Motion design boutique Citoyen contracted me to create highly detailed and artistic illustrations matching stylized art from the 1920’s for the opening titles of Rob Reiner’s feature film Alex & Emma.

I loved working with Citoyen, and their idea of pushing through stylized illustrations was really cool.

But I anticipated their motion designer was going to render the layers of my drawings with depth-of-field blurring or parallax motion. Perhaps time and budget didn’t allow it, but unfortunately the final motion ended up feeling stiff and stilted to me.

I also confess that this is the “Illustrator’s Cut”: I found the original to be laboriously slow so I literally doubled the playback speed, and I completely axed a brief frame animation sight-gag at the very end which was so poorly done it undermined everything else.

Still, it was a moment of deep pride for me the first time I saw my drawings up on the silver screen.