9 - The Co Director

As I told you before, Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier joined me so we could be the 3 directors of the film.

They are 2 belgian directors and made a lot of short films, a TV show, Comic Books and a long feature film before. They both did LaCambre, an art school in Brussel where they both studied animation. Right after school they made a series of short film. Here is one :

And here is another extract here, here or here. Later they made the tv show ”A town called Panic”. Briliantly funny, it is the adventures of a Horse, an Indian and a Cowboy living in the countryside. Here is a episode with Hulk, another one with Robin Hood and another one with a soccer match. Later they made a long feature film with the same characters. Here is the trailer.

We started working together. We didn't know each other but we wanted the same things on the film. We worked on the adaptation from the script into pictures. At first we talked about the film, thinking of ideas. It was not very easy for me in the beginning

But it went better and better until we finally made a fantastic team.  

8 - The Director

When i arrived on the project, i was not immediatly asked to be the director. I was at first an artistic director working mainly on the visual aspect of the film. On day, Mister Didier came to me and asked :

Of course this reaction looks a little bit exagerated but at the time i was not experienced enough to take over such a big project. I knew being the director was a job with a lot of responsabilities. Let's show you a sea metaphore so you can understand :

Let's imagine that i am a young sailor full of enthousiasm

who just left the marine school

At school i learne how to maneuver small boat. I was

not bas at it because it is not complicated and you can control it easily

The Governor Mister Didier the 1^st is impressed by my talent

on the small boat and suddenly asks me to be the captain of his galion

and give me a crew of 60 sailors

Suddenly it's not the same... A big ship is more complicated to maneuver

and you can't control it on your own

But mainly, you have to give orders to your team but as you don't know

your rôle very well yet, it's not really easy...

Of course i'm exagerating but this is the main idea. Each of the orders i'll say will have consequences, good or bad consequences. And if you try to work on your own, you won't go far

As I knew it was going to be difficult I asked for a co director. This is how Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier joined the team so our inexperience would be complete

7 - Lead Animator

The lead animator is one of the first person integrating the artistic team. His name is Patrick, a young and athletic gentleman coming from "Les Gobelins" school of animation in Paris

The lead animator is a the chief of the animators The animators are a strange tribe composed of semi adult women or men. They are usually polytheists, praying for either Mickey Mouse or SpongBob.

So Patrick's work was to make sure that the animation of the film was coherent and the same style for each of the animators. Each animator has its own sensibility, and each animator makes a character move with its own acting style, like a real actor would play his rôle. In a way, it's like if Patrick had to work with 10 different actor but each of them would have to play the same rôle.

Let's imagine that Bruce Willis and Woody Alllen decided to become animators. Of course they would both draw Ernest their own personal way. Bruce would draw energeticly, Woody would draw more gently

So Patrick is telling them how to draw Ernest in a certain way

This way, Bruce and Woody will draw Ernest the same way. Patrick is also the one who will decide which animator will receive which scene. Dynamic scene will go to Bruce Willis, more sensitive scene will go to Woody Allen.

At first, Patrick made some short scene in order to see what the animation style would look like. Here is some samples...

Ernest negociating with Celestine

Ernest escaping from a bis mass of mice

Once the production starts, Patrick is the one who will also give the intentions of acting I want for the characters to the animators. In order to do that, we used to meet and talk about it. Here is how it used to happen.

6 - Character Design

Now that we had started working on the backgrounds, we needed to work on the Character Design. Of course we had references with the books. But Daniel Pennac invented a great number of characters in his script. That is when we asked Sei to work on those characters. 

Sei is a young talented artist coming from Les Gobelins a school of animation in France. Her talent is as huge as the sound level of her laughs.

Adapting the characters of Ernest and Célestine was not an easy thing. The first reason was that Gabrielle Vincent didn't always draw her the same way. Here is an example of the evolution of Célestine in time. The first drawing comes from the first book, the last comes from the last book.

After a while, we started creating our own Célestine. Of course she was at first inspired from the book, but we needed to change her on some details. Her nose was slightly shorter, her eyes bigger... She became more and more expressive under our pencils and she finally became the little mouse that you can see today in film.

Ernest was easier to work on, after a while we managed to create a nice design for him as well.

For each of these characters, we needed to give animators informations that they would use to draw Ernest and Célestine. Those informations were quite important, it helped the animators draw the little details that make Ernest or Celestine special. Here is a sample of the informations

After that Sei had to work on the supporting characters. We always tried finding references in the books. Here is a character in “Ernest and Celestine in the Museum“ he is the manager of a museum, he was used to create Georges, the manager of the shop “The House of Candy“

Here it is a photo of Ernest when he was young found in “Ernest and Célestine go to the photographer”. I helped us create Leon, Georges's son

Other characters were created that had to be fully imagined by Sei. She had to gets inspired by Daniel Pennac's writings and I was trying to sketch how I was imagining them. Here is a old rat called ”The Gray”, the manager of the Dentist Facility, and the Chief of the Bear Police

Sei work is one of the most important step of a film. The models need to be very charismatic and not too complicated so any animator can draw him or her. She worked maybe one complete year before we could have a completer lineup of all the characters. She designed more than 170 characters and she made an amazing job despite my worthless interventions...

 

 

So here we are with our character design. Now let's see more about the animation.