Finally, we awarded the Honourable Mention to a French and Canadian production by Frank Dion, 'Edmond was a donkey', which had such a subtle design and rhythm, and was so beautiful and powerful. Finally, we awarded an honourable mention to Eleni Miltsi for her film 'Abeyance'.

Here are some pictures from our lovely time in Syros, with the guys from the Jury and Maria Anestopoulou, the festival organizer.

 

WWF Cursor Swarm

This summer, Dave Dan and I were contacted as Moth by Aimaq Von Lobenstein agency in Berlin, in order to make a short film for the WWF in Germany. We were instantly very excited at the idea of collaborating with the WWF and created a pitch combining their initial ideas for the film and our personal input and narrative style.
The film is a call to sign a petition against overfishing in European seas. As the WWF states, "For 30 years Europe’s Fisheries Ministers have made poor decisions that have resulted in overfishing, sending our fishing industry into decline. If this continues we will bankrupt our oceans and our fishing economy". The vote against overfishing will take place on the 20th of November.
We were very happy to hear that the film helped raising a lot of awareness and that EU politicians have already contacted the WWF to talk about their proposals. We hope that they will make the right decision next month, but until then, you still have time to watch it and to sign the petition at either the German or the UK website. The German one is decorated with our illustrations too!

http://schwarm.wwf.de/#sam
http://campaigns.wwf.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=14&ea.campaign.id=16714


WWF Cursor Swarm from Moth on Vimeo.

We worked on the film during August and September, in a lovely studio we rented out just for the purpose of this project. The studio space was kindly given to us by Sparkle Animation, where we got in our dear friends Matthias Hoegg and Mikey Please, to help us out with animation and compositing for two weeks. James Hatley, Daniela Negrin Ochoa and Kristian Andrews also helped us with animation. Most importantly though we had the chance to work with Marian Mentrup, also a good friend of ours that we had never had the chance to collaborate until this project, who did a fantastic job with the music and that we couldn't thank more.  

Motionographer did a little feature on the film, where you can read more about the production and see the full list of credits. 

BBC Science Series Pitch

In July we were contacted as Moth to do a pitch for the new BBC Science Series. We didnt win it, but we did get through the last round! Here are some stills i designed for them and that i wanted to share as i enjoyed making them!

Mountain animation

Mountain was launched online this week, so i can finally post it here too. I was responsible for the animation of the two market ladies, the computer boys, the girlfriend, and the hikers in the end.