Walls come alive with animations in Badland

Fans of Italian street artist Blu have been poking me to display this Badlander pairing. Since I'm fresh out of snark, having just spent it all on a re-run of Jersey Shore, I'll just point at these two and say enjoy the cool animation, kids.

"Muto" a short film by Blu, shot in Buenos Aires and Baden, 2008

Music by Andrea Martignoni, produced by Mercurio Film, assistant: Sibe

Agency: BBDO Berlin, Director: Jose Gomez @ Shilo, shoot location (wait for it....) Buenos Aries!

smart - For the curious - (2011) :30 (Germany)

See also the ad Smart Individualists. More at Shilo project Q&A at https://bit.ly/JGsmart

Sheina: Hi Jose. These smart spots show some awesome views of a modern city. How did you decide to shoot this piece?

Jose: BBDO came to us with a concept of having these black and white illustrations on the walls. Not an entirely new concept, but what I loved about the project was that we could breath life into the characters and make them unique. Their script and story was so clever and we were lucky enough to be given the task of interpreting that script and making it a distinct smart story. It was really fun to come up with the different actions and vignettes to keep it simple and smart like. The agency wanted to make sure that the spots came off simple and to the point. And what I love doing is creating that simplicity of the action in storytelling.

Sheina: It’s interesting that you shot the spot with a digital camera. Do you have a specific reason for doing so?

Jose: To achieve the stop motion effect, you need to shot the spot using still photography. The inconsistency of the characters is best achieved with still photography by way of time lapse. Stop motion is a collection of still frames jumping in time. So, we didn’t really need to shoot video and we used the Canon 5D because it has one of the most robust production backbone.

Sheina: What was the illustration process? Who did you work with?

Jose: We worked with a bunch of illustrators but the main character designer is Ken Lee. His drawing sensibility hit the nail on the head. He and I worked closely to get the characters looking right. We have over hundreds and hundreds of different reiterations of the drawings between the agency and us. From changing the hair style a few times, to the size of the shirt, and the flipping of the shoes, it was a million different details going back and forth. We also worked with Brian Covalt, for the stop motion animation of the characters. We wanted to get that animation feeling just right.