Coke Music
​Here's my friend Chris and I hanging out at the set of our Coke Music spot. Wrapped at 5 AM that night with a 100 teenagers that were starting to get tired. Catering made us all some mean grilled cheese sandwiches.
Escape Machine
Here are some of the initial designs for what was then called the "Get me out of here button". We first wanted it to be hundreds of buttons placed around Paris that would give out trips every day.
By Teenage Engineering
The client said that if we're going to give out trips, we'll need something more spectacular so we comped up this:
​By Alex and I
After a bit of a production nightmare and people telling us we could only have a tiny amount of action for a large amount of money we started again from scratch and brought Pleix on board:
​Initial Design
​3D model
​Final Product
There were 3 people inside the machine operating everything by hand like oompa loompas. The two lips came out from behind and the heart jumping on the trampoline was hidden inside the top of the box.
After watching the film online, you could go into first person view and take a chance at winning a ticket yourself. This was directed impromptu style by Clemens Purner, Alexander Kalchev and myself. Between rehearsals we had one take to capture the entire action...
Billboard powered by oranges
Everyone told us it couldn't be done. People had done it with potatoes, lemons and oranges on a small scale but never for a billboard.​ Michel Gondrys production designer couldn't do it and even some dude who worked for EDF said it's impossible.
Once again, we had to call Teenage Engineering for some help.​
Laser cut copper and zink plates
Rows of oranges to make the multi-cell battery
​more and more and more oranges
All connected to a custom controller and ​IT WORKS!
Even the oranges were happy ^ _ ^
Attraction: the anime
​What a nightmare. Really. We thought this was going to be so much fun to work on. It was the perfect recipe, Unit9 for the digital production, Koji Morimoto for the animation and good production time (+- 10 months) but it turned out to be insane. Totally worth it but crazy. Communicating with the japanese anime studio turned out to be pretty much impossible. We thought they said yes when they said no. They thought we agreed when we disagreed. In the end, it still managed to meet our expectations and became one of our most awarded projects, with three D&AD pencil nominations and a Webby among others.
Here's some work in progress imagery from the sets to characters.​
​Tokyo in the year 2040
​Interior sketch
​The project was initially called 15.
​Hiro, one of the main characters.
​His friend Ren.
​and Koichi.
Chaos at Home
Another over over over ambitious project where each day seemed to bring in more mistakes and more lessons to be learned. We could have just gone and payed Ubisoft or any other major french game studio to skin one of their existing Wii titles. Change the levels a little and your good to go. But no. We wanted to go the difficult way. Build game mechanics from scratch, do everything in cell-shading to give it that drawn 3D look and of course create intro and outro cutscenes for each of the 17 mini games. Alex and I came up with the story, the characters, the levels and overall art direction. We also designed the cover art. In the end my childhood dream came true, walking through a store and seeing my own video-game on the shelves.
Here are some Work in Progress images:
First sketch of the house. The idea here was to give the house itself character, the more you repaired it, the happier it got.
We wanted our 2D illustrations (left) to look just as good when rendered in 3D (right).
First sketch of the family
Here are some different version of the dad and his evil boss which we later turned into the annoying neighboor.
The menu was a good place for us to re-use the 2D elements. Giving it a Saul Bass relooking.
Alex and I wrote a hundred names and designed tons of covers. Chaos At Home is the one that stuck around.
We even made this intro screen that shows up everytime you start up the game right after the Wii logo.
Chlorophyllo
El Luchador mas grande del universo! Chlorophyllo was one of those projects that happened very fast, very good and on a very very tight budget. We had about 6 weeks to make the whole thing so we couldn't afford any mistakes. Working with Oscar Tillman from B-Reel was great. If it wasn't for him and his team it would've never turned out the way we wanted. After sifting through hours and hours of footage, we made up our own story and recorded mexican actors to redub the films. We also turned the luchador green so he'd fit the brand. The initial idea was to use the website as a training campaign to come and fight the real Chlorophyllo at an actual ring in Paris. We wanted to have him kick everybody's ass but it turned out to be an insurance nightmare... oh well...
Here are some of the designs we made to get B-Reel excited.
Ever wondered what you were going to do with all those horrible fonts in your suitcase? I finally found out how...