Blu's First Stop-Motion Street Art Experiments in 'Megunica'
Filmmaker Lorenzo Fonda and street artist Blu traveled through South America to shoot the documentary Megunica in 2008. On the road, they began to create these stop-motion animations, which were the genesis of Blu's famous animated wall paintings. Fonda describes the adventure in an interview with The Atlantic.
Megunica is a feature documentary that follows street artist Blu as he paints murals in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Argentina in 2008. The director, Lorenzo Fonda, and Blu became friends in Italy before teaming up to create the film, and in the process they developed the stop-motion style that animates Blu's street art.
In this excerpt from the film, you can see some of their very first stop-motion experiments -- drawing on windows and car windshields while on the road, animating paper cutouts, and painting on walls. You can see these sketches evolve into the signature style that you see in Blu's most famous film, Muto, which has ove nine million views on YouTube.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Fonda describes the genesis of the project, "The idea was to basically improvise a trip that would facilitate his creative approach, which is very loose and based on the surroundings of where he paints, and through that I would hopefully show a little of his creative process as well. Also, we did quite a few experiments with stop motion, which culminated into the wall painting animation that you see at the end of the film."
Animations from Megunica:
Muto on YouTube:
You can see Blu at work in another scene from Megunica, in which he is caught painting a mural on private property.
For more videos by Lorenzo Fonda, see http://www.cerberoleso.it/. For more work by Blu, visit http://www.blublu.org/.