The Illusionist Poster

Sylvain Chomet "The Illusionist" color work - backgrounds

- in-between 2006 and 2008 I was so fortunate to work on Sylvain Chomet's “The Illusionist”. The first two month mostly BG painter- then as head of Art department with the responsibility to oversee the productions of BG's and layout- clean-up even though that was in good hands of Isobel Stenhouse and Bjørn Aschim ( he did the beautiful cityscape drawings you see through-out the film)

     When I came, they had been working for some time in making the animatic and was slowly starting the actual production of cleaning up the layouts.Evgeni Tomov had been working on the project on development and on the animatic, but had left before I came on board.... still he did circa the first third of the roughs for the animatic and Pierre-Henry Laporterie had taken over where he left. 

     The black/grey/white animatic worked as a blueprint for the film... I do hope that it will be included in the DVD release... one can say that the film was done twice first a rough drawn and posed black/grey/white film and then the color version that I worked on.

Bjørn had done some color work but I after a short time when I started doing the color-keys for the BG's I did it mostly from scratch keeping only little from what was done before....and was a dream job to do. First I had those great drawings to work from and then a handful of great artist to paint the BG's. Anne Hpfmann whom I think did close to 100 and did some of my favourite BG's in the film, Bjørn Aschim - also a great painter, Marcin Lichowski, Julien Deman – did too few BG's since he worked on the character color together with Emma McCann that beside her job as character color head did a handful of BG's. Beside supervising the artists I painted as many BG's as I could manage. 

  I enjoyed staying in Edinburgh for those close to two years I did. And Im proud of have been part of that film. I got some good friends among them the assisting director Poul Dutton that wrote the Fiddler Pieces story...another great project.


More to come, stay tuned.. 

Sylvain Chomet "The Illusionist" color keys - Backgrounds

Sylvain Chomet "The Illusionist" color key's - backgrounds

Das Sandmännchen - Abenteuer im Traumland art work

I was so lucky to part of this film directed by Sinem Sakaoglu and with beautiful production design by Anne Hofmann. In these pictures I was asked to design some interiors for the live-action part of the film. The kids bedroom and the living room. It takes place in a light tower so no corners. It was hard to live up to the stuff done for the puppet part of the film...but fun.
      People that have seen the film might recognize the Zeppelin lamp or the Moon-dogs...