A young Italian artist, Luca Nemolato, is taking over Hollywood sci-fi movies characters creations, after leaving his Italian hometown, Scampia, one of the most dangerous Naples’s neighborhood, where camorra—the Neapolitan’s mafia, has its headquarter.
Luca was raised by a simple and humble family in the “honest Scampia”—that’s how he likes to differentiate it from the dangerous Scampia, not just another Naples’s suburb located in southern west Italy: a place where extortions, blackmail, drugs dealing, violence and murders make up for nearly 75% of young adults’ unemployment, one of the highest rate in Italy.
In Scampia, many of Luca’s peers, young boys in their early twenties, are massively recruited to begin an easy, remunerative and powerful criminal career and help to keep the crime going in the city, because they are younger and weaker, like “fresh meat” says Luca. And what they desire in return it’s just “easy money, a motorcycle and a sense of power.”
Luca didn’t wish for any of those things. And he owes it to his family, because his parents taught him the difference between right and wrong, while many others don’t have the same luxury he had. “Sometimes becoming a drug dealer or something worse doesn’t seem a choice when your father is in prison, your mother is instable and you have no one else to turn to” explains Luca. But it’s not just that, it’s also a personal vision of life, and if Luca had a different one, he would not be talking about his life today.
Luca never had fear while growing up in Scampia, but if asked to define and describe his neighborhood to someone who doesn’t know and has never heard of it, he says he can’t. But not because of a silence’s conspiracy. Only because “you have to live it to truly understand it, yet, everything becomes normal when you live there.”
Shortly after graduating high school, Luca decided to jump on a 10,000 kilometers plane ride and decided to move to Los Angeles. Countless financial, legal and immigration difficulties that any underage foreign alien ‘trying to make it’ in America would have to face, did not stop Luca’s creativity and willingness to transform his most profound passion and his undeniable talent into his career.
One day, Luca’s artworks ended up on the desk of the President of the Aaron Sims Company—a renowned visual effects studio based in Hollywood. Some of his designs, including an astonishing detailed and innovative human rat, were so highly valued by the company for his artistic conceptualization and for its superior technique, that he was offered an internship right away. But this wasn’t just an internship for Luca, as he stepped into the door of a reign whose king has always been one of his biggest visual effects idol.
Since then, Luca has been working full time for The Aaron Sims Company, creating new artistic concepts for movies, TV shows, ads and video games. One of the most challenging part of Luca’s job is understanding and meeting clients’ expectations and visual prospectives which are never “obvious” in Luca’s own words. Often times, movies and shows characters get rejected not for poor quality nor poor conceptualization but simply because of a different approach that the movie director wants to take.
Luca reveals that “every projects is a challenge” and when a client assigned it to the company, a couple of artists work on the same character creating different version of it and once submitted to the client, typically a movie director, the favorite artistic style is selected and followed by constant feedback, edits and tweaks until the final creation is reached—a perfect balance of artistic quality and ground-breaking conceptualized creative ideas. Luca tells it’s amazing to get his hands on big movies projects and be noticed as an artist while working in a small company, or better, “a boutique” of visual effects as Luca defines it.
As a 20 years old intern, Luca was directly catapulted into projects for TV shows such as Falling Skies—a TNT’s series started in 2011, produced by Steven Spielberg. The series introduced for the first time in history a new breed of aliens as well as Luca’s artistic conceptualization elements. His alien suit’s 3D model was used to create the asset for the final animation and was seen on the season 2 finale.
The majority of Luca’s work is still unreleased, in pre or post-production, which is why he can’t anticipate anything about the movies he has been working on for the past two years. Although, you can still sneak peek his amazingly artistic eye and hand in I, Frankenstein’s trailer, for example, a film in theatres at the end of January 2014, where his work—a gargoyle queen, was described by the movie director as incredibly majestic, fresh, young and out of the box.
Among other major upcoming Hollywood movies in which Luca’s art will be admired include movies of the caliber of Jupiter Ascending, starring Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum, on the big screen in July 2014,Noah, featuring Russel Crowe, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Watson, The Amazing Spider Man 2, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise, X-Men: Days of Future Past and the Hunger Games: Mockingjay, both starring Jennifer Lawrence; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where Megan Fox will interpret a sexy April O’Neil and finally, in the creation of Maleficent—predictably the summer 2014 box office winner, featuring Angelina Jolie as a cruel Disney villain.
Luca is thankful to America because he recognizes that regardless his young age and his first entrance in the industry “Here in the United States, if they believe in you, they will take the risk, giving you great opportunities.” Luca chose to pack his future in a suitcase and challenge his destiny. And his life agreed.
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