Michel Gagné - Interview

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In the fall 2004, I created a couple of demo films with the help of Vancouver animator Jason Thiessen and flew down to Los Angeles to pitch the idea. I pitched to Cartoon Network, Disney and Nickelodeon all on the same day! All three studios seemed really eager and all said that they would be in contact with me shortly. After a few weeks, I got phone calls from Disney and Cartoon Network turning down the project.

Fortunately, Peter Gal, development director at Nickelodeon brought my pitch package to the folks at MTV Networks in New York who became very interested in the project. They had to get new animation segments for the upcoming "Nickelodeon's Halloween Shrieking Weekend" programming and they saw Shadow Puppet as a great fit for that. After numerous phone calls and emails, we made a deal.

ANIMWATCH: Did Nick have scripts, or did they ask you to come up with scripts?

MG: Nick had nothing. This was an invitation to do my vision unhampered.

ANIMWATCH: Did they tell you how long they wanted the shorts to be?

MG: I told them I could produce 100 seconds of animation for the budget they were willing to allocate me. They wanted 12 interstitials so the 100-second was divided into various lengths: 5x3 seconds, 3x5 seconds, 2x10 seconds and 2x25 seconds.

ANIMWATCH: How much input did they have in the process?

MG: They had a few comments but they essentially left me to my own device.

ANIMWATCH: How did you go about making ITSP?

MG: I started with illustrations showing how I wanted the final frames to look. Those were all approved by Nickelodeon without any problems.

Then, I went to a website called SoundDogs.com and listened and bought a bunch of sound FX tracks. I gave all the sounds bites to my sound guy, Andrew Scott, who edited them, adding atmospheric sound, echoes and other musical subtleties. We worked back and forth on the track until they had the perfect feel. This was a tedious and exhilarating process at the same time. Andrew must have done 10-15 versions of some of the tracks!

Nickelodeon needed to approve the soundtracks before the animation was started. All the shorts were approved at that stage except the first version of "Nightmare" which they thought was too mean-spirited and horrible to be featured on Children television.

Once the soundtracks were approved, I sent them to Mike Hogue and Jason Thiessen with a series of storyboards of how I wanted the film to look and feel. From my layouts and notes, the animator did the first animation pass and sent me a Quicktime for review. I looked at the films and then called or emailed the animator with precise notes about timing and animation revisions. They did a second pass, and I gave more notes, then a third and so on. We worked back and forth until the short looked perfect to my eye. The animator sometime came up with incredible solutions to my difficult animation challenge. They created animation that was surprising and unexpected.

ANIMWATCH: How did you come up with all those great ideas?

MG: Hehehe, sometime I think I'm channeling from some weird dimension.

ANIMWATCH: Do you have any further plans for ITSP? (ie, a book, more animations...?)

MG: With the help of a partner, I'm hoping to bring my insane shadow puppet style to the X-Box by the beginning of 2008. The tentative title for the game is "Michel Gagné's Dark Land of Malcovia". I'm really excited about it. I'm also creating animation in a similar style for the upcoming Mixomation show.

ANIMWATCH: What are you doing next?

MG: Well, I just finished a bunch of animation for Brad Bird's next movie. I always enjoy working with Brad and he has a way to get the most out of my animation skills. I can't really talk about any of the specifics at this time but that's a project I'm excited to see on the big screen this coming summer.

On the comic front, I'm wrapping up work on "ZED #8" and I'm about to start illustrating the next chapter of "The Saga of Rex".

Animation wise I've got "Michel Gagné's Dark Land of Malcovia" and the Mixomation project as discussed earlier. By the summer, I'm hoping to start production on "Sensology", an abstract animated short film for the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

There are also several book projects that are in the works. Some have a lot of artwork done already. And through all this, I continue to do illustrations for the trading card game "Xeko". I feel exhausted just listing all this. No wonder I have no social life!

ANIMWATCH: What do you hope people take away with them after viewing your work?

MG: I hope they like it. that's about it, really.

ANIMWATCH: Thank you for talking to us.