The past year my girlfriend Lois van Baarle worked on a motion comic named ‘The Art of Pho’ based on the graphic novel by Julian Hanshaw. The whole piece was produced at Submarine Channel.

The Comic was carefully animated and converted into an interactive experience. Every day of this week the an episode of the comic will be released. The music was composed by Pastelle Music in Amsterdam.

You’ll find this wonderfull project here:

artofpho.submarinechannel.com

Check out the trailer:

An interview with the creators/ Making Of:

Official Press Release:

The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw is a moving and surreal story about a creature named Little Blue and his relationship with Ho Chi Minh City, better known as Saigon. In Vietnam’s bustling capital Little Blue learns to master the art of making Pho – Vietnam’s ubiquitous national noodle dish.

The Art of Pho was the highly anticipated debut graphic novel of the award-winning British illustrator and animator Julian Hanshaw. Under his creative supervision and with animation director Lois van Baarle, Submarine Channel adapted The Art of Pho for the web. The interactive graphic novel adds the dimensions of sound, music, animation and interactivity to Hanshaw’s exquisitely drawn artwork and features 8 episodes.

Julian Hanshaw
British-born Julian Hanshaw (1971) graduated from the University of Wolverhampton with a BA Hons in Fine Art. After spending three years at the NFTS, where his animation ‘The Church of High Weirdness’ won a prestigious Golden Reel Award, Hanshaw worked as an animator and animation director on double BAFTA-award winning projects such as Charlie & Lola, and Yoko! Jakamoko! Toto! After 12 years in the animation industry, Hanshaw needed a new challenge and returned to his first love, comics. With his short story ‘Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms’ he won the 2008 Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize. Two years later he published his first graphic novel, The Art of Pho. A collection of short graphic novel stories is to be released by Random House in 2012. Julian is currently working on a new graphic novel.
julianhanshaw.co.uk

Lois van Baarle
Born with a pencil in her hand, Lois van Baarle only recently developed a preference for digital art and animation. Although born in The Netherlands, Van Baarle has lived all over the world, including the U.S., Indonesia, France and Belgium. After high school, Van Baarle studied animation and pursued art as a career. Following a one-year study in Ghent (Belgium) van Baarle attained her European Media Master of Arts title from The Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) in 2009. Her graduation film, the breathtaking animated short ‘Trichrome Blue,’ went viral. Inspirations include Japanese manga and anime, French comic artists such as Aurore BlackCat, Art Nouveau artist Alfonse Mucha, as well as the online art community DeviantArt. Van Baarle lives and works in Utrecht (NL).
loish.net

Submarine Channel
Founded in 2001, Submarine Channel is one of the world’s premiere destinations for original transmedia dramas, motion comics, web documentaries and other forms of genre-defying entertainment that advances the art of the moving image. From studios in Amsterdam and L.A., Submarine Channel creates fresh content that exploits new technologies to tell stories in visually exciting, multiple format-friendly ways. Projects include, among many others, the motion comic The Killer (2003), the interactive animation series HOTEL by Han Hoogerbrugge (2004) and Valley of the Cnuties by Craig Robinson (2008), the website about title design ‘Forget the Film, Watch the Titles,’ and the Digital Emmy-award nominated transmedia project Collapsus (2010).