Heads or Tales

Heads or Tales is a short film realised by animation quintet Pierre Bottai, Foehn Gallet, Kévin Herbrich, Adrien Kédochim and Gauthier Troalen at Georges Melies School, Orly, France.

We spoke to Pierre Bottai about the their short film

Who?
We did this short film at the Georges Méliès School (EESA) in Orly (near Paris)
Pierre Bottai
Foehn Gallet
Kévin Herbrich
Adrien Kedochim
Gauthier Troalen

What?
We wanted to talk about the kids’s imagination, the moment when all our reality changes because of our imagination. At which moment we have lost the ability to imagine a lot of things from regular stuff in our daily life.
This is the story of a boy in the subway who meets a musician. He’s going to explain to him that a dragon lives in the deeps of the underground’s network. During their travel the boy will believe the story…

Why?
We are taking the subway, the public transports every single day, and the musicians, the train’s shake and all those events are a part of our daily life inside the subway (from paris anyway). We have only wonder ourself, if that was not just some ordinary things, but if everything was related? And if something was causing all of that ?
With this modern tale we want to show that looks can be deceiving and that our daily life can be full of treasures and mysteries we don’t pay attention to any longer.

How?
The film has been made like a real one from caracter’s design research, setting, storyboard then animatic 2D and 3D, in parallel with modelling and the rigging then the animation and compositing et voilà. Each person of the group had a accurate task in the making, wich has allowed to get a technical and artistic balance in the film.

We also wanted to get closer to the kids’s point of view by using brighter colours, to give a fairy touch to his travel. But the film has not been made in one step. There has been a lot of changes in the story (until the end) and we have met some difficulty like doing castings (to find actors for the lip sync) . It was a pleasure to see a real actor acting what we have wrote for him. We recommended you to check the making of out…

Next Project?
Right now, two of our team have already worked as animators on the feature film ”The Lorax”. An other one is working in modeling on ”Despicable me 2”. One more has also began in compositing on ”Cinderella 3D” then in modelling on DM2. For the following, some of us keep writing scenarios, or searching new ideas.