A trailer for The Elephant and The Bicycle, a short animated film I made in 2014. Produced by Folimage.
Le vélo de l'éléphant
The Elephant and The Bicycle /
Слон и велосипед
paper cut-out animation, 9'04", © Folimage / La Boite,... productions 2014
Script, direction, design: Olesya Shchukina
Music: Yan Volsy
Sound design: Philippe Fontaine
Cinematographer: David Toutevoix
Backgrounds: Lucrèce Andreae, Sandrine Héritier
Animation: Lucrèce Andreae, Marjolaine Parot, Olesya Shchukina
Distribution and festivals: j.mourlam@folimage.fr
The Elephant and The Bicycle /
Слон и велосипед
paper cut-out animation, 9'04", © Folimage / La Boite,... productions 2014
Script, direction, design: Olesya Shchukina
Music: Yan Volsy
Sound design: Philippe Fontaine
Cinematographer: David Toutevoix
Backgrounds: Lucrèce Andreae, Sandrine Héritier
Animation: Lucrèce Andreae, Marjolaine Parot, Olesya Shchukina
Distribution and festivals: j.mourlam@folimage.fr
Some stills:
Some making of photos:
The elephant had 2 sets of eyes for puppets of 2 differents sizes. They were fixed to the head with patafix and replaced when needed:
This puppet was used just for one short scene, so 3 pairs of eyes were more than enough:
Lucrèce Andreae, an extremely talented filmmaker on her own, is making a background. I provided her a layout and sometimes a color sketch. And she used a light table to trace all elements separately on thick paper. Then she colored them with acrylics and pencils and glued together. That helped to have a collage effect and make the final picture more natural as all characters were also made of pieces:
That's how layouts looked like. I had to calculate the scale of each keeping in head the size of the elephant. I also had to consider whether it was the 1st or the 2nd layer of glass. If it was the second while the elephant was supposed to be on the first, I had to make the background bigger. So I used a lot of mathematics to calculate well the size. My grandmother was a math teacher and I spent my summer holidays doing exercises. So I think it finally got useful!
A scene ready to be shot. All elements are there:
Lucrèce is animating a scene. Extra eyes, legs and arms are on sides. 2 layers of glass are used. One for the elephant and the second for the background. There is actually the third as well where the sky is placed.
That was the most complicated scene. We spent almost a week working on it (40 seconds of animation!). We had to animate 2 layers simultaneously and each of us was in charge with 4 characters some cars at the same time.
DragonFrame helped a lot because we could draw some points and guides on the screen and track the walking cycle of each character as well as cars.
The most struggling were the moments when one character passed behind another. Sometimes it created intersections of 3 or 4 of them. It takes few seconds of screen time but it took us much more of working time (an hour at least?).
The set with the light. Everything was dark and colored in black as all other colours could reflect the light and interact with the image. The film was shot at Folimage studio in Valence, France:
Marjolaine Parot, the second animator, is working on one of the final scenes:
Some color sketches and final screenshots from the film:
Thanks for watching and reading!
