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The start of yet another project… who knows…

Thanks to helios, after 10 years of absence from cinema and directing, I had the pleasure to direct this Ad for the cinema. Client is the Südtiroler Kulturinstitut, an institution that works mainly with theatre. The Ad uses elements from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to create a surreal and dreamlike atmosphere.

Here are the first photos from the set, more are to follow!

I’m having a good time. I draw a lot, have a lot of ideas. Actually I needed to take a break from projects and just let myself go. And when I let myself go, things like this come out, I wonder why… whatever, it’s great!

A portrait I made for Sbrizz. Could as well do more of these…

A friend of mine, Valerie, has recently pointed out that I never gave any English translation for the text in Sed Tantum Dic Verbo (like the one in the picture above), and being it quite fundamental for the comprehention of the story, this could be a problem for all of you, who don’t read Italian.

So here is a short synopsis of Cubber‘s text, the comic is based on. I decided not to provide a real translation, because the text is quite complex and I’m not such a good translator.

Synopsis

Cubber’s story is written as a kind of police report, by an imaginary office for “christmas decoration prevention”. It tells about some people who put a figure of a Sphinx into a nativity scene. The spynx then tries to reach the infant Jesus to tell him something (but we’ll never know what). They try to stop the Sphinx by putting the shepherds in its way, but the sphinx would just bite them and eat all their sheep. Then the fisherman tries to catch the mythological animal while asleep (because it’s eaten too much), but the sphinx escapes. As a final resort, they give Saint Mary a holy cleaver while Joseph puts straw and mud into the ears of the infant to protect him against the words of the sphinx.

notes

The text is written so that the distinction between the real world and the miniature world of the nativity scene becomes quite blurred, what I have done in my comic version of it, is to tell the story from a different temporal point of view, i.e. tell the story from the traces the events have left in the world.