Animag Interview with Michel Gagné
February 2007

MG: I was born in Roberval, a small town about 2 ½ hours north of Québec City.

ANIMAG: How long have you been in the art business?

MG: I started professionally in 1985, but I’ve been doing art my whole life. It’s an obsession.

ANIMAG: How do you make your living?

MG: Doing animation, books, comics, commissions, illustrations, licensing designs, selling artwork etc… I make a living being creative and doing what I love.

ANIMAG: Where are you currently living?

MG: I live in Washington State.

ANIMAG: What artists have inspired you?

MG: There are so many. Here’s a succinct list: Jack Kirby, Eiji Tsuburaya, Steve Ditko, Picasso, Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, Yerka, Oscar Fishinger, Osamu Tezuka, Miyazaki, Don Bluth, Ishiro Honda, George Lucas, Moebius, writers such as B R Bruss, Richard Adams, H G Wells, Philip Wylie, and many more...

ANIMAG: What advice would you give artists just starting out?

MG: Every artist is different and has their path to follow. I didn’t listen to most of the advice that was given to me when growing up so who am I to give advice. I’d say it’s up to each artist to find its own path. Be true to yourself. Set goals and go for them. There are no rules.

ANIMAG: How do you think an artist can best cultivate their creativity?

MG: Never sit on your laurels. Keep creating. There are people that come up with one idea and they’ll protect it and stick to it and put the blinders on. I say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep an open mind, and be receptive to the potential of creation. There are so many doorways to creativity. I, for one, want to make sure that I remain open-minded enough to go through any of them.

ANIMAG: You are an artist who works in a variety of media - comics, animation, illustration. Which do you prefer?

MG: I’m open and enjoy all the various media I’ve worked in. What really matters is the project, not the media.

Of course, I tend to favor my own projects over commissioned work, but not always. Sometimes collaborative work is very stimulating.

ANIMAG: Your continuing Rex saga is one of my favorite things in the Flight comic anthologies. How much of the whole story do you have outlined?

MG: The full story is figured out. As a matter of fact, I pitched the entire epic to Flight editor, Kazu Kibuishi, last summer and he seemed to really dig it. It has a lot of twists and turns, but the whole thing is going to feel very coherent and unified once I’m done.

ANIMAG: How much of the story do you have finished (final art)?

MG: I have 78 pages completed and I’ve done 30 pages of rough layouts for the next chapter to be featured in Flight 5.

ANIMAG: How long do you think it will take you to complete?

MG: Well, I’ve got 3 more chapters to be published in Flight which comes out annually, so that bring us all the way to 2009. Then, the plan is to publish the full graphic novel the following year with roughly 30 more unpublished pages (prologue and epilogue). I was planning the whole thing to be 160 pages but it might be closer to 200 when I’m done with it.

ANIMAG: Zed #8 is just about out. Nice to see you exercising your inner headbanger. How long do you expect this series to be?

MG: I’m pretty sure things will wrap up in issue 10.

ANIMAG: How far ahead have you scripted it?

MG: Everything is figured out till the end but I don’t have an exact breakdown of how many pages each passage of the story will take to unfold. It’s all in my head but not on paper yet. But at this point I’m really aiming to finish with issue ten. That won’t mean the end of ZED though…

ANIMAG: Do you have any plans for an animated version of Zed?

MG: I have so many plans in my head I can’t even count them. Plans don’t mean much until the work gets started. Let just say that I remain open to the endless possibilities the animation medium has to offer.

ANIMAG: Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets is outstanding. Tell us how that came about. Did Nick come to you?

MG: In the summer of 2004, I started thinking about doing independent animation again, except this time, I wanted one of the big studios to foot the bill for the production cost. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I came up with a concept for a series of short animated films called “Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets”! I was thinking that they would be very short, used a style similar to my book “The Great Shadow Migration”, and be aired as interstitials between programming and commercials.

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.

ANIMAG: 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. ANIMAG: 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.

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

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

ANIMAG: 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 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.

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

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

ANIMAG: 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.

ANIMAG: What are you doing next?

MG: Well, I just finished 5 short animated vignettes 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!

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

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

ANIMAG: Thank you for talking to us.

Visit Michel Gagné's wesites at www.gagneint.com and www.insanelytwisted.com.