Lulu is a rhinoceros
TV Special - Art Director
Apple TV, Boulder Media
Late 2022 I got a call to work as Art Director for a TV special called Lulu is a Rhinoceros. It was a musical and it felt full of joy, then I met the Director Angela Stempel and I fell in love with her energy and vision. So I joined the team and in only 4 weeks we did all the preproduction followed by less than a year production for the 45min special. The speed it was incredible but also the enthusiasm of the team, that seemed infected but this wave of positiveness and excitement. I couldn´t be more proud of what our wonderful team achieved.
​I really wanted the color progression through the special to be a rainbow, where Lulu goes through all the colors and their emotions and ups and downs, and the colors landed surprisingly good with the parts of the spepcial. Angela loved it so we went for it!
I started with some scene illustrations to set the mood and style, we were going for a sweet children book feel, to keep the essence of the original book but with a more modern twist. We wanted it to make it feel cozy and relaxed so we leaned into a soft pastel palette that gave the project that gentle touch.
​I´m not shy to admit that I´m not good at drawing animals, so this project was a bit of a challenge and I learned a lot. My first sketches were a bit wonky and ugly but little by little we got the personality shining through and we found Lulu! It was a bit hard because we were trying to somehow be faithful to the book, but the gap was too big, so we decided to go totally different style. The Character design team then designed all the rest of characters in the special.
As Art Director I usually don´t have much time to paint beautiful stuff, but I do a lot of notes and sketches. Composition ones for storyboard is one of my favourite things to do. Also I had to create a lot of styleguide pages to ensure the team would understand and be able to follow the style consistenly. So here are some examples of the not so flashy tasks but very enjoyable to me.
Finally towards the end of the BG department, I got to help a bit and paint some final BGs. But my favourite task by far in this projects was doing the end credits, where I painted over 100 pets photograps with all the crew pets, to pay a little omage to the hard working people that made this special possible. :) Thank you all! I hope you enjoyed and if you haven´t watch it yet, go catch it in Apple TV+
