



Equipped with little more than a video camera and a piece of green cardboard, Montreal filmmaker Patrick Boivin earns a comfortable living by setting up action figures on his kitchen table and moving the limbs in tiny increments to produce weirdly funny slugfests. The creative shorts have propelled this self-taught stop-motion auteur from YouTube sensation to Hollywood hopeful in a matter of months.



In March, Boivin, 35, heads west to pitch projects on the strength of his videogame-inspired hit “YouTube Street Fighter,” his funny smackdown clip “Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee” and his recent martial arts spoof “Ninja’s Unboxing,” commissioned by Google to promote its new cellphone. The videos have racked up millions of views on YouTube and earned Boivin entry to Hollywood’s hit-making machine.

Essentially a one-man show, Boivin savors the do-it-yourself show biz ethos.

“There used to be this huge process where you had to go to a company with an idea, they’d called another company to hire a director — there was all this protocol,” he told Wired.com in an telephone interview. “Now, thanks to the web, companies can contact me directly to create all this stuff. For them it’s cheaper, and for me it’s a lot of money because I’m all alone.”

Well, not entirely. Shorts posted on Boivin’s YouTube channel triggered a call last year from Circle of Confusion. The talent-management outfit is setting up meetings with movie producers for Boivin to meet with during next month’s trip to Los Angeles.

Here’s a look at Boivin’s short film artistry that forced Hollywood to take notice.

“The Future of Air Travel”

Before he picked up a video camera, Boivin came under the influence of moody French illustrator Moebius and, at age 16, began drawing cartoons. Out of high school, Boivin formed the Alliage comedy troupe with eight fellow comic book fanatics. They performed in Montreal bars.

“We wanted to tell stupid, funny stories that were bigger than life,” Boivin explains. Supporting himself as a dishwasher, Bolvin bought a used VHS camera and started shooting the troupe’s sketches. “We didn’t know how to do movies, but we could watch movies and knew we wanted ours to look like those. The other guys acted and created sets and costumes. I was director, cinematographer, editor and I did the special effects. You do one short movie, you look at it, want it to look better so you try something else.”

A TV show called Phylactère Cola hired the Alliage troupe to produce a series of sketches in 2002 including “The Future of Air Travel,” embedded above. Made at the peak of post-9/11 paranoia, the film draws on an absurdist point of view that characterizes most of Boivin’s shorts.

The Phylactère comedy spots brought Boivin steady work as a TV commercial director, but he grew weary of shooting 30-second spots a couple years ago and launched a master plan to earn wider recognition. “I started my YouTube channel with short movies, and they were not popular at all,” Boivin says. The short dramas had plenty of poetry but not a lot of punch, garnering only 200 views after six months. So Boivin shifted course.

“YouTube Street Fighter”

“I decided to do stop-motion stuff that would get me some notoriety and then I could contact toy companies about making animations with their toys for money,” Boivin says.

Tech Specs Camera: Canon 5D MkII

Editing: Final Cut Pro and After Effects

Stop-motion software: Final Cut Pro and After Effects Dragon Stop Motion . “It’s a brilliant and affordable tool developed by people who really understand your needs while animating,” Boivin says.

Thus was born “YouTube Street Fighter,” embedded above. Working with a couple of action figures based on the videogame, Boivin cleverly manipulated YouTube’s annotation tool to create an interactive fight scenario embedded with 121 different video segments.

“First,” he explains, “I moved the toys to fight together. Then, using YouTube’s principal of annotations, I created a clickable section of each video so you could decide what kind of move you want the character to do by pushing the buttons that drive you to another video.”

“YouTube Street Fighter” blew up immediately. “That was my first real home run,” Boivin recalls, adding that the video brought with it 70,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. “The videos that followed got discovered faster,” he says.

Next came Boivin’s 1-minute, 19-second animated smackdown titled “Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee,” embedded below. “For that one,” he says, “I created the picture of the set, put the characters that I wanted to animate in front of green-screen cardboard and then animated the characters on a table in front of the cardboard as I sat in front of it. ”

“Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee”

Powered by a goofy disco track from Boivin’s musician friend DJ4Joy, “Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee” landed Boivin an offer from Google to create a viral ad for its Nexus One cellphone. “They basically let me do what I wanted, so that’s pretty cool,” says Boivin. “It didn’t really feel like work.”

To produce the 1-minute, 37-second clip, Boivin holed up in his Montreal living room for most of December. Logging 12-hour days, six days a week, he minutely moved the limbs of his figures and captured each action moment with a Canon camera. “Stop-motion is complicated in a way because you have to think about the movement of each different section of the body,” Boivin says. “Once you do a couple of them, you start to understand how to do it so they’re living-like.”

“Bboy Joker”

A previous interactive smackdown, “Bboy Joker” (embedded above), pitted Batman against his clown-faced nemesis. Boivin showed off some of his stop-motion techniques in a subsequent video, “Making of Bboy Joker” (below).

“Making of Bboy Joker”

Boivin shares unique cinematic tricks, like how to perform prosthetic hip surgery on a Batman figurine, in “Making of Bboy Joker.”





“Love Letter”

Boivin doesn’t always hit it out of the park. His submission for Animboom‘s Radiohead music video contest failed to take the top prize, yet “Love Letter,” his animation-and-storyboard clip about a lovelorn love letter, embedded above, demonstrates a sure grasp of surreal storytelling principals.





“Redite”

With cash flow from Lego, Hot Toys, Google and other clients in place, Boivin is eager to move forward on feature film scripts involving time travel and post-apocalyptic war zones while the Circle of Confusion management team solicits director-for-hire assignments. “I would have made a good Transformers movie,” Boivin says.

Though his live-action shorts, like the artfully shot “Redite” piece embedded above, failed to drum up big viral crowds, Boivin hankers to do some long-form storytelling. Citing the brainy, dark-humored films of Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson as prime influences, Boivin says Duncan Jones’ “ Moon was the last movie I saw that really touched me. This is the kind of picture I would like to make: It uses science fiction to talk about something else.”

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