Ashe Versus
Short Film
Animation Art Director| Concept Artist
Ashe Versus was a film conceived by Moderna, produced by The Youth and Colossal, and directed by the duo Maldita. I joined the project at its early development phase, where I created the visual art style for the animated sequences — from the character design concept to the overall painterly look and lighting approach that guided the team throughout production.
I defined the brushes, lighting methods, and painting process, and recorded detailed tutorial videos so the team could replicate the intended visual quality.
Beyond style development, I also produced key panels, refining composition, posing, and lighting, and provided art direction feedback to ensure consistency across shots. I later contributed to the final animation polish, reinforcing the painterly style I had established for the film.
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First studies
I started on the Ashe Versus project by studying Arthur Ashe’s gestures and movement, exploring how to represent him visually and define the painterly style that would be used in the final look.
In this study, I was already exploring how to convey movement , with parts of the painting fading away or expressive sketch lines drawn over the poses.
I also began, under the direction of the duo Maldita, to explore other approaches, aiming for a looser brushstroke style and starting to define how Arthur Ashe would be composed within the environment.
In this panel, while continuing to explore the art style we would follow, I was also trying to conceptualize Arthur Ashe’s gestures during his celebrations, which were always very restrained and composed.
Finally, we defined the film’s visual style with the image below, establishing the level of volume we wanted, the final pose, and the overall composition of the scene.
After this image, I continued developing additional panels, conceptualizing the scene compositions, lighting, and level of detail that would appear shot by shot.
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In the image below, for example, I refined the shot composition by adding more detail to Arthur Ashe’s face, using the tennis court lines to create a strong diagonal across the frame, and directing the light to burst on the bright side while silhouetting the darker one. The goal was to make the image feel powerful, dramatic, and visually engaging.
I also designed the opposite side of the court, conceptualizing Ashe’s opponent. The idea was to keep his face partially hidden and work with dramatic lighting.
The scene in which Arthur Ashe is hospitalized needed to feel dramatic. I chose to go with a darker, silhouetted composition, with only a small beam of light illuminating his face. Working with light filtering through window blinds also helped add to the drama. In this image, it’s possible to see how volume and form can be suggested even with minimal lighting revealing the figures.
In the next two images, I worked on the graphic treatment of newspaper visuals, adapting them to the art style we had established. I had to determine which areas to reveal and which to blur, as well as define how to handle the hierarchy of information between the images inside the newspaper and those outside of it.
Below are additional shots where I defined the visual style before moving on to animation.
After all the shots were animated, we needed to work on the transitions that integrated the animated parts with the live-action footage.
To do this, a transition video was exported, and I started painting over it frame by frame, establishing the final visual look of each transition and refining its timing and duration.
You can see the results below.
Excerpt from the digital painting process
