It's always a pleasure to feature a production focus on a short film made at Supinfocom. This time we've met with the team that created "Yankee Gal," a tribute to WWII pilots and the mood and atmosphere of the 1940's. Enjoy!



IT'S ART: Could you present the team and tell us what were your respective roles in this short?

Gary Levesque: The team was made up of Celine Desrumaux, Antoine Perez, Francois Pons and myself. It was created around Antoine's synopsis. He drew the storyboards and put a lot of efforts into the directing. He was very involved in the 'look' of the film and he lit and rendered most of the interior cabaret scenes. I took care of the character designs, modeling and texturing.

Céline was also very involved in the direction of the film, and she carefully watched over the homogeneity and feasibility of the movie. She and I painted a very nice color board that created the mood for the lighting. She then worked on every step of the movie: background modeling, character animation, exterior lighting and most notably the majority of compositing. Francois was the most technical member of the team, allowing us to safely use special effects like smoke and particles, and he built a custom rig for the film. On top of that, he's an artist and knows how to make things look good without going over the top with effects.

I was the lead animator on the film, and put a lot of effort into bringing subtlety and life to the characters. I also worked on the light board, props design and modeling. As well, I completely managed the sound design and audio mixing, which gave us great control over it.Olivier Calmel is a professional music composer who did a great job on the movie, and we can't thank him enough for that.

IA: Where did the initial idea of the story come from? How long did you work on the script and how did it evolve?

The original idea was born out of a drawing. It was one of those situations where you look at a character and it just came to life and you begin imagining what his story would be, what kind of person he his, etc. Honestly, it could have been anything else. The origin of an idea isn't relevant, what matters is what you do with it and where you take it. If you put it this way: "A pilot in a crashing plane during WW2," it doesn't sound like anything ground-breaking. That's why we focused on different aspects of it.

The script took more than a year to finish, but you have to bear in mind that we were always in a learning process. We have had completely different versions of it, even including the small toy-like characters. This process of trial and error helped us define what we wanted out of the movie and which influences were more important to us.




IA: What was your source of inspiration?

Valenciennes isn't the most exciting city to live in and studying at Supinfocom barely left us time to sleep so, in terms of inspiration, it mostly comes from our influences: films that have stuck with us over the years from directors like Jim Jarmush, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch. To be more specific, we all enjoyed watching things like: The Running Man from Awajiri, or Tetsuo from Shinya Tsukamoto and Mind Game from Masaaki Yuasa.

The "Yankee Gal" character was built from bits of Marilyn Monroe for her showgirl-attractiveness, and other bits were taken from Marlene Dietrich for her mental dominance. She's a real Frankenstein! But in the end, she's really close to Jessica Rabbit, which was another strong influence. For the pilot, we drew influences from the Corto Maltese comics from Hugo Pratt, but also Moebius and then Blacksad from Juanjo Guarnido...They're all strong minded characters.