Leno 1

A few months ago, a young movie director from Geneva told me about his project to film the story of the famous French female aviator called Hélène Boucher (nicknamed Leno). He asked me to draw a dozen drawings to illustrate the scenario he was to show to his producers. The movie would be called "Leno".

 Hélène Boucher had a short but intense career. After her first flight at the age of 22 years old, she decided to become an aviator. She quickly managed to accumulate speed and heights records and became famous doing acrobatic flights, guided by Michel Détroyat. The she got a contract as a test pilotfor Caudron-Renault in 1934. She also was the lover of the famous pilot François Durafour from Geneva. He was the first man to attempt a landing on the summit of Mont-Blanc, the whole thing with a plane made out of wood and tarp!
The 30th of November 1934, the young Leno lost her life when she crashed during a test flight.

Rootwords "Just Amigos" - part 5: THE VIDEO CLIP!!!!

Rootwords "Just Amigos" - part 4: Shooting, inking and coloring

A few pictures of the shooting at la Brasserie des Halles de l'île  with a few extras, GanzHQ, KinyamaSounds and Rootwords:

And here's the inking before the colouring of page 1 of the video clip.

Rootwords "Just Amigos" - part 3:The shooting place and colorations tryouts

After visiting a dozen coffee houses in Geneva, two them were left: the Remor and la Brasserie des Halles de l'île. The place for the shooting had to be well exposed and inspire confort in which a comic artist would enjoy dreaming at his pencils and sketchpad. La Brasserie des Halles de l'île was perfect for that with the right kind of light, space and furnitures. While KinyamaSounds  was working on getting all the autorisations and GanzHQ was gathereing all the stuff needed for the shooting of the clip, I imagined Rootwords in the colours of les Halles or the Remor.

Rootwords "Just Amigos" - part 2: The graphic tryouts

Once the storyboard was finished, we were able to picture the general structure of the video clip in a better way. While the others where starting to organize the filming part, I had choose a graphic style that would fit the summery atmosphere of the song... We would need colour and a friendly kind of stroke... After several tryouts, some of which you can see below...

...We opted for computer coloration and a simple kind of stroke. The graphic style had to be different from the usual street art associated with hip-hop and not to realistic... We finally choose the following kind of drawings for Rootwords:

This graphic style is a bit different from the drawings I'm used to do... that would be a challenge for the rest of the work to be done.

Rootwords "Just Amigos" - part 1: The storyboard

Everything started with a meeting between GanzHQ, KinyamaSounds, Rootwords and myself. The week before, Rootwords had sent me the lyrics of the song as well as explanations about the meaning of the story it depicts, the kind of message he wants to give through it. I made a first rough storyboard, suggesting a story and the kind of illustrations that could accompany the song. It was arranged into a powerpoint coupled with the song, so we could have an idea of the rhythm the images would pass so that it followed the music. It made us realize that the flow of speech was to quick for the video clip to be entirely made of drawings. Too much was said in too  short a time for it to be depicted into drawings and stay intelligible. At the end of the reunion, we decided the clip would be a mix between classic filmed sequences and comic pages that would illustrates some of the narrative parts of the song, with sometimes insertions of sketches into the filmed parts. In this way, two different actions would happen simultaneously, one with Rootwords singing while drawing in a coffee house, and the other telling through the drawings his ambiguous meeting with a girl that will become his friend... but just his amigo...


 We had only two months and half to make the clip because the single will be out the 25th of June. So we had to organize ourselves and work very fast. During next week, I made a second storyboard more complete, describing the entire video clip in 17 pages, with the images and actions associated with the lyrics and  a suggestion of camera movements. You can read below an example of the storyboard.

 

Rootwords - "Just Amigos"

Dear all,

Since march, I've been working on the new music video clip of Rootwords, a promising hip-hop singer from Kinyama Sounds, a music label from Geneva. For his new single "Just Amigos", that we can start hearing on Swiss radios, Rootwords wanted to make an original video clip which would reunite filmed sequences and comics parts. For this he has assemble a small team composed of GanzHQ, a gifted music video clip and film director, his managers from Kinyama sounds and myself to work on the concept of the clip that we had to make in two and a half months. During the next days, I will present you the different steps of the creation of this clip, for which I created the storyboard, the illustrations and the cover of the single, while waiting for the official release of the video clip, the 25th of June.

Rootwords

 

 In memory of Moebius, who widened my imagination since childhood...

Losar

It's Losar, the Tibetan new year! According to Tibetan calendar, we're starting year  2139, the year of the dragon. So best wishes and a happy new year to you!  Who knows, maybe this will be the year I finish my first comic!
A huge thought to the Autonomous Tibet and Kham regions inhabitants, and loads of prayers to appease the tensions in those places.

The Last Cop

Tibet woman