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

Animation Reel: April 2015

Hey lookie here!! A new animation reel!

Pete Levin: Animation Reel - April, 2015 from Pete Levin on Vimeo.

Featuring clips from:
Oakley*
Spy vs. Spy#
Foo Fighters*
UPS#
Dinosaur Office
Baltimore Orioles*
Google Cardboard#
Detroit Lions#
Minhocas o Filme
Haunters*
I'm Scared*
WWE Slam City


* = I directed or co-directed this animation as well as animating it.
# = I was a lead animator on this project.

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.

Getting out of my dark studio for some Starbucks

STARBUCKS - SIP FACE from Nicholas Gaul on Vimeo.

Every now and again, I get to leave the cavernous darkness of the animation studio and venture into the sunlight to be part of a fun pixilation shoot. Dallas Sterling, the brilliant DP who I got a chance to work with on an XBox commercial, brought me onto this Starbucks SipFace spot as animation supervisor.

Over the course of three days, we shot dozens of setups from Venice Beach to Griffith Park. Frappuccinos were frozen with dry ice so they wouldn't spill out of their cups, but still every shot was a race against the frozen-coffee-melting-clock. A special thanks to all the very patient actors!

Produced by Radical Media and directed by Dennis Liu.

Foo Fighters: Miss The Misery

Summer of 1995 in Baltimore, Maryland. This was the poster that I hung on my bedroom wall:

(It's still hanging there, amidst Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots posters; like a time capsule of high school in the 1990's.)

Winter of 2011 in Los Angeles, California. I'm told I get to direct the official music video for the Foo Fighters' song "Miss the Misery" off of their newest album, Wasting Light.

After a ton of hard work (with less than three weeks between hearing the song for the first time and delivering the final video), the video is premiering today on Fuse TV at 2pm, 9pm, and randomly throughout the day and will later be posted through Fuse the Foo Fighters' official websites.

EDIT: Here it is, the completed video for Miss the Misery:
The concept for the female character in the video came after I saw a website linked to by a friend on Facebook, showing Chinese artist Liu Bolin's urban camouflage body paint. Other inspirations included the work of Emma Hack, Joanne Gair's Disappearing Model, and a Canadian Salvation Army commercial.

At one point in the making of the video, Aiden, the actor, had 83 layers of paint on his face. Linn, the actress, had all of the blood rush to her feet and nearly fainted after holding her position for so long while being painted. (There's still a lot of pioneering to be done with pixilation, so we often had to discover what was and wasn't possible along the way.) Still, even with these hardships, there was never a complaint out of either of these dedicated, talented actors. (Not to mention the ceaselessly committed and inspired crew I was lucky enough to work with on this!)

Keep your eyes peeled for my brief appearance on Hoppus on Music tonight at 11pm. (All times eastern.)

EDIT: Here is my awkward appearance on Hoppus. Don't Blink!


Click on the pictures to embiggen them.
Here are the credits for all of the amazing people who helped on this!

CREDITS
Actor: Aiden Ivy
Actress: Linn Bjornland

Director: Pete Levin
Producer: Andrew Ahn
Producer: Daniel Kang
Associate Producer/1st AD: Eisen “Ace” Yoon

Director of Photography: Josh Silfen
Animation Director: Musa Brooker
Editor: Ishai Setton

Key Body Painter: Justine Serebrin
Key Body Painter: Samitra Borhanpour
Animator: Chris Calvi
Animator: Dan Driscoll
Animation Assistant: Eri Hawkins
Animation Assistant: Ashley Arechiga
Animation Assistant: Nicole Emmons
Art Department Assistant: Jennie Cotterill

Gaffer/AC: Armin Balg
Gaffer: Nathanial Fu
Gaffer: Kyle Murphey

Original Prints: Nigel Sanders
Make-Up Artist: Fanny Herrera
Make-Up Artist: Amanda King

Storyboard Artist: Sam Hale
Post Production Effects: Takashi Takeoka
Post Production Effects: Sol Friedman

