Scooby Snacks!

Directing & Producing partners Leah McKissock & Adam Blake Carver make up La Di Da Films and have recently created a great niche for themselves with stop motion food animation! Here are four Scooby-Doo spots that I helped them with. Now I'm getting hungry for some mummy dogs...

Charbroil Grill social media spots

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.)

Director/Producer: Pete Levin
Creative Account Manager at McBeard: Kathleen Curran
Animation Team Manager at McBeard: Vick Trochez
Producer: Musa Brooker
Director of Photography: Eric Adkins
Lighting Technician: Ian Raymond
Production Designer: Kyle Arneson
Fabricator: Emily Franz
Puppet Fabricator: Tennessee Reid Norton
Animator: Hilary Lile
Animator: Misha Klein
Animator: Pete Levin
Senior Editor & Motion Graphics at McBeard: Matt Wells

Here are the first two spots:

Magic happens when two become one. And then becomes dinner. Get Gas2Coal at the link in our bio.

A video posted by Char-Broil (@charbroilgrills) on Apr 29, 2016 at 11:56am PDT

TRU-Infrared™: Act now and receive 50% juicer steaks. Get TRU-Infrared™ at the link in our bio.

A video posted by Char-Broil (@charbroilgrills) on May 6, 2016 at 11:59am PDT

UPDATE - Here's the third!

The Digital Electric Smoker sends cook notifications over Wi-Fi to keep you in the know, so you can tackle your day while it tackles dinner. Get more info at the link in our bio.

A video posted by Char-Broil (@charbroilgrills) on May 13, 2016 at 11:53am PDT

Principal Financial: Logo Evolution

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

Pete Levin | Director's Reel | Jan. 2016

Brand new for 2016: A Director's Reel!
(Not to be confused with my animation reel.)


Featuring clips from:
Transformers vs. GI Joe: The Commissary
Oakley: Heritage
Comedy Bang! Bang!
MAD: Spy vs. Spy (and here)
Fist-Man: Strongest of the Slab-Bodied Slab Lords
LaMuff: Gold Lamé
Orioles Spots
I'm Scared
Foo Fighters: Miss the Misery
Discovery Communications Holiday Card

Target Pharmacy commercial

BLOG CATCH-UP WEEK: DAY 1

Catching up on the backlog of posts I wanted to put up here. I guess it's good when you don't have enough time to yammer on about all of the stuff you're doing because of all of the stuff that you're doing.

This is a quick, fun Target commercial I worked on in May, with the team at Buck.TV.

It incorporates live action, CG, and stop motion. I was the stop motion animator, with Jason Ronzani serving as assistant animator. The spot was directed by Steve Day, produced by Emily Rickard, and Stacy Toyama was the DP.

Look for the sponge animation and the spray bottle coming coming out of the surface - those are the main stop motion effects! 

More entries each day this week! (Hopefully!)

Cardboard animation for Google!

A few weeks ago, I got a call to work as an animation director on a project for Google and jumped at the chance! Google's got a bit of a legendary status as a cool place to work and I wanted to try out some of the cafeteries on their campus at the Googleplex in Mountainview, CA. Nick Carbonaro, a talented director that I worked with on a series of Ronzoni commercials, would be directing this spot and remembered me from our previous work together.

I brought the incredible Musa Brooker along for the ride to animate with me on the spot. We were total tourists when we got to Google:

We actually shot the spot up in Sonoma with Colin Blackshear & Josh Livingston with a crazy moco camera rig at their production house, Film Country. Director of photography was David Jacobson.


Check out the Cardboard app for Android.
The animation ended up being a demo for Google's Cardboard. The big surprise of Google i/o Conference this week, Cardboard is literally a package made of cardboard that unfolds into VR goggles that will work for your Android phone.

Photo courtesy of @sree_raman
You can scroll down the page HERE to step through the animation.

Musa at work.
Google's gotten the ball rolling and I'm really excited to see where developers are going to take this from here...

Oakley: Heritage -- a downshooter, paper cut-out, pixillation, replacement, handdrawn, rotoscope, puppet, stop motion spot

At the end of February, I got a chance to direct this fun Oakley spot with Alden Wallace. Produced by Colin Hudock for Transmission Creative, this spot really goes for it!

Oakley is celebrating their 30th anniversary of making sunglasses with their Heritage line of glasses, bringing some of their classic designs back for sunglasses enthusiasts. For this spot, we wanted to go through all of the most iconic sunglasses as well as incorporating Oakley's most iconic spokes-athletes.


To do this, we played with several different kinds of animation on a downshooter setup: puppet animation (Frogskins), cutout animation (Flak Jacket and Airbrake), photo animation (the Lindsey Vonn sequence), flipbook animation (the Julian Wilson/Shaun White/Eric Koston sequence), replacement object animation (Radarlocks), and the pixilation of human hands throughout.

The art director was Maria Sequeira. The hands belong to Michael Stellman. So, so many things fabricated by Karen Knighton (but especially the big flipbook sequence). Drawings by Javier Barboza. Frog puppet fabricated by Greg Sesma. Animation assistant was Brandon Lake. Andrew Racho did some great post work. Ada Trinh did hand make-up. Oliver Wyatt Lewis was a production assistant. I'm probably forgetting people. Oh yeah, as well as being a co-director, I also animated this thing.

Ronzoni - "Pasta Evangelista: It Pays to Eat Pasta"

This April, immediately after the Foo Fighters video was wrapped, I boarded a plane and headed to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to act as animation director on a series of live action/stop motion spots for Ronzoni Pasta. The spots, directed by Nick Carbonaro and Ben Leavitt for Greencard Pictures, are a fun, energetic way to present recipes and health information about Ronzoni products.

Keep your eyes peeled for the food and puppet animation! Check out all the spots at the official Pasta Evangelista website.