• December 26, 2006
  • Posted by Marc

Found Cleaning Out Our Inbox #4 (or Baptiste Buonomo’s Incredible Short - “Virus”)

virus2.jpgBack in June, Cassidy from the terrific Graffiti Archeology website sent us a note about an amazing animated short called “virus” that he saw at the Annecy animation festival in France.

What was so impressive about the piece is that it looks as if it is painted frame by frame, directly on the walls, and done illegally in the middle of the night.

From Cassidy’s site we learned that the filmmaker is Baptiste Buonomo, an animation student from EMCA in Angoulême, For those of you without Real Video here’s Cassidy’s description - 

“The fun starts with a live action shot of a kid in a hoodie tagging “virus” on an old plaster wall. The kid exits, and the tag grows, multiplies, and morphs into a simple cartoon version of him, which then starts running around the town’s walls making mischief. This may not sound like anything special, until you realize how it must have been done: it looks like every frame of animation was actually painted directly on the wall itself, in the middle of the night. This meant erasing the old frames before painting each new one, a technique also known as “painting under the camera”. You can see the ghosts left behind from earlier frames in the image above. It must have taken hours of work f this is what it looks like, it may well be the first ever example of underground, unpermitted street animation. Whatever you call it, it took a lot of guts! Monsieur Buonomo, my hat is off to you.”

You can see the video using Real Video by clicking here.