Behind the Scenes Videographer: Audrey Stanzler
Animation Production Assistant: Sam Amin
Animation Production Assistant: Danielle Bonadona
Animation Production Assistant: David Braun
Animation Production Assistant: Lauren Brown
Animation Production Assistant: Laura Cechanowicz
Animation Production Assistant: Lisa Chung
Animation Production Assistant: Christy Heyob
Animation Production Assistant: Jay Kim
Animation Production Assistant: Lizzy Klein
Animation Production Assistant: Nalena Kumar
Animation Production Assistant: Burak Kurt
Animation Production Assistant: Brandon Lake
Animation Production Assistant: Amy Lee Ketchum
Animation Production Assistant: Louis Morton
Animation Production Assistant: Spencer Ockwell
Animation Production Assistant: Kelsey Stillmaker
Animation Production Assistant: Vincent Tang
Animation Production Assistant: Michele Yang

Location: Monk Space
Tape Transfer: Point 360
Catering: Fiesta Mediterranean Catering
3D Set Photography: Jon Schnitzer

Special Thanks: Deux Jeans, Max Winston, Screen Novelties, Jen Hoche

XBox Kinect: Joy Ride

Three days to do almost about a minute of pixillated animation in a ton of different locations with a crew who was used to live action and winter light fading quickly? We did it! The crew, including director Scott Culver and DP Dallas Sterling, were incredibly talented and a lot of fun to work with. Although I think we all could have done without the vicious windburn in the middle of the desert. I served as animation supervisor.

Check out the spot, produced by g-Net Media for a new game on the XBox Kinect system:



Photo by Scott Culver

Photo by Dallas Sterling

ANNIE AWARD!!

WINNER OF THE 2010 ANNIE AWARD
FOR BEST ANIMATED COMMERCIAL

Congratulations to everyone at Acme Filmworks, Yuval & Merav Nathan, Linn Bjørnland, and the amazing crew of this spot!

Spanish Lottery commercial nominated for an Annie Award

Deportes, the first spot shown in the previous post, has been nominated for Best Animated Commercial. Click here for a list of nominees.

Congratulations to my friends at Screen Novelties and Shadow Machine for their respective nominations as well!

2/7/10 Update:
We won!!

Pixilation Downshooter spots

Here are four new pixilated spots that I worked on that premiered on Spanish television (television in Spain, that is) this month. The campaign is called "Si sueñas..." and it's to promote Loterías del Estado. They were directed by Yuval and Merav Nathan, the Israeli husband and wife directors of the music video for Her Morning Elegance. These four were animated by Yuval, Guy Ben Shitrit, and myself. The stop motion puppet is the talented and patient Linn Bjornland and the production company was Acme Filmworks.

You might want to hit the full screen button on these youtube clips so you can see details like the birds made out of socks or the plates exploding into forks.

Deportes
Social Genérico Producto These commercials follow three others I helped Yuval and Guy animate earlier in the year (along with Portland animator Kevin Glick). These three are currently airing on Spanish television (Spanish language television in the United States and Latin America, that is). They're for a campaign called "Dreams" to promote Comcast. They were also directed by Yuval and Merav and produced by Acme Filmworks this time with the help of the Stokes/Kohne studio. Anthem Super H Triple Play Downshooter Pixilation seems to be getting more and more popular. Due to the success of Her Morning Elegance, there's been quite a few people who have tried to duplicate its style. But there's also a huge amount of territory to pioneer with downshooter pixilation (i.e. the amazing Coldplay video below). I hope animators continue to play with this style and push it further and further. Some recent examples of downshooter pixilation are: Sorry I'm Late (short film) Anuncio Telefónica (commercial) Target: Every Color You Can Dream (Australian commercial) Target: Every Color You Can Dream - Kids Version (Australian commercial) Chateau Bonne Entente: Summer (Canadian commercial) Coldplay: Strawberry Swing (brilliant Little Nemo inspired music video) Tunisiana: Sayef Jawak (a shameless Tunisian ripoff of Sorry I'm Late) And here's a bonus video of me and Yuval fighting it out on set: