Christophe Ferreira began his career as a dougaman at Telecom Animation Film under Yasuo Ootsuka and Kazuhide Tomonaga, passed from project to project and position to position, took a detour outside the industry into comics, ducked back in for color scripts and storyboards on Hirune Hime, and now takes the director’s chair at Orange for an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s novel Leviathan.
Needless to say, when I saw Otakon had invited him as a guest, I had many questions for him – and he was kind enough to let me ask a few. This is an interview he conducted with us alongside Qubic producers Justin Leach and Katrina Minett, who themselves have very interesting backgrounds. Frankly, I could’ve talked to them all individually for the whole hour, but I had a lot of fun even just in our fifteen minutes. It went a bit like this:
Nate A.M. (>>Nate): Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to do this interview. First of all, I absolutely have to ask you, Mr. Ferreira, about your early time at Telecom. You mentioned once that you attended one of Ootsuka Yasuo’s workshops, and that this ultimately let you to moving to Japan a few years later with none other than Tomonaga Kazuhide as your mentor, so could you talk about that story a little bit?
Christophe Ferreira (>>Ferreira): Yeah, yeah. So I studied animation at the Gobelins school-
Nate: Oh nice!
Les Gobelins is a prestigious French art school with a highly respected animation program. Vincent Chansard, who we interviewed a few years ago, is also an alumnus. You can read more about that here.
Ferreira: Yeah. I graduated in ‘98, and in 2001 there was a festival in Paris about animation, and Ootsuka Yasuo was one of the main guests. He held a “master class” – we call them “master classes” – for one week during this event where a few people – I think it was fifteen people: fifteen young animators – were invited to learn the Japanese way – or what you can learn in one week.
(both of us laugh)
Ferreira: So I was one of those fifteen guys and girls, working every day – like he would come in the morning and give us an exercise, and talk to us about the exercise, talk about his experience in animation and stuff like that, draw with us, and then he would leave because he had stuff to do, and we would work on the exercise every day, and then we’d come back and talk about correcting stuff and explaining stuff. At the end of the week, he told us one week is not enough, so if you want to learn a little bit more, please come to see us in Japan, and we’ll see what we can do, but first: come to our studio – and his studio was Telecom Animation Film. In 2003 I got my work visa, and I went directly to the studio. We arranged that I would join the studio for one year. It was me and another guy, and at this time we were the only foreign animators except for from Asia I think. I didn’t know any Japanese – or almost none. My mentor was sitting next to me, and it was Kazuhide Tomonaga plus Ootsuka Yasuo. We spent three months learning the Japanese way of animation – basically the one week extended to about three months, or a little bit more.
Nate: So how to do a timesheet, how to do genzu and stuff properly…
Ferreira: Exactly, like how to do the layout…first we learned how to do douga, and then a step-up, a step-up, and then the last exercise was doing a presentation of an original idea. So we made some image boards, some small econte…we pitched that to the room and we made a presentation to the main staff there – so Ootsuka, the boss of Telecom, and the two main chief animators: Tomonaga Kazuhide and uhh…ah! I forgot the name!
Nate: ‘s all good.
Pilo (@pilooo15) informs me he probably means Nobuo Tomizawa, who was one of the animators Ootsuka invited to Telecom in its early days to form the backbone of their animation department.
Ferreira: Anyway, that was the first three months, and after that I worked as douga on all the shows that they were doing at the time; and then I learned Japanese along the way – a little bit.
Nate: Nice…well, I’m sure you had to to learn the notations you were getting back on the corrections and stuff.
Ferreira: Yeah basically. The advantage is that…well, Japanese is very important, but you can learn by drawing. I’d draw something for a cut, and then I’d show it to Tomonaga-san or Ootsuka-san, and they’d correct it, so I’d learn from the corrections to do things more like this, or more like that…
Nate: Excellent…so, I tried to look up a little more about your work during this time period, but I couldn’t really find all that much animation that was attributed to you, so I’m curious: do you have any cuts of animation that you did during this period that you’re particularly proud of?
Ferreira: During that one year, I wasn’t an animator. Telecom was – is, they’re still alive – an old-fashioned studio especially at this time. I dunno now, but they had a structure which was new staff at the base, then you learned, then you passed a test to become an animator, then you were mentored by someone during one year or two years, and then you fully become an animator as the next step. So no, there was no way to skip that within the studio.
