Cervantes Institute - Tuesday, October 7th, 16:00
Jury member Piet Kroon, whose independent short film T.R.A.N.S.I.T screens as part of the Around the World program focusing on the topic of travel, presents a masterclass on storyboarding for feature animation. Tracking the evolution of sequences he developed for well-known animated features, like Iron Giant, Shrek 2, Despicable Me, Rio 2, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, he will discuss his strategies and techniques, offering an insight into his process. Storyboarding is a crucial creative step in the production process: the first visual translation from script to screen. It gives the story a workout: exploring ideas, beats, scenes, character, acting, action, comedy, and staging, it helps pull everything into focus and makes any film rise above itself. An inside look into the messy kitchen of animation – there is always more than one way to skin a cat.
At 6’7” Piet Kroon stands as one of the tallest internationally acclaimed filmmakers working in animation today: always pushing for new heights, never talking down to an audience. He spearheaded the development and directed the animation of Warner Bros.’ irreverent cult comedy Osmosis Jones, about a cool white blood cell (Chris Rock) and a stuck up cold pill (David Hyde Pierce) that fight a nasty cold (Laurence Fishburne) inside Bill Murray’s rundown body. Kroon developed, wrote and directed HEINZ (2019), an animated comedy feature for young adults, based on a pleasantly deranged newspaper comic about a surly Amsterdam cat. As writer/director, story artist and story consultant, Kroon brought his unique visual imagination to scores of animated features, ranging from Brad Bird’s fantastic Iron Giant (1997), Shrek 2 (2004) (contributing Pinocchio’s fetish for girlie-underwear), to the gorgeous idiosyncratic Academy Award winner Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022). Kroon’s independent short films received widespread acclaim. T.R.A.N.S.I.T (1997) was short-listed for the Oscar and nominated for the BAFTA and Cartoon d’Or. It was elected Best Animated Short Film by The Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
