This article is also available in:
French
3DVF: How did you approach the rigging, animation of the two main characters?
For the character animation, we tried different styles before getting this result. First we tried something more cartoon but that was too far from the atmosphere we wanted the film to have. So we searched for something else and found a semi-realistic style, which was more adapted and gave us enough liberty to approach the movement for biped and quadrupeds bears.
At the same time, we were wondering about the framerate of the animation. We did some tests but we quickly figured out that the 12fps was more coherent for the project, it made our puppet character more believable, as we wanted to get close to the stop motion aspect.
3DVF: How did you create the forest environment, which is full of trees, plants, mushrooms, etc?
We first made some concepts of our general forest environment, then we made more drawings for each important asset that will define the look of our forest. Once that was done, we modeled trees, mushrooms, plants etc.. in Autodesk Maya and Houdini and we used the substance suite for surfacing.
Antoine Dupriez has created a tool which was super effective for the set dressing of our environment : we just had to create a main set, with a ground and few trees, manually in order to control the composition of the shot. Then the Houdini tool was smartly scattering elements into the shot, from several pieces of information (distance to camera, assets name etc..) : it generates other trees, grass and secondary assets taking care to not generate them where the characters were animated to avoid interpenetration. We had a lot of control to get the best out of each shot. With it we were able to have a good density in our environments without having to place each asset manually, it saved us a lot of time and created some good randomness.
3DVF: Looking back at this project, what are you the most proud of?
We had a lot of feedback about the character’s wool and fuzz, most people told us that it works really well both for the polar and brown bears. We are very proud of the visuals of our characters, they really feel like soft toys but they still have something special in their look and shapes, specially for the polar bears with the patchwork they have on their bodies. The patchworks help to show that the characters lived even before the movie, like they were damaged by life.
We tried to be exigent for the creation of our bears, from the concept to the final result, I think that is what we are the most proud about.
3DVF: Your short won dozens of prizes : “Best in Show”/SIGGRAPH 2021, “Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project”/VES Awards, “VIEW Award for Best Short”/View Conference… Migrants is also one of the finalists of the 2021 Student Academy Awards.
How do you explain such a success ? And what are the next prizes you might receive?
The success of the film is just incredible. Not only for us but also for our school and the distributor Je Regarde (Patrick de Carvalho).
We are surprised by how many major events have awarded our movie. We think it is not common for a student project to win as many prestigious prizes. To be honest, we did not expect that when we were creating the movie, but after it came out, we quickly had amazing feedback from festivals. We think the first element to the success in competitions was the Spark Animation in Vancouver, Canada. After this, there was a snowball effect with our short film in festivals.
At the moment, the short film has been selected over 220 times in different competitions and won more than 60 prizes. This is absolutely incredible for us.
We are also very happy from our success in academic competitions, like the last one: the BAFTA. We can’t wait for the result for the Student Academy Awards, we are part of the 3 finalists. No matter which movie won, french student and school are already well rewarded (the 3 movie come from french 3D animation schools)
Following such a success, we have been surprised to get some positive messages from important people in the animation industry !
3DVF: Migrants is distributed by Je Regarde. Can you tell us a little bit about this distributor and the distribution strategy for Migrants?
Je Regarde (Patrick de Carvalho) has been working with our school Pôle 3D for 5 years, he also manages the distribution of the short film of the school Rubika in France. Patrick is doing a very intense job and we are very grateful to work with him. He is totally transparent with us, students, and with the pedagogic team. We are all aware of every selections in festival for Migrants, as it is for the awards and financial rewards we get from it, which are separate between the 5 co-directors only.
The strategy Patrick is using for the movie is to give as much visibility in as many festivals as possible. We think it relies on an active festival network. All his work have made our movie eligible for the official Oscars competition in 2022.
3DVF: Since we usually don’t see student projects from French School Pôle 3D achieve such a high level of recognition within the industry, some of our readers outside France might not be familiar with this school. Can you tell us a little bit about the animation course?
Pôle 3D is an animation and VFX school based in Roubaix, in the north of France. The school is based in the heart of the “Plaine Image” which is a cluster dedicated to creative industries. The school was created 17 years ago by the director Antoine Durieux.
The ambition of the school is to produce innovative shorts, which take risks as much on the form as on the content. Pedagogic team is adapting and improving each year, and, since a few years, specialties are created to meet market needs. Every student from our promotion has all found a role in the industry, which is good news.
We had the chance to see our school evolve a lot while we were there, it was very motivating and satisfying to feel to be part of this evolution. We hope the sudden success of our film will inspire and challenge the future promotions of Pôle3D.
3DVF: Where have you been working since you left the school ? Are you open to new opportunities?
We are all working in the industry now, on animated projects.
Antoine Dupriez is currently working at Illumination MacGuff Paris as a VFX artist.
Zoé Devise is working at Jungler Paris as a lighting compositing artist.
Lucas Lermytte is in Montreal, working as a TD Rigg at Mikros Animation.
Aubin Kubiak is a 3D animator at Superprod in Angoulême.
Hugo Caby is working at Cube Creative in Paris, as a lighting and compositing artist.
It is personal to each member of the team, but globally we are open to any proposition of work, as we are working with short term contracts for most of us. Some people of the group may be very interested in working on live action projects, or in working in other countries. If you read this and may be interested in us, please don’t hesitate to find us on linkedin or anywhere else !
For More Information
- You can find the directors on LinkedIn: Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Lucas Lermytte, Zoé Devise, Aubin Kubiak.
- Pôle 3D – French school of 2D, 3D animation and video games.
- Je regarde -French distributor.