Nate: Yeah, I’m sorry I probably misspoke, I didn’t mean necessarily specifically at Telecom, but after-
Ferreira: Oh, after that?
Nate: Yeah.
Ferreira: Ahh…I’m never proud of my work but I-
Nate: But your image boards were so good that you were showing in th-
Ferreira: Yeah but that’s not animation!
[amused crosstalk]Nate: Yeah I know I know, but I also saw some of your animation that you had posted to your tumblr. In fact I was actually surprised: I’m pretty sure I reblogged some of it back in the day without realizing. It’s great.
Ferreira: I remember one thing…and that was during my first year at Telecom, but it was an outside work for 4ºC It was on the uhh…
Justin Leach (>>Leach): Genius Party?
Ferreira: Genius Party, yes.
Nate: Oh wow, been a while since I thought about that one!
Ferreira: -and it was nice. I was asked to [laughs] work on that…yeah, and it was pretty nice.
Nate: Excellent.
Ferreira: But after that no, I…how to say it? First of all, after my one year, I didn’t have any more visa, so I had to come back to France, but I wanted to go back to Japan, and the only way I found was to create a project and make it happen between France and Japan. The project was the one I showcased at the end of my three month internship, because the boss told me “yeah I like it! So if you find a producer in France, come back and see me.” And it happened that I had a producer in France who was interested in it – he was the producer of Oban Star Racers and stuff like that. And so I came back to Japan not as an animator but as a potential director for my own show. From the start, it was ah…kind of in a strange position. I did some animation like on Bleach…stuff like that, but it was side stuff.
He might be referring to Savin Yeatman-Eiffel and Sav! The World Productions. I should've asked a followup here to find out what happened to his project, but as you can see, I'm not actually very good at this.
Nate: Alright, alright. So speaking of France-Japan production cooperation, I thought it was very interesting and striking in Hirune Hime that you could tell the work of some of the French animators like Mr. Hérole from the character animation of some of the Japanese animators like Iso Mitsuo-san, who was also working on the project [note: here for instance]. And I was wondering if you had a perspective on the mentality of some of the overseas animators versus the Japanese animators in how they approach acting.
Ferreira: It’s a little bit difficult because there’s a lot of individual stuff. If you look at the same film, we also had Toshiyuki Inoue, and obviously you can tell the difference between Iso Mitsuo and Inoue-san, right?
Nate: Oh yes!
Ferreira: Just the same, you can see the difference with Hérole-san. Hérole has been living in Japan for 20 years now; he’s different from a French animator – far more Japanese. I think they tried to work with some French animators that were abroad, and I remember they were heavily corrected – even by Hérole-san.
Nate: Oh man…
Ferreira: Because in France you don’t learn how to do layouts: the perspective and stuff like that. The kind of stuff you have to do in a cut is totally different, and they weren’t prepared for that. Their layouts were basically almost entirely corrected, but not the ones from Hérole-san. He’s a really talented animator, for one.
Nate: Yeah, plus plenty of time to learn the Japanese pipeline.
So during your panel, you talked a lot about color and light – talking about Leviathan now – so I’m curious: what aspects of the compositing and color were surprising in how well you were able to achieve them, and what aspects do you wish you could’ve maybe asked for a retake if you had a little more time?
Ferreira: Oh…so in Leviathan the characters are 3D, right? So I pushed a lot for the background to be in 2D…that turned out really good! I think we achieved [what we wanted]. Of course there are limitations: budget limitations and time limitations…anyway. The characters. One thing I would like Orange to improve in – and it’s not just Orange, it’s a limitation of the tech – is the shadows on the body. Basically they don’t have any control. They only control it for the face, and in terms of lighting, that’s something important to do. In a 2D drawing, you can decide what shape to give to a shadow, but in 3D? No. It’d take a lot of money – it’d have to be a movie to do that.
Leach: Because of their physical nature…
Ferreira: Yeah, yeah! Because it’s low polygon stuff and…yeah, strange things happen with the 3D shadows.
Nate: Especially because of how much deformation you already have to do to the model in different perspectives to make it look right as anime.
Man, I have so many questions that I want to ask you all, but I feel like since I invited you two as well I should probably ask you some questions, so Mr. Leach! You talked about at the panel – and I’d noticed beforehand – that you were one of the producers of Kick Heart back in the day! So I’m curious: I’d like to hear your post-mortem a decade later about what went right with that project, and what you think about crowdfunding in general and how that worked out. Obviously from the outside this was one of the more successful of these projects, but of course there were a lot of projects trying to figure out how crowdfunding might work in the anime funding structure that sorta concluded…maybe not so much.
