What was the starting point or the initial idea for this film?
M started as an animated love letter that I wanted to send to my girlfriend, a couple of years ago. The letter M is the first letter of her name. I was playing with little drawings and abstract forms, putting them in movement. The filmmaking itself started when different levels of complexity appeared, when the assembling showed various visual possibilities. But still, it was a very explorative and enjoyable process.
Can you share an anecdote of the making-of this film with us?
The image editing was finished before the soundtrack. So it needed a structure, a sense of its own. It took me more than fifty versions (and I could say more than an hundred, with the numerous variations) to actually begin to think that I had a film in hand. And not only some sequences of moving images.
What do you do when not making films?
Making or writing some other films. Or trying to finance them (which as you know isn't the easiest part). I've been lucky enough to work only on my personal projects for the past couple of years.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing your film?
If you don't mind, I've already written a short introduction to the film and I will copy it here:
‘M is a film of assemblage, juxtaposition and manipulation of animated structures. Small architectures appear and overlap. Brief nebulas arise, the most complex structures sometimes recalling constellations and other stellar clusters.
This abstract film shows the results of a year of visual and technical researches. Hand-drawn animations were scanned, manipulated and combined. The resulting images were printed on paper and reworked, then put in relation according to their level of complexity and the movements which constitute them.
Editing these images was done with a constant concern about the organization of the frame, of its centre and periphery, and the succession of complementary rhythms and densities. The electro acoustic soundtrack combines noise music, digital processing and recordings of percussive instruments. It evolves with the image, underlining certain events and occupying various forms of emptiness, taking advantage of the synchronisms and independences therefore created.
M is thus a short textured and sensory film, in which alternate density and release, tension and soft fall, animation, geometric abstraction and digital manipulations.‘
Could you tell us something about your future projects?
Of course! I've just finished a new experimental short, called Strips. Here is the synopsis: Masculine noun, shortened form of striptease. From ‘strip’, to remove, to take away, and ‘tease’, to entice, to tempt. And then all this in plural. A vintage erotic film was cut into stripes and then reassembled. As these filmstrips were displaced and manipulated, a shift from figuration to abstraction occurred. It wanted to be a playful look at what is shown and hidden in the image, at the appearance of an eroticism and at the ideas of presence and absence, of public and intimate spaces. In cinemascope.
I'm also working on a narrative animated short to be produced with the National Film Board of Canada.