TORONTO—Christian Volckman was 28 years old when he started making his first animated feature Renaissance. He’s 35 now and finally presenting the flick at the Toronto International Film Festival. The French director looks weary in a Toronto hotel room as he searches for words to sum up the past seven arduous years of his life. “It’s been exhausting,” he admits. “Working on an hour-and-a-half piece for six or seven years was just bizarre. The whole technological history of the film is a little bit painful.”
Renaissance (screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 7 and 9; wide release will follow later in the month) is a gritty, film noir crime drama set in a futuristic Paris in the year 2054. The entire film consists of stark black-and-white animation, as though it was run through the Threshold feature in Photoshop. “Working with those black-and-white images was fun because you can work on a subconscious level with the audience,” Volckman says. “The thing about black-and-white is it can represent the dark side of the human condition. Even in everyday actions, you can choose to be nice to people or not be nice. You always have the choice between the dark side or the bright side. It’s very difficult to put that in words.”
The idea for Renaissance was born while Volckman was attending an animation festival with his first film, “Maaz”, an animated short. “I met this guy there and he was working with 3-D images. He had done some little tests in black-and-white with motion capture. I thought they were great and figured I could do something with them. It felt right for me, with my obsessions and stuff. So we started working together with a producer and the scriptwriters.”
Although the look of the film has been compared to graphic novels like Frank Miller’s Sin City, Volckman explains that comic books had nothing to do with his vision for Renaissance. “I don’t really like comic books,” he admits. “I was much more inspired by film noir—Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and [Sergei] Eisenstein—those great geniuses. I also liked the atmosphere of Blade Runner, and, of course, there was some of that influence in it too.”
But creating this highly stylized noir look was a colossal technological undertaking for the young director; it took a small army more than six years to create the effect, “people drawing, people making 3-D stuff, actors, musicians—anything you can think of,” Volckman says. “It’s funny ’cause the end credits are as long as my first short film.”
The action was all caught using motion capture first, a technique by which actors are recorded digitally, then animated.
“The whole thing was shot on a six-by-10-metre square in an empty room,” Volckman explains. “The actors had to imagine they were in the middle of Paris, like under the Eiffel Tower. For the actors, it was a bit strange in the beginning, but after a while they got used to it. It’s difficult to explain, but once you’ve lived it, it’s very simple to understand that it’s just a step in the process of animating a virtual character.”
But from a directing point of view, the process itself wasn’t simple, particularly because this filmmaking technique had not been widely used in Europe at the time. “There was no studio you could go to that you could say, ‘I want to do this; help me,’” he says. “We were learning how to do it while we were doing it. It was a real fight against the technical world.
“I think the worst part for me was digital,” he laments, “all the things we had to make in the machine using software like Maya, which is used to build an environment. You’re creating a whole world. What’s interesting is that when you do it for a long time, you realize that creation is incredible. Material. Textures. Light. The way things reflect. It’s just so incredibly perfect that when you’re trying to emulate it, or copy it, you find out how great it is and that it’s difficult to replicate. Everything has a look to it and a feel to it that you’re just used to in real life; you take it for granted. But when you’re doing a digital film where you have to become the god of your own creation, you find out that you’re really a bad god, a total amateur.”
But would he do it again? “Maybe. For me, I’ll need to have an emotional relationship with the film to invest that much time into it,” he says. “Working for three or four years on a film like that, it can’t just be for business. It has to be personal.”