Wired magazine recently interviewed director Patrick Boivin who they rightly say has YouTubed his way to Hollywood.
Here’s the pretty cool storyboard he made to prepare for the stop-motion Ninja Unboxing of Google’s Nexus One phone. When the process is this good…
In the interview, Patrick Boivin talks about how he came under the influence of moody French illustrator Moebius and, at age 16, began drawing cartoons. He has since directed many TV shows and shorts.
These are the same shorts Patrick Boivin put on his YouTube channel. “They were not popular at all,” Boivin says. “The short dramas had plenty of poetry but not a lot of punch, garnering only 200 views after six months.”
So Boivin turned to stop motion.
His video game-inspired hit Street Fighter, his funny clip Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee and his recent martial arts spoof, Ninja’s Unboxing, commissioned by Google to promote its new cellphone, have all racked up millions of views on YouTube.
Patrick Boivin and his own brand of DIY has made him a Youtube success story. But uploading your work on YouTube is not everything. Users must respond to it. And in the case of Patrick Boivin they did by the millions. 56, in fact.
That’s when Hollywood came knocking.
Now, and we’ve said it here before, Circle of Confusion is the LA-based management team that is taking care of finding directing gigs for Patrick.
In the Wired piece, he cites the work of Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson as prime influences. But Duncan Jones’ Moon was the last movie he saw that really touched him. “This is the kind of picture I would like to make: it uses science fiction to talk about something else.”
It’s just a matter of time as Patrick is heading out west in a week…
The Wired article goes into some detail on how he made the Ninja video, but there’s more DIY stuff in the interview Patrick gave to YouTube’s Creator’s Corner.