The film Into Pieces is the result of a long-awaited collaboration between Guilherme Marcondes and Daniel Bueno. We both graduated from the same architecture school and we share the same interests: cartoons, illustration, design, animation, visual arts in general.

To create the story, we met in a bar, spread a lot of Bueno’s drawings over the table, drank a few beers and laughed imagining what could be happening inside those illustrations. They all have this mixed feeling, somewhere between pop cartoons and modernist art collage, and that definitely gave us a hint of the right mood for the film. We came up with a few gags and short scripts, and decided in the end to go on with the story of the guy trying to fit the pieces together, annoyed by the superhero. I thought a 30-second animation would be enough to do a test, but I couldn’t help making it twice that length. The animation process was so much fun and so engaging that I decided to go further and finish a short film. Since I was doing it alone, in my free time, it took me two months to complete it.

Starting from the original illustration, I didn’t make any considerable visual changes to it apart from applying textures in the background. I even used the original colors and the portrait aspect composition, taking advantage of that for the downward tilt of the camera at the beginning. The process was to re-build the original illustration in After Effects from the layered Photoshop file Bueno sent me. Spreading the flat cut-outs in 3D space gave the film that so-called “2.5D” look. To round it off, Paulo Beto was responsible for the sound. For Into Pieces he mixed the most improbable samples, from animal sounds to audience claps. These insertions are unexpected but, at the same time, true to the meaning of the story. I really love the result.

Guilherme Marcondes (BR) started illustrating around 1998, when he was still in architecture school, and started work with animation in 2000 at the Brazilian studio Lobo Filmes, where he was director and animator for five years. He still does freelance illustration work. Apart from that, he is developing personal projects in different media such as animation shorts, etchings and a children’s book. With his films and projects he has had several screenings at festivals and has been awarded several prizes. Currently he is based in London, freelancing for MTV.