Production Focus : Meet Meline       

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Virginie Goyons is 26 years old and from St Raphael (South of France). She spent 3 years at the ESMA learning about 3D before moving to Lyon. She is now a Lead 3D Artist at Eden Games (ATARI), a video games company. Two of the projects she worked on are “Alone in the Dark” and “Test Drive Unlimited 2”. Sebastien Laban, 25 years old, is from Lyon (Center of France). He studied 3D Animation and Compositing at “Arts Appliqués Bellecour” for 3 years. After school, Eden Games hired him to work as a Visual Effects Supervisor on “Alone in the Dark”, and then he spent 6 months at Framestore as a Technical Director for Brian Singer’s “Superman Returns”. He is currently working as a Director and Artistic Director at Diplomatic Cover, working on 3D cinematic, live film and photography.

They teamed up to create a promising short movie, Meet Meline. We asked them a few questions about this project.

IT'S ART : Why have you chosen to initiate such a project? What was the initial idea?

Sebastien Laban : We met at Eden Games, a video game company. Virginie was responsible for modeling sets and I was working on visual effects. We were both just out of school and we got to know each other over a year. ... The magic happened! As we are both passionate about film animation, we thought that it would be amazing to create a short film of our own. Or, at least, it would be interesting to see how far we could go. Sharing our ideas, digging for more, in one word: CREATE! We all love watching movies, and we thought the best way to express ourselves was to create our own.

Anyone is able to write a film critique, but when it comes to creating a short movie, the amount of work and dedication needed is immediately much more intimidating. There are so many things to manage, and I'm not even talking about the pre-production work with the story and the narration of it.

That's the best context to learn, and learning is crucial in our opinion. It offers so many personal challenges. The simple fact, to finish a project is already fabulous. We've seen many projects during these two years; many were stopped even before moving into pre-production. A short film constrains you to go beyond what you think you can do best. Each day, you have to avoid problems of all kinds and at all levels. But you continue, you seek, you test, you dodge and in the end you find the exit door! Then you can start fixing the next problem, and in a film, where everything is connected... it becomes a game!

And because this is so true, I always have that quote from Walt Disney in my head that says: ‘Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.’