Student Prize: I Am a Pebble
Directed by Maxime Le Chapelain, Mélanie Berteraut-Platon, Yasmine Bresson, Léo Coulombier, Nicolas Grondin and Louise Massé (ESMA Nantes, France)
Growing up in the beautiful countryside of Brittany in France, Maxime Le Chapelain spent a lot of time surrounded by nature. That’s why the natural world plays a big part in his beautiful graduation film from the ESMA school of the arts, I Am a Pebble. “The short came from the simple comparison of otters taking round shapes to sleep and the round rocks in the rivers of my countryside,” he tells us. “They share the same shape, the same place, and we tried to give them the same life. This story of family and identity came naturally as we wanted the otter to have a choice to make between the worlds of pebbles or otters.”
Le Chapelain and his team worked for a little more than a year, including preproduction and production — which was sometimes simultaneous. “Six of us worked on this short, and for the last couple of months, we received some precious help from three interns to finalize the short.”
The animation’s rich, painterly look was the work of Léo Coulombier, who developed the tools that generated a brush effect in Nuke and applied it as the final step of the workflow. “Before that, we worked on many aspects like hand-painted textures in Substance, looping textures, animating on twos to be coherent with the final 2D style, and finally we did a lot of color scripting to get a clear target and not lose too much time in a heavy compositing process.”
The director says apart from the technical challenges, developing the story proved to be one of the big challenges. “The idea of an otter living with pebbles could seem ridiculous, but that’s why it was interesting,” he explains. “To create drama and conflict with only a non-speaking animal and pebbles, we had to find scenes and actions with the pebbles that would lead the otter to a series of disillusionments and questionings. But as you can expect, actions made by pebbles are quite limited. And then, it became obvious that the otter’s perception against reality would help us build the dramatic tension through the movie to visualize the internal struggle of our main character.”
Le Chapelain says he owes a lot to the animation class he took at ESMA. “That’s where I discovered a completely new way to express and give life to characters,” he notes. “I truly learned I could work in animation when I entered ESMA. Before that, I only wished to tell stories through illustrations or films, but in animation you can do both at the same time. And once you try to bring life to what was originally a drawing, you want all your drawings to come alive. But the true value of ESMA for me were the group projects we worked on every year, because we created things we could not have done alone and it feels really great to grow with others.”
Counting artists such as Alê Abreu, Alberto Mielgo and Trevor Jimenez as his favorites, the 24-year-old artist says he looks forward to directing his next project.“It is a never-ending path to learn storytelling and animation, and I still have a lot of room for improvement,”he concludes. “So, one dream after the next, I train, I write, I draw and, sooner or later, something may appear on a screen. I hope to work on moving stories with a great team, being at the core of the craft and using all what today’s animation offers to bring more touching characters to the screen.” ◆