Category: Things We Like… A Lot

Brent Bonacorso Directs Elton John’s Home Again

This is Brent Bonacorso’s video of Elton John’s newest single Home Again from the album Diving Board coming out this month.

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The music video was produced by Collaboration Factory and Passion RAW.

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“It’s the fantastical journey of the Man in the Moon returning to his childhood home, and a bit of a metaphor for Sir Elton himself,” says Brent of the video.

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The man is seen, quite picturesquely at that, from the point of view of different ages as he travels across an imaginative landscape back in time to his childhood home.

Visually poetic, right?

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Maker Studios Behind Infinity Blade Lore Video

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ChAIR | Epic Games contacted us some months back with the desire to work with some of our talents to increase their visibility on Youtube. While the ground-breaking Inifinity Blade video games remain some of the most popular to ever release on the App Store, and that success has also spawned a series of hit novels, ChAIR still felt their presence on Youtube could be elevated.

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We explored several ideas until Woolf + Lapin suggested they pair up with some of Maker Studios’ talent to explore how they could complement ChAIR’s on-going marketing efforts and increase Infinity Blade’s visibility on Youtube. It was clear that bringing the talented teams at ChAIR and Maker together would help broaden the game’s audience even further.

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The Maker campaign kicked off last week with this fun Lore Video, which highlights some backstory, character arcs and stakes in practically one minute flat.

For those who don’t know, Maker is a next-generation media company founded by YouTube talent and home to online video’s top digital stars. Maker Studios’ vertical The Game Station (TGS), the second largest gaming network on YouTube, can exponentially expand the fan community around a game by incentivizing major talent within its network to create content around a spectacular property. Maker’s exclusive network of pop culture influencers entertain an audience of over 70mm unique users.

Youtube talents’ influence over their audience does great things; but it’s also about the needle and it is a great way to directly affect sales in an engaging way.

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Brief Candle: A New Short by Duncan McDowall

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Duncan McDowall’s new short is inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and explores how bio-electricity galvanizes into discovering muscular intelligence.

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It stars the very dramatic dancer and choreographer Dorotea Saykaly. It’s nice to see the longtime Compagnie Marie-Chouinard dancer take on independent projects like this. She has collaborated with Duncan before on the prequel to Brief Candle, called PAINTED.

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The short was filmed with 3 cameras in 30 minutes right after sunset, and then again just before sunrise. The light field is setup with 50 lamps, thousands of feet of power cord, and careful VFX in post courtesy of FRIMA FX.

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Music is by Godspeed! You Black Emperor.

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Woolf + Lapin is Excited to Pair Up With Director Brent Bonacorso

This is Brent Bonacorso’s short film called West of the Moon.

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Much like his well-known advertizing visual signature, West of the Moon is chock-full of fantasy imagery and enticing, subtle effects.

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The film’s script is penned by Bonacorso himself. He chooses to tell the story from the point of view of an old man reflecting on his past life. He pines for a past love lost during the Great War. “There was no Great War,” his forlorn narrator says, “it was a terrible one.”

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He brings back his love from the dead with his grenade heart.

Beautiful, right?

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New Talent at Woolf + Lapin: Director and Animator Julien Demers-Arsenault

Woolf + Lapin is happy to include another hot director to its roster of young, up and comers.

While Julien Demers-Arsenault is known for his animation work on credit sequences of some of the hottest films that have come out of Quebec in recent history, he is now tackling the live-action adaptation of the epic French comic strip Philémon.

He will co-direct the adaptation which stands to be a mind-bending three films spanning the three tomes with Sébastien Denault, also a great fan of the late Fred (Frédéric Othon Aristidès), legendary author of the comic strip known for its 70s style, openness and exuberance.

Speaking of exuberance, here is Julien’s splendid opening of Le Journal d’Aurélie Laflamme.

Some time ago, Julien also directed the music video for a satirical boy band song by Jon Lajoie. The video in question went extremely viral.

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Director Patrick Kalyn Joins Woolf + Lapin

Woolf+Lapin signs young director and VFX specialist, Patrick Kalyn. See his second and quite visionary short, Hybrids, produced by Gabriel Napora at Triton Films of Neill Blomkamp fame.

Here is the synopsis: In the wake of an alien infestation, an ex-special forces soldier’s daughter is killed in an alien attack. Seeking revenge, she leads a team deep into alien territory to a quarantined lab.

Soon, she discovers the aliens aren’t alien at all, but a failed government experiment to create a bio-hybrid soldier. She must then expose the government’s cover-up and save the last standing city in the quarantined zone from falling.

Needless to say we are very excited about this new collaboration.

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Duncan McDowall’s PAINTED at Lincoln Centre

Director Duncan McDowall’s screendance piece PAINTED just played at New York’s Lincoln Center as part of the Dance on Camera Festival. “It was terrific to be part of it as well as to be featured on the cover of the festival’s program,” Duncan says.

Choreographed and starring dancer Dorotea Saykaly, the film was selected to screen in the festival’s upcoming Dance on Camera Tour, February 23-24, and then will be heading to Amsterdam to be part of the prestigious Cinedans 2013.

PAINTED will then swing back to Montreal for its first hometown screening as part of the Festival des Films sur l’Art in mid-March.

Duncan is working on a few other things, namely the premiere of his short narrative fiction The Horse Latitudes at the upcoming RVCQ (One of Woolf+Lapin’s favorite film fests) on February 25th, followed by its inclusion in the NSI Short Film Fest as of April 29th.

Since screening The Horse Latitudes as part of last year’s Not Short on Talent delegation at the Cannes Film Festival, Duncan has been busy wrapping another screendance film, casting another narrative short, and scripting a feature-length.

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Disney’s Much Touted “Paperman” is Here

Back in June we posted an interview with director John Kahrs who was working on a groundbreaking technique that merges computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques. Disney employees were tweeting things like: “it’s the dawn of a new age in animation.” They may very well be right…

Here is Paperman .

“Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting with a beautiful woman on his morning commute.” Really, how fate conspires to bring people back together after a chance meeting, a broken connection.

Here again is the interview with John Kahrs.

Check out how it’s done?

Here’s to John Lasseter at Disney for fostering such a project. Could he be bringing Disney back to its prestige of yore?

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Patrick Boivin Kicks Off the New Year

Woolf + Lapin decided to go with Patrick’s newest clip, which is a riot by the way, to spread holiday cheer. We know we put a lot of his stuff up here, but the guy is so damn productive and amazing, he deserves it.

This is Einstein innocently busting some wicked moves to ring in the new year with some rather clueless robots.

OK so not that innocent. The man is using some dark science to make these robots a thing of the molecular past.

The clip was done to thank Patrick’s many subscribers (260,584 in fact, with a total of 200,137,222 video views). Hearty congrats!

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