2 posts tagged “animation”

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.

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.