Ohhh Yes! I'm telling ...The Greatest Party Story... EVER!!! On @MTV on DECEMBER 1st. Hahaha Haven't told this one before... yikes. pic.twitter.com/uviBbAJoAd
Directed, Produced, and Animated by Musa Brooker & Pete Levin
Starring Amanda Cerny
Director of Photography: Eric Adkins
Production Designer: Julianna Parr
Production Assistant: Andrew Oropeza
Costumes: Simone Williams
Storyboards: Greg Sesma
Puppet Fabricator & Rigger: Greg Sesma
Additional Fabrication: Musa Brooker & Pete Levin
VFX: Caress Reeves
The Baltimore Orioles. Stop motion animation. Two of my favorite things in the world.
My yearly animation for the Orioles remains at the top of the list of am-I-really-working-or-is-this-all-a-crazy-dream jobs. But somehow it was about to get much better.
It just so happened that there was going to be a Manny Machado Garden Gnome Night three days after Manny's 24th birthday and the O's wanted a video to celebrate both.
John Sumner (my perennial partner in crime on these spots) and I started brainstorming. John drew up some simple boards and I submitted them. The scoreboard team said the designs look great... but where was the script? Script? Yes, I'd be writing a script where several current players on the Orioles would voice their animated bobblehead likenesses! If there was a way to top the thrill of the yearly scoreboard animations, this was it!
Here it is:
Full Credits
Director/Animator/DP: Pete Levin
Art Director/Fabricator/Storyboards: John Sumner
Specialty Mouth Fabricator: Greg Sesma
Chris Davis as Action Figure Chris Davis
Adam Jones as Bobblehead Adam Jones
Manny Machado as Garden Gnome Manny Machado
Buck Showalter as Garden Gnome Buck Showalter
Matt Wieters as Bobblehead Matt Wieters
In March, I was hired to direct three stop motion spots to be produced by McBeard for Charbroil Grills. From stylized 2.5D downshooter animation to 1:1 scale animation, we truly found out how versatile the shooting space at Platypus Pictureworks could be!
These spots were really enjoyable to make! (Though animating that realistic steak did actually get me pretty hungry.)
In February, I got a chance to serve as animation supervisor on this spot about the evolution of Principal Financial's logo. I'm fascinated by the idea of how graphic design can so powerfully shape identity and inform people instantaneously about what a company is and is striving to be.
Directed by: Sean Starkweather
Produced by: Arsenal Creative
Animation Supervisor/Animator: Pete Levin
Stop Motion Animator: Musa Brooker
Director of Photography: Andy Knapp
Gaffer: Christian Buchholz
Production Designer: Francesca Marciano
Lead Artist: Andrew Schreiber
I'm a Los Angeles based animator, writer, and director. Between jobs for larger studios, I work out of my own stop motion animation studio in my garage, producing advertisments, music videos, and short films.
