Anthony Voisin, a recent ESMA graduate, shares with us the journey of making his group thesis project and the challenges he and his team faced and overcame. The result of this group’s hard work and cooperation is an intelligent and emotional short named “Replay.” .

AV: At ESMA we are required in our second year curriculum to present some synopses to a jury of professors to select from, once it’s chosen we start working on the synopsis and develop it into a scenario and then a short.
It was Zakarian, nickname Zak, who came up with the initial idea of the synopsis. During the summer before, Zak worked selling fritters on the beach and during a break one day he sat on the water’s edge and closed his eyes and emptied his mind. He could only hear the sound of the ocean and the sounds of the vacationers; the kid’s happy screams, the mom’s chitchat. He started imagining a story that would take place in such an environment and later on we all started developing the story into a futuristic scenario, but we kept the interaction of the visual souvenir and the sound track with the nostalgia of a better world that, in our short, had been destroyed by men.

IA: How did the script evolve once you started facing technical difficulties and new ideas?

AV: The initial story was simple: a little boy is wandering in the ruins of a city and finds a suitcase that used to belong to a writer and in it he discovers a tape recorder. He presses the play button and all the sounds of the world we know fills the air: birds singing and kids playing. All the sounds of life coming from the tape recorder completely stand out against the silence of the kid’s deserted world and the kid’s imagination transports him into the world described by the sounds on the tape.
The scenario started evolving the more we worked on it in our group. We created a solid structure, a good story to tell and emotions to communicate through the art. Each brought his ideas and expectations without thinking of the technical problems and we faced some difficulties finding a common ground, but the fact that we worked in a team spirit helped the story a lot.
Next, we started working on the story-board and we estimated the length of the movie as we wanted it would be 17 minutes, which is of course too much, so we started thinking of ways to make it shorter so it would fit into the 5 minutes we were allowed.

When we started production we found some tricks to go around long scenes and cut details that were not essential to the story. I would say that the short never stopped evolving, even when we set the “final” story-board we went back and changed things to have practical results.

AV: We all took part in writing the scenario, as well in the step of doing cutouts and creating the story-board. Even though the best sketch artists did the story-board, each member of the team added his ideas and expectations. As we started the work, each one of us was ready to do everything, but with time talents appeared and we divided the tasks based on the team member who had the best skills for each specific task. We also started searching for someone to do the audio: music and voices.

IA: What were the major difficulties that you faced during the making of this short?

AV: Organization was difficult, we needed to save time not waste it, and we also needed to stick to the plan. The big mistake was to attack the production without enough planning and organization. At a certain point you realize that you have worked for hours on a scene that is not essential and that we have to delete it. We always had to regroup, discuss things and check on each other’s work and performance: especially when someone is waiting for someone else to finish part of the work to take it over to the next level. Then we faced the hard truth of rendering time. We had to organize ourselves to prepare the rendering scenes, the different layers, the backgrounds and the foregrounds, the objects to separate to be able to chain up the compositing directly after the complete rendering of a plan.