Long Way North‘s 3D Ship
“What interests me is the emotion. I want animators to spend time on the characters’ emotions. I don’t want them to spend time tracing details or pulleys. That’s why the graphic style is so simple. No buttons, no laces, no folds in the clothes. So for the ship, the train, the dog sleds, the carriages, we made 3D objects.”
“At first, I took my inspiration from the Endurance, Shackleton’s ship, thanks to the marvelous pictures by Franck Hurley, the photographer of the expedition. The problem is that it’s a “three-masted barquentine” that functions with 40 people, which was way too many to animate.”
“In Valence, I happened to have met Sébastien Godard, an animator fascinated with ships. He alternates between periods where he works for animation films and periods where he is training to be a ship’s carpenter. I asked him to conceive a ship that could function with a dozen of people. From a sketch found in Sweden on the building site where he worked, he created a “brig-schooner” that became the Norge. He adapted it to the requirements of the production – by adding a steam-powered propulsion to it. He put all his energy into it as a real professional.”
Long Way North‘s Cast of Characters
“It’s the strength of Fabrice de Costil. He’s the one who created Olga and the brotherly tension between Larson and Lund that didn’t exist in the first version. This brings a series of conflicts in which Sacha finds her position.”
“Fabrice pushed the characters as far as he could. He tried many things and observed how it works. Does it create fertile situations and in our case, does it bring Sacha where we want her to go, and what does she take from it? What interested Fabrice was that Sacha learn something about humanity from this adventure. As opposed to her grandfather’s obstinacy, he wanted Sacha to realize the importance of group cohesion.”
Long Way North‘s Storyboarding
“It is one of the specifics of animation and one of the reasons why I think of this film as a collective auteur film or as a collective film of auteurs. To make an animated film, we start by what we call an animatic. It’s a draft of the film. A filmed storyboard with voices, music, background noise. Since animation is expensive and takes a long time to make, we want to lay it out as close to correct as possible, as the editor Benjamin Massoubre says “in animation, we edit before we shoot”. And to do this, we sketch many scenes very quickly, we try things and we edit them.”
“Here, I mainly worked with Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han for the storyboard and Benjamin Massoubre for the editing. It was a fascinating time where we really went deep with this film, back and forth with Fabrice de Costil on the script.”
“Later during the making, Maïlys came back to do the animation while Liane-Cho was supervising it all. He oversaw the French and Danish animation teams, the cel painter teams and the layout and posing team – the step specific to the characters in the layout. More specifically, he put together an economic way to animate and brought the maximum emotion to the characters with the fewest drawings possible. It’s this technique that allowed us to make the film in France with this budget. The film owes a lot to his incredible energy.”
Long Way North‘s Artistic Director of Color
“For the teaser, it was “my” graphic style. But after, for the making of the film, you hire a lot of very talented artists. They take a step towards you to adapt to your style, and you take a step in their direction to make it evolve. Patrice Suau is one of these talents who arrived later and started making the film evolve.”
“He is an artist with an incredible understanding and talent for color. He figured out the technique that allowed us to make the decors on time. And he redefined the graphic style of the film using 40’s American railway companies’ posters, very simple with saturated colors.”
Long Way North‘s Music
“I wanted to work with Jonathan Morali, the songwriter for Syd Matters, a French pop band that sings in English. Once we knew for sure we would be working with him, we exclusively used the music of his discography for the animatic. Benjamin, the editor, added this song when Sacha is running away and it worked really well. On top of that, the lyrics are not really far away from how Sacha is feeling. Jonathan agreed to let us keep it in the film in addition to the original music he composed.”
“From the beginning, the idea was to create a musical contrast, without imitating the Russian ambiance or “adventure film” music. The pop folk direction of the soundtrack is completely acknowledged.”