Aurélien Prédal “Monstre à Paris”

Posted on December 18, 2011 
Filed Under Painting | 1 Comment

Aurélien Prédal is a Gobelins graduate whose work you might have come across in 2006 as he took part in one of my all time Gobelins favorite shortfilms : “Burning Safari”. (“Le building”) is also a top favorite Gobelins short)

Aurélien was involved in the never ending production of french animated feature “A monster in Paris” and he just posted some unbelievable colour keys he made for the movie.

If you are interested in painting or lighting you should definitely have a look at his blog, his work is exceptional. To me he is just as good as people with 5+ years of experience and he probably made those colour keys, two to three years after graduating.

If you didn’t know, Aurélien was also a contributor to the Sketchtravel project.

Aurélien Prédal “Monstre à Paris” colour keys

As a side note, with 1.7 millions tickets sold, the movie did very well in France but so far it hasn’t covered the 27 millions euros the movie cost, making it a loss for the production company, Europa Corp.

A US release would be really expensive for Luc Besson’s company but they could probably do a UK release first. The British market is usually the second biggest territory in term of sales, ahead of Japan.

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“Monstre à Paris”
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Monstre à Paris french trailer!

Posted on June 15, 2011 
Filed Under Animation | 4 Comments

via Monstre à Paris Facebook page

That’s it! There won’t be any more delays, the movie is coming out at the end of the year and Europa corp finally released a trailer in french. I feel that “Monstre à Paris”, a movie that was first started in 2007, is showing a bit of age compared to animated blockbusters like Kung Fu Panda 2 but hopefully the very stylised art style and european flair will make the movie stand out from the competition.

I wrote several posts related to the movie in the past, you should be able to find them all by doing a search on my blog . I am really liking that trailer and the music is very catchy. CG animation lovers are really being spoilt those days!

Some more videos on Catsuka.

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Monstre à Paris
Monstre à Paris short clip

“Monstre à Paris” short video clip

Posted on July 16, 2010 
Filed Under Animation | 2 Comments

Ah ah! I just found a very short clip from “Monstre à Paris” on Zalex’s lighting showreel! ;-)

This is Vanessa Paradis’ character singing.

[update]this post is gaining a lot of popularity those days so I would like to point the readers to an older post with an other clip from the movie

http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2009/07/05/monstre-a-paris-short-clip/ .

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Monstre à Paris short clip

“Monstre à Paris” short clip

Posted on July 5, 2009 
Filed Under Animation, Character design | 4 Comments

Un Monstre a Paris

Curious about “Monstre à Paris”? Max Vallon, one of the animators just posted a short video clip from the teaser that was shown in Annecy last year. The animation is 3d and the backgrounds are matte painted/camera mapped. For having seen the whole sequence, I can tell you that the rest is even better.

[update] most links are dead but I just found a video on youtube

Read more:
Un monstre a Paris

“A monster in Paris” english trailer

Posted on August 31, 2011 
Filed Under Animation, Business of animation | 2 Comments

Well it looks like folks outside the country of smelly cheeses will also be able to enjoy Eric Bergeron’s “A monster in Paris” feature!

An 1080p English trailer just popped out and I am finally understanding why the lip sync was off in the French version… they animated with the English audio! :-) Surprisingly, the songs were also written in English. It is a good thing they had such a fabulous composer/singer as M.!

Some of the lip sync is a bit too symmetrical in places but this is looking pretty good overall. I missed last sunday’s première but I hope to catch the general release very soon.

We can say whatever we want about Europa corp. at least they made the movie come out and probably get released worldwide.

Hopefully this will attract more investors to the French feature animation industry. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need to emigrate to the US to work on similar projects or command higher wages?

Talking about the USA, the TAG 2011 Wage survey just came out.
TAG 2011 Wage survey highlights

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How much do they earn?

“Monstre…” again

Posted on February 8, 2010 
Filed Under Animation | 4 Comments

well well well, it looks like “A monstre in Paris” is still going despite all the problems the production went through and that s a good thing since what I saw at Annecy few years ago was really really cool

Matt Jones on “Monstre à Paris

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Monstre à Paris short clip
Un Monstre à Paris

I graduated!

Posted on June 18, 2008 
Filed Under Animation Mentor | 1 Comment

after 2 years and a half I finally graduted from the online Animation Mentor training. AM wasn't an easy experience but it was really worth it. I met a bunch of incredible people and a lot of talented animators. I also got a job out of it, in one of the best video game companies.

I thought redoing class6 would be easy since a lot of shots had been approved by my previous mentor Jason but Kevin pushed me in a different direction and I had to reblock a huge section of it. My short is still not finished but I still like my short very much and will keep working on it until I am pleased with the result.
I think I should be able to post a bit more often on my blog in the futur but there is already a new deadline with Siggraph so let's see what happen. Keep an eye on that space, I have a lot of things to say about the Annecy animation festival. I got to meet Bolhem Bouchiba, a very very nice animator from Pixar. I got to test TV Paint 9 and talk to the developers this year again. I saw Doug Sweetland "Presto", I participated to a presentation of "Monstre a Paris" (A Monster in Paris)… I got to do some pedalo on the Annecy Lac ;-) a lot of great things!
In the meantime, here is a pic of most of my classmates for this term under the mentoring of Kevin Koch

Schoolism Light and colours week 01

Posted on January 24, 2013 
Filed Under Education, Painting | 2 Comments

For this first week, our teacher Nathan Fowkes asked us to do 12 under one hour studies of photographs, paintings or any reference that we found interesting.

I have been collecting color scripts and movies screenshots for quite a while so finding references wasn’t difficult. Painting was an other story… I have a whole set of clean-up brushes for character designs but when it comes to painting, I realised all my brushes were of no use and had to find some new ones more appropriate for that kind of exercise. I also had no clue how to go about painting in Photoshop but my knowledge in oil painting and lighting came pretty handy.

Here is what I submitted for this week. The first one took me a very long time to do and I didn’t have time to adjust the colours but luckily I became much faster after having done several and the last ones were more enjoyable. You should try, it is a fun exercise. For each study I tried to work on something different, SSS, backlighting, color scheme…

Credits: Aurélien Prédal (1/2/5), Joaquin Sorolla , Roger Deakins (3/4)), Robert Richardson (7/9/10/11)

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Schoolism – Designing with colours and light
Aurelien Predal Monstre à Paris
Light and colours

La Seine

Posted on July 1, 2011 
Filed Under Animation | 1 Comment

I am such a fan boy ;-)

Here is a music video clip from French animated feature “Un monstre à Paris” and performed by Vanessa Paradis and composer M, who are respectively voicing Lucile and Francoeur (the creature). La Seine is the river that flows through Paris and also the french for stage. The lip sync is not very accurate but the video is gorgeous.

I love that track…

Related posts:
Monstre à Paris

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