Narrative spaces, places that don't need words to tell a story, they require just a glimpse and suddenly you're in. My name is Simo and, with this goal in mind, I started dreaming of a life path where I could create different worlds to inhabit every day, and I wanted to do that in films.
Stories and productions like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter forged my fantasy during my late youth and the relentless desire to be a part of them plunged me through the University years. One day the instinct tickled my brain, I picked up a pencil, a sheet of paper and for the first time started drawing. There and then my deepest desire loomed. After graduating in Cinema and Media Engineering in Italy, I retired to my own cave and for months I learned on my own how to draw and paint. My student portfolio gifted me a scholarship with a ticket straight to Hollywood. What I thought was the final destination instead became the first step. The Gnomon School of Visual Effects welcomed me and helped enrich my collection of works, eventually wandering towards the realm of Matte Painting, the art behind those worlds and landscapes that we see in films which makes us wonder whether we're being fooled by reality or an artist's brush.
Two years of endless work and self-teaching granted me a first job as a Matte Painter in the motion picture industry, across the ocean. I left California and moved to Munich. I fell in love with Europe again and decided to stay, also living across Hamburg, Stuttgart, London, Belgium and Berlin. In the years that followed, to my surprise, Hollywood kept re-presenting itself with the opportunities of a lifetime full of creative dreams.
I was fortunate enough to collaborate with Ridley Scott, Wes Anderson, Roman Polanski, the Wachowskis and Bong Joon-ho, to name a few, trying my hand through Matte Paintings, Concepts and Digital Set Design on films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Oscar winner for Best Production Design in 2015, Game of Thrones, Cloud Atlas, Exodus: Gods and Kings, An Officer and a Spy, Snowpiercer, Captain Marvel… and I hope the list will grow.
Curious what awaits you when you just follow the instinct and trust your original idea. It’s all in the stories that stir the emotions, I only needed to act on them. I’ll keep at it, until my days will come to an end.
Today I'm writing and illustrating my own novels, in a genre that spans from fantasy to magic realism. My wish is to give back what I received from those stories, and if in doing so I’m holding a pencil, a brush or a pen, it won't matter, as long as that dream defying energy will reach the people who long for it the most.
Thank you for reading me.