"Kid Cole & Clay" or How I met Kevin Dart and Pete Candeland

It's interesting to see how far my professional life in London took me in only 5 years. And how many amazing talents and souls I've met!
I started working at Cartoon Network Development Studio Europe in 2007. I first did the animatic of an opening sequence for a pilot called "The Vaughan Boys", directed by Alan Kerswell. Unfortunately it didn't make it to a proper TV series.
After that, They asked me to direct the opening sequence for another pilot called "The Amazing Adventures of Kid Cole & Klay"directed by Pete Candeland.
I was already a big fan of his work for Gorillaz, I got really excited and a bit nervous as well. Then I've been told I would be working in collaboration with an illustrator based in L.A. called Kevin Dart.
The funny thing was, I discovered his work few month before and had just ordered two prints from him as gifts for my brother and his wife 3 days earlier!!! I felt like the luckiest person on the planet! Working with Pete and Kevin was the best experience I ever had at that time! We were all on the same page and trusted each other. I had few meetings with Pete who would show me a bunch of sketches of ideas of scenes he'd like to see in the opening. I used that as a base for my storyboard. I dug into my vintage soundtracks and edited a temporary music to build my animatic on. Kevin produced most of the backgrounds and monsters. Lionel Marchand animated the main characters and Ben Locket composed the final track.
So here are 2 work in progress (early board on a temp track and colorboard on the final music with a temporary voice over) and the final animation.

Back after 3 years

I've opened this blog more than 3 years ago and, by the number of posts and their dates, you can guess I'm not the blogger type of guy.
I'm about to go on a one month journey to Malaysia this coming January. I thought it might be a good excuse to get back on this empty blog and try filling it up with new stuff about my trip but not only. That's why I call it my mess.
I'll post really random things. Some might make sens, some won't.

More of Before...

These are few of the old jobs I produced back in Paris:

This is the a graphic interface I did for the DVD of "Drunk of women and poetry"


This one is for the DVD of "Ran" from Akira Kurosawa


And this one for the DVD of "The Bear" from Jean-Jacques Annaud


I made all those animation using Adobe softwares (Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects).

Before...

Here is what I used to do before I moved to London.

I was creating animated menus for DVDs in Paris. I worked for few different companies, but the one where I really inprouved my skills was Ulteama, a small but wealthy companie directed by two brothers Eric and Richard Leboloch. They sold Ulteama in 2005. Then I decided it was the time for me to move on and try to be more ambitious. So I made my Reel and sent it to many companies in London. Most of them replied positively. So I said "Au revoir Paris, Hi London"

This is the Reel I sent arround here and which helped me to find my place here.