I Am Curious Johnny
Role: VFX Artist — Character Animation
The Brief
Documentary by Julien Temple about Jean Pigozzi, streaming on Prime Video. Pigozzi is accompanied by Mr. Limo, a life-size plastic puppet with a fixed face. The director’s request: make it speak and react believably in every scene, as if it were a living character.
The Challenge
The puppet’s face was rigid and expressionless — a single piece of plastic. Working remotely from Rome, for every scene I had to remove the original face, rebuild it digitally and animate it with believable lip movements and expressions, maintaining visual coherence with the physical material. All across dozens of scenes with different framing, lighting and angles.
The Solution
I developed a complete character study: phonemes for lipsync, facial expressions, variants with and without teeth. Submitted to Julien Temple for approval. Once the look was validated, I worked scene by scene: rotoscoping the original face, digital reconstruction, lip-sync animation matched to dialogue and photorealistic compositing to integrate the animated face into the footage.
The Result
A puppet that speaks and acts naturally in every scene of the documentary, without the viewer perceiving the digital intervention. The initial validation process with the director avoided revisions and ensured consistency across all scenes. The film is available on Prime Video.
Rimozione volto e integrazione animazione — Mr. Limo
Test animazione lipsync — Mr. Limo
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