Melanie Lopez, Simon Boucly, Marie Ciesielski, Alice Jaunet, Chan Stephie Peang and Beatrice Viguier recently published their graduation short The Stained Club, which has already gathered dozens of awards in many festivals (including SIGGRAPH).
We had the opportunity to ask the team about this film, its creation and their artistic choices. Such details are all the more important that the short film deals with very sensitive topics : psychological and physical abuse.
Finn has stains on his body. One day, he meets a group of cool kids with different stains on their bodies. One day, he understands that these stains aren’t just pretty.
3DVF : Hello, and thanks for accepting this interview. How did you come up with the core concept behind your graduation short ?
Melanie Lopez : “The Stained Club” was born from an idea inspired by Angela Strassheim’s work called ‘Evidence’, for which she photographed the inside of what looked like perfect american houses but where tragic murders had happened. You could see the real ‘face’ of interiors thanks to her pictures, for which she used a special UV light to reveal the blood stains. It made me think that it would be crazy to see the emotional ‘stains’ of people directly on their skin without us being able to remove it despite the years, and so I wrote Finn’s story.
3DVF : What were your respective roles during the preproduction/production ?
We all did a bit of everything! But if we were to resume our main ‘spheres’: Melanie was directing the movie, and worked on pre-production, scenario, layout, and texturing; Simon on animation, rigging, staging and editing; Marie on character modeling, texturing, and rendering; Alice on modeling, texturing, shading and animation; Stéphie on animation, modeling, blendshapes; and Beatrice on look dev, visual effects, compositing, and team management.
3DVF : Which software did you use ?
We used Premiere for the editing, Maya, Substance Painter, Houdini, Nuke.
The Stained Club deals with physical and psychological abuse, which are obviously very sensitive topics. Could you tell us about the writing process ? Was it hard to find the appropriate tone and narration and to avoid voyeurism and exploitation ? Did you have any doubts and did you often change your mind ?
Melanie Lopez : A lot ! The subject itself wasn’t hard to be talked about for us: when you’re ready, you’re ready. But finding ways of telling about it in a subtle way, in 5 minutes, while portraying the emotions we wanted to portray, was a real pain in the neck. It needed to be understable, in 5 minutes still, but not too much so you can actually keep space for spectators to feel and interpret by themselves. We also did not want people to understand something like ‘physical pain does not hurt mentally’, of course it does. Neither did we want people to understand we were saying ‘this pain is worse than the other’. We just wanted to put light on the invisible pain that is the psychological one.
At the moment everyone had their 3D animatic they could focus on to start the real production, we were re-doing the whole storyboard. We basically start pre-production in 4th year at Supinfocom, and start producing the movie end of 4th-beginning of 5th year. At the end of 4th year, The Stained Club was happening in a school, and it was too me, very boring. I decided the whole junkyard thing during summer and re-did everything. Teachers hated us for that! But in the end, it payed: and seeing them completely moved at the end of the new animatic after lot and lot of tries was the best reward.
3DVF : The Stained Club is made of four kids with very specific personnalities. How did you create those characters and their designs ?
Melanie Lopez : Well, honestly, as it’s a short movie, they were all created around the main character, Finn. Finn was the first to be created: to us he needed to be the cute innocent kid, too innocent to realize what was happening to him. Creative was one of the traits we came up with early – there was some story with him and his drawings before, something a bit tragic like ‘he always draws his mom and his stains and in the end he hates his drawings just like he hates his life’ but it was… too tragic! We kept this creative trait though, you can find it through his bedroom (lot of posters and drawings), because it was obvious to us that a kid who feels ignored will find a way to live his own adventures – in his own mind. He was visually inspired by my own cousin, who’s his voice in the movie, and mixes of Courgette, Paranorman,…
Then Robbie, Connie and Joshua were created in a way they would all complete themselves, and that Finn could admire at least one thing in each of them that would help him grow. Robbie is brave, and is not afraid of putting his ideas out there in the world in front of everyone; Connie makes pretty and useful things out of trash and stuff you would not imagine would be useful again; Joshua makes children dreams become real and gives hope and solutions.
All four have a bit of me (Melanie) in it I must admit, but mostly a bit of what I admire in other people.
3DVF : Let’s explore the character design. Your characters have round, black eyes, a choice that can make emotions more difficult to convey. Could you tell us about this, and the way you handled facial animation ?
Melanie Lopez : It’s something I’ve wanted from the beginning and that I would refuse to give up on. I’ve always prefered black dots for eyes in characters but, mostly, I felt this could convey some kind of weird emptiness. Teachers were worried about this point, but when we worked with Erik Smitt, director of photography at Pixar, he told us there would be no problem as long as the animators could convey all of the emotions needed in the body and the rest of the face. We knew it would be a challenge, but it was an important choice to me: so we made it happen. Fortunately we could count on our two amazing animators, Simon and Stephie!
Colour profile of the short. The individual frames of the movie were compressed horizontally (1 pixel wide) then joined side by side. The picture can therefore give an idea of the dominant colours throughout the short.
3DVF : You clearly put a lot of efforts in the way you used colours, and you created different moods for each setting and throughout the short film. How did you handle this part of the project ?
Melanie Lopez : We tried indeed to make everything in coherence to what the spectator is supposed to feel; and so, very linked to Finn’s emotions, with the help of the weather everytime. Writing about it now makes it look very basic, and it probably is! But, for example, when he meets the crew, it’s a warm sunset; it has always been my favourite lighting, and it was meant to make the club appear like a new, awesome thing. A rebirth! About the scenes with his mom, it was inspired by scenes like the Minas Morgul one in the Lord of the Rings, all black and green: it terrified and marked me a lot as a child! When they fight with Connie, we chose a stormy weather, as if something was coming… And when Finn comes back to the club, it was obvious for us to choose an ‘after rain’ weather, when we know the sun will be back soon but not yet, and that it’s still a bit wet on the floor. We only had live references for lighting, such as Xavier Dolan and Terrence Malick.
