Olympics 2026 - Milano Pride House
To give a bit of context to this post, I shall explain what happened last summer at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
I was invited to represent Paris Pride House as the official interviewer / journalist / podcast manager / VIP manager, and I absolutely loved the experience.
During the few weeks we were all working together on making Paris Pride House the most fun place to be during the Olympics, we also met the upcoming 2026 Milano and 2028 Los Angeles teams.
A few months after the Paris 2024 Olympics were over, and we had all come - reluctantly - down from the beautiful, rainbow-coloured cloud we had been on all summer, we started talking next steps.
I was then asked by the team of Milano Pride House to create a 4 minute digital art video to be projected at the Meet Digital Cultural Center in Milano, during the 2026 Winter Olympics.
We are also in discussions with LA 2028 to perhaps create some art for their Pride House as well, hopefully hand-in-hand with the IOC (International Olympics Committee).
A few images of Meet Digital Cultural Center are below - it seems to be 180 studio, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Atelier des Lumières, and several other wonderful spaces all mixed together!
So this was obviously a really exciting opportunity, despite the fact that there was no associated budget (for this time - but perhaps for Pride in June 2026, there would be!) There will be two main events, one called “Sempre Libere” on Saturday 7th February, and another - the main Pride House event - on Saturday 14th February.
The brief was to add onto the video that was already being created by Milano Pride House for their launches events, whereby Minute 0-1 was the intro, Minute 1-2 were the country representatives saying “Ladies & Gentlemen” in their languages (this includes me in English!), and then Minute 2-6 would be dedicated to our digital art videos.
Bearing all of this in mind, I informed the class, allowing them to join me if they wished to do so, and we have been working on a video with a select group of fantastic artists!
The deadline for the V1 of the video was 23 January, and we made it. Just 2 of us from the class (Olga & I) are in the film, and two other fantastic artist friends of mine:
Mathilde Soares-Pereira - Beaux Arts de Paris, Poush residencies, Cité Internationale des Arts
Martina Margaux - UAL CSM, award-winning film director & creative director
The final version of our film to be projected is below.
The idea behind my part of the video was to take the stop-motion illustration book I previously made in blog post and to develop it even further, into almost a stop-motion, or animation, film. This is something I have always wanted to do - to bring illustrations to life, by hand - so this seemed to be a perfect (yet albeit terrifying) opportunity to get this sorted in just a few days.
Reflect: How was I going to fill the global video from Minute 2-3, taking precisely 60 seconds, just before the next artists and their videos? Martina would have a black and white video that would no doubt be absolutely perfect and amazing, Olga would have a fantastic illustration animated by her professional video effects friends, and Mathilde - like Martina - also works in film, so, no pressure. I decided to stop trying to generate AI videos of my work, or create an actual film, because these are not my strong points (yet). What could I rely on, in times of need, something sure that I 100% knew would be good and easy (and fun!) for me to do in such a short lapse of time? I decided to believe in my illustrations, and started to create a storyboard directly inspired by the lyrics in the song, which involved creating hundreds of hand-drawn illustrations, using the Sony Alpha 7s to take photos of each and every one, upload them onto Photoshop and individually make them identically black and white, and then teach myself how to use Adobe Premiere Pro for the first time, and cutting each and every one of these hand-drawn illustrations into tiny little individual moments on Premiere Pro.
Plan: Get it done in one weekend, leaving plenty of time to help the others with their parts, as Martina was travelling all over the Middle East, Mathilde was moving from one Poush residency to the other, and Olga also has a million other things to do PLUS her lovely children, so it was all my responsibility to centralise, and I darned well tried my best!
Act: We got it done, actually with a few days to spare, before the deadline of 23 January.
Observe: Milano Pride House absolutely loved it. I loved it even more, as a result, even though I had already re re re re re re watching it a hundred times (to check for errors but also because - honestly - I am proud of this strange little film I have ever made). It is definitely not the last, and I see this developing into a new technique, perhaps towards actual stop-motion, or actual animation, or actual film-making, at some point.
The final version of our film to be projected is here on this link.
Happy watching!
