APPLE 2022

Endless Paper

It was wonderful to work with the folk @Apple on this project. Using an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and the Endless Paper App, I created this one big drawing.. Yes.. this is one big drawing believe it or not!

This app allows you to work on an infinite canvas, meaning you can continually zoom and draw stuff and not lose the quality of the image. The drawing tools are very simple, and you can’t work on layers but this actually suited me perfectly…the Apple Pencil is so good for drawing and painting that it 

 even when i use other drawing apps i use them very simply, meaning i just think of it as a pen or pencil (selecting a brush with a simple line) that i am changing the colour of and that’s about it. 

For this, the less decisions i had to make benefited the process, which was already rather complicated. 

The first lines i drew were the end part of this sequence (not in the Ad- the mouse sat on top of the typography..) i did this just so i could get a feel for drawing in the app. I am very comfortable using the Apple Pencil so it didn’t take me long to get a sense of what was possible. I then zoomed in thought the “o” of “mouse” and started drawing. I very crudely drew in a space scene and picked one planet as earth, zoomed into that and then actually wrote the word for the next scene (city) at the point where it felt natural, then zoomed into “city” and wrote “room” and so forth until i got to the mouse hole.  I then screen recorded myself pinching and zooming through to get a sense of the timing, I made adjustments by painting over and repositioning the words until it felt right and not rushed but also fit in with the allowed time for the sequence in the Ad.

Once this was signed off, i had to think about how things were going to look and work out the track of the zoom to make a smooth sequence.. for example, the angle of the city as seen from the clouds  and the kitchen had to match as you fly through the window. For this i had a great reference shot of London i used and then i got up on a stool with a camera here in my kitchen in Brooklyn and matched the POV as best i could.. it didn’t need to be bang on, but i wanted it to be pretty close… same with the mouse once you arrive in their home, i had to think about the body positioning etc. Then it was just a case of drawing on top of the rough work and finessing. I added things like the plane, the satellite and the pigeons/plant by the window to ease the transitions between the scenes and to try and make this world more believable. 

What you see here is a screen record of me  moving through the scenes, showing off some of the detail that went into it. The final Ad was a shorter version. This was an absolute joy to work on, the power of the iPad Pro coupled with the Apple Pencil and the creative potential in the Endless Paper app meant that i just lost myself in the process of making this world, i would still be drawing and fine tuning it now if there hadn’t been a deadline! 

#MadeOniPad