Features | |
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Last Airbender |
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Grey's Anatomy Promo VFX |
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Interview with Bobby Chiu |
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License to dream |
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Focus : Gears Of War 3 |
News Headlines | |
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Dragon Age 2 |
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Bioshock Infinite |
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Time travellers Comic |
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Envirometer |
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Thelma and Louise Remake |
Other Features | |
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Interview With Nick Harris |
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Making Art for Ipad |
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Making VFX for Ben Hur Remake |
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Interview : Mike winkelmann |
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Baby Data |
A man lost his love. He decides to go out and find her in the night of Hong Kong, only to realise that it's not with her he's in love, but with the city itself.
IT'S ART: Can tell us a little about yourself and your past work?
Jean Julien Pous : Well, alright, I'm French, 24 and living in Paris now. I made the short film "Switch" as a student at Supinfocom. After graduation I was selected to take part to an exchange program with the Vancouver Film School, where I made another short film, "Seeking You". Most recently I had the chance to be the set photographer of a short film made by the Smallville crew, called "The 11th Spice", it should be released soon.
IA: What's the concept behind "Seeking You"?
JJP. : I first wanted to do an erotic film, because I think it's a genre that is very seldom developed in the animation field. Then I wanted to do a short about Hong Kong. My first desire was to make it a film project, as I like to blend video, but it just wasn't fitting the project. It became a mix of both. It is the story of a guy that seems to have lost his love and he goes out at night in Hong Kong looking for her.. He then realises that the girl may or not exist, his love is mainly towards the city itself.
IA: Did you have a clear idea of your artistic choices before starting to work on the realisation of the short?
JJP : I had references but I couldn't predict the results. I admire the backgrounds of "Tokyo Godfathers" (Satoshi Kon / Madhouse), and the freedom of "Mindgame" (Studio 4°C). I wanted to try something with this freedom by mixing differents medias. The big question was how they would merge together, and whether it should be layed down as a very heterogeneous work, leaving the different sources - photos, drawings, 3d - as they were, or trying to blend everything together, to unify the whole picture. Making some proof of concept greatly helped to understand how it would finally look.
IA: Have your artistic choices influenced the the tools used to make this short?
JJP : I was thinking about a story, so images. And then used the tools I know how to achieve it with to be efficient. Everything came out progressivly and organically. I first took many photo references and I noticed that I could use them for rotoscoping to optimize the animation and help me with drawings. I wanted to paint the backgrounds but to use 3D elements to help me with perspective and I finally decided to leave them like that. And leave some photos for the faces as I loved this about "Mindgame".
IA: What tools did you use and how much time did you spend on this project?
JJP : I used my camera, a Nikon D70 with two lenses, the starter kit 18-70mm and a fixed 50mm. Pencils, paper and on the computer I used After Effects, Maya and Photoshop. For the sound, some effects where recorded with binaural microphones then layed down in ProTools and mixed with Sonar. Some musical tests were made with Reason as well as ProTools.
IA: This short is a tribute to a city, but also in my opinion in some ways a tribute to cinema? Am I right?
JJP : It is a tribute to Hong Kong, that's for sure. Tribute to those mixed strong feelings that it brings me each time I go there. And I think you can easily guess which films influenced me in the making of this one.
IA: Colors in this short are also very important and remind us of the classical Asian director, Wong Kar-Wai. But it's also because it's simply the natural colors of the city. Can you tell us about these influences and the city itself, how they have helped to build the universe of "Seeking You"?
JJP : On my previous short, "Switch", we worked mostly in black and white. I had some trouble using colors harmoniously. I was always going into a too scattered palette. When I visit a city, I think it always has its own colors. In China, what is kind of typical, is that they use very strong colors that are at the frontier of a visual cacophony but they miraculously fit. I think it's because of their very strong vibrance and saturation. I wanted to try this out and the pictures I took in Hong Kong were used as starting point, but I also intentionally corrected them to achieve a broader range of tones from the deep cold blue feeling of a high tech world, to the very warm market streets. I tried to describe in colours this weird feeling that we experience sometimes, you know, when we are about to laugh for anything, but almost ready to cry as well.
