Pablo Ferro: Making the Movie

The end of 07 brought some interesting conversations about the launching of a gallery tour with Pablo's art work throughout different countries. Pablo's inventory, currently in a garage in Van Nuys, includes a wealth of his fifty year plus career, and spans from original boards shown to Stan Lee in his first job interview, all the way to the logo work he did for the 'Napoleon Dynamite' filmmakers a few years back.

We're currently putting together an introductory book that takes us through the evolution of his work and is remarkable to see how much ground he's covered. Pablo's career bounces from comics to animated commercials, from pioneering quick cut commercials to multiple-frames in the original Thomas Crown Affair, and leaves a mark in the world of motion graphics and typography with his title and logo designer work for film and tv.

The latest up his sleeve is the creation of a line of calenders featuring his lovely animated alter ego, in a variety of sweet (and often disturbing...) images. Check out a few below...

 

The script had come a long way - long enough for us to get Jeff Bridges to spend a day of his own time in a Santa Monica sound studio with us, getting the voice track down.

But we felt the script needed even more. We wanted to streamline the story, to strengthen the narrative spine and make it funnier.

Screenwriter Adam Trunell was just out of the Disney screen writing fellowship and after playing weekly hands of Poker with him, I knew he wasn't just Poker smart, but had the right sensibility for the film.

Together, we did yet another draft of the script. And another.

We toiled over the tale of a character who sees poetry in the way he waters his plants, who on the one hand lives in a world of his own making, and on the other hand is perfectly in synch with his time and place. Be that place Cuba, during the pre-revolution diaspora, in Stan Lee's office at Timely comics in 1950s Manhattan, in the "Mad Men" scene of Madison Avenue during the mass media boom, in Stanley Kubrick's Strangelove set in London, in Pablo's "factory-like" loft on Second Avenue, or all the way across the country to Malibu in the Seventies, where he moved to make Harold & Maude with Hal Ashby.

Pablo soars from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, samples the best champagne and the best grass, but one day finds himself at the wrong end of the barrel of a smoking gun. Pablo gets shot by a mysterious stranger who shows up at his Second Avenue loft. He tries to close the metal door, but half of the bullet splinters off and ricochets into three walls before hitting him in the neck. Pablo falls down in a wet crunch. The Sixties escapism and utopia he embodied comes crushing down with an injury that almost claims his life
                                                           

Life punches Pablo's easy spirit hard and knocks him on his ass, and the movie takes a dramatic turn. But like all true heroes, Pablo gets back up, wraps a red scarf around the injury on his neck and keeps on swinging. Triumph over tragedy. And that's our story.

 

The character of the Dude played by Jeff Bridges in the Cohen Brothers'  The Big Lebowski turned out to be a fortuitous reference point for our Pablo character in the Pablo movie script: both are characters in sync with their times and comfortable wherever they go. Both are simple men and ardent members of the marijuana club... Pablo has been good friends with Jeff Bridges for many years, and we decided to ask Jeff to be the narrator of our film. And guess what?

He said yes.

When we got to the studio, Jeff got instantly behind the vision of the film and lent his warm touch to the production.

So the guy gets awards everywhere, he parties hard on the sixties, the whole thing is animated and he's full of famous friends, but what is the story about?

By this time I had researched Pablo Ferro enough to proclaim myself an expert in the field. I had been the documenting his life for over two years, scanned over fourteen hundred pictures and interviewed more than forty of his friends and associates, including an ex-lover who found me online and opened up a whole different (and darker) side to this "two-girl kind of guy..."

But this of course didn't make the story telling easy. Too much information can make telling a story more difficult than not having much to go on. Maybe a writing partner would be in order...

My producing partner Jeremy found the talented Neil Katcher, a writer and co-creator of the terrificly original Mortified franchise. Together and over several months, we labored exhaustively to boil down the story to a reasonable running time. Out came several drafts of the script, making use of the "Who is Pablo Ferro?" question to punctuate different beats of the story.

We came up with a sort of comedy of errors with a Big Lebowski-like type character who dances through life without too much of a plan for the future, mostly just concerned with living for the day and making his amazing art. A crazy and reckless way to go perhaps - but pretty compelling.

With the animation test up, I turned my attention to a documentary scene of the film. We chose to cut a scene showing 72-year-old Pablo getting one of his life time achievement awards. The scene shows Pablo "arriving on the scene" in New York, "getting showered with gifts" and then getting his awards to great applause.

The documentary elements of the film will still be treated with a painterly animated layer, turning Pablo's red scarf into a sort of magic wand that brings color and shine into the frames, juxtaposed to the animated scenes that have colorful backgrounds, but with black & white characters.

Here's the scene, still without the "magical realism filter". WIP, work in progress.

