The Eisner Award winning graphic novel 'The Property' by Rutu Modan was adapted to film on 2024. It is a comedy, drama, romance story about Regina, and her granddaughter Mica, traveling to Warsaw in an effort to retrieve the lost property of the family, an apartment left behind during the seconded world war. Of course everything goes wrong, especially when Mica meets Tomasz, a young pole dreaming of becoming a comics artist, while working as a tour guide to Jewish Warsaw.
I was asked to create Tomasz's sketchbook - a prop of high importance in the plot. It was the first time I had to create an illustrated object, and it was quite a challenge. One of the reasons was the absence of post edit. The drawings had to be drawn directly into the book. The other was the extremely tight schedule. And the third was the damned to create two identical pieces, just in case one sketchbook would get lost, ruined on set or drown in the Vistula.
In his sketchbook Tomasz originally tried to adapt the historic Polish uprising against the Nazis into comics, but after hearing Mica's exceptional family story, his plans changed and he decides to shift the plot of his graphic novel to their story.
I drew more than a hundred drawing in the sketchbook - studding reference material and historic photos - but as things in the film business goes, only some of them got into the film.