Leach: Yeah…so I think on the positive side, at the time we did Kick Heart, Masaaki Yuasa was kinda in an inbetween place. I think he was looking for his next project, he was working at IG, and I mentioned to [Mitsuhisa] Ishikawa-san about doing a crowdfunding project, and he was like, “why don’t you work with him?” And that was a very exciting prospect for me because I was a huge fan of his work. So yeah, it was kinda uncharted territory. We weren’t sure if it’d go well or not, y’know, but we did the best we could. It indirectly led to the creation of Science Saru through another short, Adventure Time: Food Chain, which was an idea I had to combine Yuasa and Adventure Time, and it turned out just by coincidence that we met one of the artists who worked on Adventure Time because they were a backer of the project, and so through that person we got introduced to Cartoon Network, and we made a proposal. And I just kinda made introductions and they went off and set up Science Saru and made the short, but I wasn’t involved more than that… But I think in that respect it was successful.
I think doing the merchandizing for the film – that’s a lot of work that maybe we didn’t know going in. That was very challenging. But yeah I love the idea of crowdfunding still. One of the challenges is that animation is very expensive. That was a very small team that made Kick Heart and their style is also limited, which helped in terms of the overall budget. It’s just hard to raise money to make animation, and I’d love to do more but…that’s just the challenge.
Nate: Yeah…
So I wrote this down for Ms. Minett, but maybe both of you have some perspective on this. It was interesting when Star Wars: Visions came out, there were a bunch of studios involved which certainly have a lot of outreach to the west like Science Saru as you said, Production IG, Trigger, but also some ones that were a little bit surprising like Geno and Kinema Citrus, so I’m curious: how did they come on the project?
Katrina Minett (>>Minett): We had a lot of studio ideas on our side that we wanted to suggest when we were talking with Lucasfilm – “this studio is cool, maybe this one is less known but they’re making cool things and we think people will like this,” and then y’know “maybe this is more known from a fan perspective but it’s not known on a wider scale.” So there was a list of suggestions that got shared and discussed.
Leach: And then I think the other case was Twin Engine. When we approached Twin Engine, they made a recommendation for Geno Studio. We originally wanted Colorido – that was one of our main studios that we were interested in, and then because they were associated with Twin Engine, they recommended Geno Studio, and we liked their work so we said “yeah that sounds great.” But mostly it was a discussion and recommendation based on our relationships and the studios that we named.
Nate: Excellent. Well, I have a ton more questions but unfortunately we are already at fifteen minutes and I do not want to press my luck here.
Ferreira: One more question.
Leach: I think you might be the last one.
Nate: Oh really? Alright, lemme try to pull a good one then…uhh okay for Mr. Ferreira, having worked on both Hirune Hime and Leviathan now – a project with some world-class traditional animators and a project with some world-class 3D animators – what do you feel some of the strengths of 3D are?
Ferreira: Yeah, so, I like 2D. If possible I will always go with 2D. But, I discovered a very good point for 3D: you can have long cuts. In 2D animation, if you have a long cut, it’s usually expensive, there are a lot of fixes…so it’s really hard to come up with a good cut like that. But with 3D, basically it looks like live action. You can have the character stand there, move around while talking, doing things – complicated things – and the character will always be on-model. This is something that I really enjoyed about it. And of course, obviously, as it’s always 3D, the character is always on-model: the face will always be the same, and it will always be kinda “beautifully drawn.” What I really wanted for the show was to use those points. But one thing I really didn’t want was 3D camera moving around the character or around the background – stuff like that – without purpose.
Nate: Yeah, it was interesting when you said that in the panel, and then you showed some of the footage and there were actually a couple of cuts with rotating camera. There are definitely some places where it makes sense, and some places where it makes less sense…
Ferreira: I think the one you all saw was the one with Alek close up and…(laughing) yeah I think you saw all the cuts with rotating camera.
Nate: (laughing) Yeah because I suppose they’re the flashiest, so that’s what makes it into the preview material.
Ferreira: -and there are moments like that. I can’t say anything, but they are all important. Like I think one of them is the discovery of the Leviathan by one of the main characters. So yeah, you can turn around it to see him from all these different perspectives…you can do that in 3D.
Thank you very much again to all three for giving us this opportunity to talk, and to Otakon for making it possible!