We came up with the idea of re-sampling the classic UPA/Mr.Magoo design of wild colors and asymmetric shapes, and build it with photographic elements within 3D modeling, all of it layered with a wealth visual effects.  A look that sets out to be both modern and familiar.

At the end of two months, we developed a handful of environments for the film and created this animation test, based on the Grand Royale Cinema scene in Hell's Kitchen, 1951. WIP, Work in Progress.

The context of the environments came to us easier as an ode to the rich graphic shapes of vintage Mr Magoo cartoons, interpreted with modern day technology, yet the look of the characters seemed to be more challenging, after all the screenplay profiles big personalities such as Stanley Kubrick, Hal Ashby, Peter Sellers, Stan Lee and Mick Jagger.

We looked at toon-shading, a cool technique that makes 3D originated characters look hand-drawn like "the deviants", in the scion commercials. The technique sort of tricks the eye as whether you're looking at a 2D or 3D character.
Yet stylistically they weren't right. We needed warmer feeling characters than the odd deviants...

Take a look at the character board that JJ put together, as part of our research:
 

We got in touch with a talented illustrator based in Canada, Antony Hare, who we hired to develop the look of the characters. He drew Kubrick(09) and Pacino (27) on the board above. We both thought his graphic and illustrative style was right on the money for the film, and we are still toying with the idea of populating our colorful environments with black and white characters.

Tale a look at the Hal Ashby Malibu Colony Pool House style-frame bellow:

The "Who is Pablo Ferro" teaser video came out well, but gave no clue that this was indeed a narrative, animated film. The layer of animation on top of live footage wasn't anywhere close to our entire vision for the film. And if animation was to be the predominant element of the film, it was time to define what it was going to look like. We surely wanted a "visual feast", "a look nobody ever saw before" - and who wouldn't? - but had we ever done extensive work with animation before? The hard questions kept on coming...

We took on the humble quest of catching up, and met with different animation companies from São Paulo, to Montevideo, up to New York, Toronto, across to London, Dublin, Odessa, and all the way to Calcutta and Seoul! We engaged in serious conversations about partnering up with at least half a dozen candidates. Conference calls and lots of pep talk. Can we find government subsidies? Should we shrink down the scope and ambition of the animated sequences? Am I open to sharing my director credit?

We finally settled on the obvious idea of doing the work, or at least the development work, here in LA. We hired a well-regarded and very talented commercial animation director, JJ Walker. With a tiny development budget, I set him up with a crew of beginner designers and animators in our production office on Melrose Avenue, bought a few computers and sat down for an endless path of research on visual references from other notable designers from all over the world. 

Norman Lear generously got us started with some development funds, and we compiled a sequence with some of our generous interview subjects taking a stab at our central question: Who is Pablo Ferro?

Jonathan Demme told us that Pablo "had a visual demon inside of him".

Angelica Huston said Pablo's name "evoked a kind of energy, humor, industry and goodwill.

Bob Downey's take on Pablo? "A Cuban, Jewish Indian". (Try that on for size.)

Andy Garcia called Pablo a "walking work of art".

But it was Beau Bridges who perhaps came closest to nailing the un-nailable. He described Pablo as "A leprechaun, yoda -- and also just your average guy.

You can take a look at the results of our first interview foray here ...

When we set out to make a biopic on Pablo Ferro, it felt like an interesting idea to combine an animated storyline with documentary footage. And while we're at it, why not throw in a dozen celebrity interviews, add a touch of motion graphic vignettes to keep things interesting and bring it to a slow stew?

My producing partner, Jeremy Goldscheider, nodded with interest. Then he asked the hard question: "Cool, but wouldn't it be a bit of a hodgepodge?""

Being from Brazil, I wasn't overly familiar with the term --  but it didn't sound that tasty. "A hodgepodge, a mishmash, this and that but nothing at all... ", Jeremy kindly clarified. My knee-jerk reaction was to get philosophical: " Well, it depends on how it's done..."

But I did take on the debate, knowing he had a good point.
 
Pablo, with his pioneering quick-cut editing in 1950's TV commercials and the creation of the first multiple frame sequence in cinema with the 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair, could well be considered a montage artist. He's been regarded as an artist who makes poetry out of the cacophony of everyday images, and though the hodgepodge alert seemed relevant, I started thinking of the film as a mosaic of different influences: part animation, part documentary, part motion-graphics, part interviews.

The people we pitched it to were generally interested, yet wanted to see a "proof of concept". The reactions went something like this: "So, you have a colorful take on the Sixties with sex and drugs, you have amazing pop art, a great soundtrack and a famous unknown main character wrapped in a red scarf, but what is the story about? And who is this guy anyway?"