Mind Game (Studio 4˚C) is my favourite animation so far. A great liberty is taken in the medium, with photos oftenly used as character's faces for close-up to some background details. 3d is often here to liberate the directing from the constraints of traditionnal animation : camera movements, subjective angles, perspective changes, depth in the frame...To a strict and American point of view, the characters would always be very choppy and often off-model. But that's what give the great strength to this film. Being able to push very far the deformations, while never loosing the audience, and just achieving the opposite : make the characters more alive, with more contrast, offering multiple facets to their personnality through the graphism used. A film without any complex that really blow my mind anytime I see it.
All of this sounds way too serious, but after all it's playing a lot with the emotions. Most of the time grotesque and absurd, it held some magic moments of intimacy, deeper connection with the characters, and drama. It's like a blend of many genres, beginning a bit like a film noir while exploring action, surrealism and musical.
Tokyo Godfathers from Satoshi Kon, is in everyway another masterpiece, while being very far from MindGame. Very traditionnal, every element that compose the film is made of an astounding beauty, especially the backgrounds, that turn the night in Tokyo as a magic ballet of lights. Its color scheme is somehow close to Hong Kong's one, while being very urban, and not depicting much the popular districts.And of course, how to think about Hong Kong without having in mind a cinematographer that has the power to make its audience feel this city in an intense and burning intimacy. The colors of the rooms and its furniture being as much as another character, making each of his film a love triangle between the lovers and their city. Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle. This still being from 2046.
Torough the film, there's also a little glimpse to a certain Odissey...
I was torn between very different styles, from the Tekkon Kinkreet score (Studio 4˚C) made by Plaid, and the music from Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou, very inspired by Debussy's compositions. In a word, ethereal. And, on the other hand, I loved the way Wong Kar Wai was using something very foreign to Hong Kong that did nothing but illustrate even more the special feeling of being there : latin sulfurous music. I made few tries with Astor Piazolla's songs, after starting to compose something close to Plaid universe.
Finally, one song really caught my attention, a lighter and very stylised way to interpret Georges Bizet's Carmen : 葛蘭's 卡門 - GeLan / Grace Chang's Kamen. I asked Pedro Mota, a sound design student from Vancouver Film School (VFS) to help me composing something in the same spirit. After some tries, he made an amazing piece that I wish I could let you hear, himself singing in an opera way on of his compositions. But the impact was not the one created with the previous song. I finally negociated the right clearance with EMI Music Hong Kong to release them for my short.
"Some girl deeply confused my inner time." That's what the character could tell. For some reason I was wandering at night for weeks and weeks, me and my loud thoughts in the head, taking pictures. This collection helped me enormously to make the film. It speeded up the animation, I relied a lot on rotoscoping sequences of frames that I shot. And the backgrounds , the faces, the color palette...
All of this happened in less than an hour. I prepared whatever I needed, the shots, the angles, for a week or so, and went to shoot those sequences, everything at once. The singular thing was that I took everything in a rush, walking, shooting, recording some background sound at the same time with my recorder in my pocket. So when I came to Vancouver, opening those pictures several weeks later, and months later actually working on them, looking at them in detail, it was very surprising. They were different to me. I wasn't aware of every movement, faces and people that passed in front of my camera. It was an interesting experience. Very similar to the first impression you get on something new, that doesn't last, and the more you get to know it, the less you can look at it getting the same first impression. It's like gone. Very ephemeral.
Most of the pictures are taken in Wanchaï market, around 7pm, in August 2007. Some others are, from left to right, top to bottom : a school roof, in Jardine's Lookout, an speedway in Central, people in Causeway Bay, a fruit seller in Wanchaï, then a butcher, friends in M2, a bar in the retreat of Lan Kwai Fong that is now closed, the bus 109, by night, from Lam Tin, after a silly walking night, one of my closest friend surrounded by strangers in Tribecca, a club in Renaissance Hotel, in Wanchaï as well.
Further below are the sequences I took.
My friends Samuel, Sonia and Laurent helped me during this phase of the film, for taking references shots. We made several tries and angles before deciding to use the squid skewer and the orange. We shot the last one in front of a sex shop for the unnatural purple light, that made the pedestrians wondering what sort of things we were doing.
I surely scratched some words in a notebook, and draw some quick and unreadable sketches, but I decided to throw them before leaving Vancouver. I think the animatic is more interesting, to see how things changed with the final film. It was less subtle, too explicit in a way, and some angles where changed, replaced, re-ordered in a better way. The left version indicate which media is used to make which element.
VFS instructors asked me to make a proof of concept, which revealed to be quite time consuming, but very useful. I was much better aware of the overall process, and it made me ask the right questions to the supervisors.
wireframedefault shader
lighting testintegration test : 2d + paint look + final lighting
Final cameraworks + 3d models + sound sketch = 3d Animatic
Presented in front of the VFS jury, I received mix critics, especially concerning the different framerates : cameras at 24, characters between 2 and 12. Very unorthodox thinking about classical Disney animation. Very common in Japan. One point where they were very right : I was lacking of time to finish all of this perfectly, I saw a bit too big. I had the eyes bigger than the stomac. Well, at least that's why we say in France. You get it, right ? Nevermind.
Some people told me it had a certain style with only white outlines, like that. I still tried to fill them, see how it would have been. And liked it too much to go back.
Digitally hand painted, from 3d renderings or photo montage.
Here is an example of different tests and layers applied to a shot : sky alpha, shimmering lights alpha, with characters proxy in the frontm character painted in big, and depth of field.
I liked the effect of a clumsy / awkward perspective sometimes.
And as Meryl Streep would say in Devil's wear Prada : that's all.
Tokyo Godfathers from Satoshi Kon, is in everyway another masterpiece, while being very far from MindGame. Very traditionnal, every element that compose the film is made of an astounding beauty, especially the backgrounds, that turn the night in Tokyo as a magic ballet of lights. Its color scheme is somehow close to Hong Kong's one, while being very urban, and not depicting much the popular districts.
