Filipe Melo was born in 1977 in Lisbon, Portugal. He began playing piano at the age of 14, developing an interest in jazz music and improvisation. He studied at the Hot Clube music school in Portugal before getting a degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA. He has been honored with the Villas-Boas Award, as well as the best new talent award from the \u00bbJazzPortugal\u00ab website. Melo has worked as an arranger and musician with artists such as Benny Golson, Peter Bernstein and Donald Harrison, as well as with several orchestras in Lisbon, and has recorded more than twelve albums.<\/p>\n
His interest in horror and fantasy films led him to set up a production company in 2003 that specialized in those genres. Melo produces, writes screenplays, and directs for the company, called O Pato Profissional, whose productions include Portugal\u2019s first Zombie short film, \u00bbI\u2019ll See You in My Dreams\u00ab (2003) which won several fantasy film festival prizes and has achieved cult status, as well as the TV series \u00bbUm Mundo Catita\u00ab (2008) (tr: A Fine World). The 2010 graphic novel \u00bbAs Incr\u00edveis Aventuras de Dog Mendon\u00e7a e Pizzaboy\u00ab (Eng: \u00bbThe Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendon\u00e7a and Pizza Boy,\u00ab 2012) was also originally slated to be a screenplay, paying tribute to film and computer games classics from the 1980s, such as \u00bbGremlins\u00ab and \u00bbThe Secret of Monkey Island,\u00ab but evolved into its current form when Melo began working on it with Portuguese and Argentine artists such as Juan Cavia. It\u2019s the story of Eurico Catatau, a pizza deliveryman whose scooter is stolen by a gargoyle. He enlists the help of occult investigator Jo\u00e3o Vicente AKA \u00bbDog\u00ab Mendon\u00e7a, and soon ends up embroiled in the phantasmagorical underworld of Lisbon\u2019s sewers. The foreword was written by Hollywood director John Landis, who helmed, among other things, Michael Jackson\u2019s famous \u00bbThriller\u00ab video. Via his connections, a copy of the original reached Dark Horse Books[RMS2], who published it in the U.S. Melo and Cavia also produced four more episodes for a volume of the \u00bbDark Horse Presents\u00ab collection in 2011, the 25th anniversary of the collection, which has boasted the work of such artists as Frank Miller (\u00bbSin City\u00ab) and Mike Mignola (\u00bbHellboy\u00ab). A prequel to the first story appeared in a comic called \u00bbThe Untold Tales of Dog Mendon\u00e7a and Pizza Boy\u00ab (2012). The series, which won Melo the prize for best script (2011) and best comic book (2012) at the Amadora Festival of graphic novels, has been continued into two further volumes and is currently being turned into a computer game.<\/p>\n
The author teaches at the ESML \u2013 Escola Superior de M\u00fasica de Lisboa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[680,398],"jct-ilb-years":[609],"class_list":["post-39631","authors","type-authors","status-publish","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-portugal-en","jct-origin-portugal","jct-ilb-years-2015-en"],"yoast_head":"\n