posted by aaron, 7.00 AM
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1 by Sylvain Marc
AN INTERVIEW WITH SYLVAIN MARC
Last year we featured Sylvain Marc’s 1-minute animated short Fertilizer Soup (La soupe à l’engrais). 
It was produced in Flash while at school, but it wasn’t the film he came to be know for. Sylvain played a pivotal role in the production of Cocotte Minute, the exceptional opening film at the 2006 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Each year, students at the French animation school Gobelins create this opening film, and almost all of the recent films have been produced in glorious 3D. In the interview below, we learn that Sylvain, a co-director on the film, produced the opening title sequence for the film in Flash. Let’s check in with Sylvain and learn more about his short, his experiences at Gobelins and his recent exploits at Cartoon Network.
AARON SIMPSON: Is this short autobiographical, or at least semi-autobiographical?
SYLVAIN MARC: Not really. My mum used to make a lot of green vegetable soup when I was a kid, I’m sure you can find a connection there. When I think of it I have some bad memories about soup, but the idea is more about the common idea that kids hate soup.
AARON: What are you current feeling about soup?
SYLVAIN: Now I love it, but it has to be good - creamy and tasty. What I don’t like is that kind of hot water with whole vegetables you usually have when you’re sick. We call it “bouillon” in French (childhood trauma…).
AARON: Tell us how this project started.
SYLVAIN: It was for a contest for Canal J between animation schools. They gave us the theme and we had 30 days to do a one minute short about it. So it was also an opportunity for the schools to do a limited animation exercise. Then the channel selected the ones they wanted to put on air. Mine eventually was put on air!
AARON: Who else helped you with the film?
SYLVAIN: There was the lecturer (professional who comes to work with students, not a teacher) who supervised the whole exercise, my good friend Sylvain Mazas who handled the music, one of our teacher’s son for the voice of the kid, but apart from that, I did it by myself, struggling to deliver it on time.
AARON: Did you design the environments on paper first and scan them in, or was it all produced digitally?
SYLVAIN: If I remember, they are two BGs - the kitchen and the garden. As I usually do, it’s mixed. For instance, the garden is drawn and the color is all digital. I designed it and began to paint it manually, but then I fell behind and scanned it to finish it on computer. But then, time was short again, so I decided to choose that unfinished look, which I think turned out well.
AARON: Let’s take a look at some of the development artwork from your short. Click on the thumbnail image to begin viewing:
AARON: The “imagination” segments are drawn in what Americans might call “refrigerator art.” Was this animation also produced in Flash?
SYLVAIN: Again, it’s mixed. Some are pencil drawings and others are Flash-treated in After Effects, to look like pencil. There was again a time issue for this choice: in the end I didn’t have time to do all the drawings with pencil, so I took my Flash animatic and worked it in After Effects.
I’ll let you guess which parts are real and which ones are digital…
AARON: Had you used Flash before starting the Fertilizer Soup project?
SYLVAIN: A little bit. We learned how to use it and had to do a short film (I only achieved two shots), but I was experimenting, using bitmaps and animating more as paper-cut style animation. So Fertilizer Soup was my really first “finished” project using Flash. At the beginning I wanted to do traditional animation, but again time made me choose Flash.
AARON: Did you find the software easy to learn?
SYLVAIN: Oh yes, it’s really handy and intuitive software, and mixed with After Effects it can do miracles, even with 3D. But there are some things that are not as easy as paper animation. The main one is flipping, obviously.
AARON: Did you see many artists at Gobelins using Flash when you attended?
SYLVAIN: Yes, more and more, if you want to produce short films in a tight schedule, you would go for Flash.
AARON: Have you used it since you produced Fertilizer Soup?
SYLVAIN: Yes, I used it on our 3D graduation film Cocotte Minute. I animated some 2D chickens at the beginning as well as all of the smoke effects, which were then treated in After Effects. And I’m using it right now at work at Cartoon Network.
AARON: What was your role on Cocotte Minute?
SYLVAIN: I co-directed, like all of us involved, but I did storyboards, all the designs, art and render direction, a little bit of modeling and rigging, but mainly animation. Beyond that, I also created most of the textures, then lighting, rendering, compositing, etc…
AARON: What are you currently doing for Cartoon Network?
SYLVAIN: I’m a development artist which means a lot of different things. I’m in a team and we are developing new shows for the network that will hopefully get aired. That includes story, storyboard, design, animation and directing. That’s perfect for someone like me who loves to do many different things and do creative stuffs. I’m learning in many aspects with great people. There’s also the possibility to develop my own idea, fingers crossed! And I got that job a lot thanks to my soup short!
A few months back, I wrote about Cut&Paste’s See What’s Possible Challenge, sponsored by Adobe, which featured several shorts animated in Flash. I somehow missed this one, titled Living Colorforms, which was designed and animated by Claude William Trebutien (Burning Safari). It should come as no surprise that Trebutien is a Gobelins graduate, and the art direction was provided by Baeyens Michael, who attended ESRA in Paris.
