“Todor and Petru”

Todor & Petru is an unofficial music video for The Thunderclaps’ “Judgment Day” made by Gobelins students Remi Bastie, Nicolas Dehghani, Jonathan Djob Nkondo, Nicolas Pegon and Jérémy Pires during an internship at Paris-based WIZZ.

I’ll admit that I dismissed the piece as nothing special the first time I watched it, but I was quite impressed the second time around when I paid closer attention and realized what they were actually doing. The combination of drawn animation (Flash?) and pixilated live-action is mixed together very smartly. It’s done in such a way so that the piece has the cinematic bravado of a computer animated film while retaining the organic and expressive design qualities of drawn animation. It’s a worthwhile experiment that merits further exploration, and pushes Todor & Petru beyond the typical combo of 2D animation over live elements.

Their Vimeo account also features this earlier piece that appears to be a test or development for Todor & Petru:

(Thanks, DVO and Rohit Iyer)