CHARTING A NEW COURSE FOR FLOW

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Janus Films.

Art gets to imitate life when a solitary cat has to rely on a group of various animals to be able to survive a flood in Flow. Gints Zilbalodis, who, up until now, has been a one-man production crew, was given the budget to bring additional talent onboard for his sophomore feature.

While attending its North American Premiere at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, Zilbalodis readily admitted that the resemblance between himself and the feline protagonist was not coincidental. “I’m telling a personal story through this cat. The premise is a cat overcoming its fear of water. We don’t have dialogue, so we have to find things that are visually clear and immediate. Also, I knew that I wanted to have a story about this character who was independent and learns how to trust, be collaborative and accepting of others.”

Making the shift from a solo to a team effort did not require an entirely different filmmaking process. “I never use storyboards in the short films that I’ve done and in Away,” Zilbalodis states. “Even though we had a budget and could get some storyboard artists, I was used to creating the environment myself in 3D, placing the characters in there and discovering shots. On this film, there are many long takes with the camera following the characters, turning 360 and moving not just left to right and up and down but also in depth. When it’s moving in depth, it’s hard to draw because the perspective is always changing.” New skills were developed. Zilbalodis says, “I am credited as the director on the previous films, but Flow was the actual first film I directed because before if I had an idea, I could make it myself. This time, I had to articulate my thoughts. It’s almost like a different skill that I had to learn. When you articulate things, it is good because then everything has a purpose. However, you can go too far in that direction where everything is too direct, clear and predictable. I like to have some ambiguity as well. There were a few scenes where I had to ask people to trust me that it will work in the end when we add the music and everything is edited.”

Zilbalodis established Dream Well Studio in Latvia and partnered with Sacrebleu Productions in France and Take Five in Belgium. Zilbalodis remarks, “It’s quite common in Europe to have these co-productions between different countries because then you can get extra funding from European funding agencies. In Latvia, there is an animation industry, but it’s quite small. We don’t have that many 3D character animators. I thought that we should approach a studio in France because the animation industry is the third largest in the world. France and Belgium did all of the character animation and the sound design. Everything else was done in Latvia. It was quite easy to manage all of that, but I had to constantly travel back and forth to make sure that we all were on the same path.” Unlike Away, which was animated in Maya, Flow was created with Blender. Zilbalodis comments, “Blender has this great real-time render engine called Eevee that helped us to do the animatic where it was possible to have lights and effects, like fog, that affects how I frame shots because the way the shadows are cast can influence the layout and compositing. The budget was quite tight, so it helped that we didn’t have to pay for all of the licenses for the software. Also, Blender is great because it’s so customizable.”

While the animals are stylized, the environmental setting harkens more towards realism. “The approach for the style in a lot of 2D animated films is that the backgrounds are painted with a lot of detail using oil paint or watercolor, but the characters are flat shapes that are more stylized,” Zilbalodis observes. “If you make the characters too realistic, they can look cold and synthetic. You need to make the characters a little bit more graphic because they are more appealing that way.” All of the animals were chosen based on the theme of wanting to find a connection with others. Zilbalodis notes, “The lemur thinks he needs to have all of these shiny things so others will accept and love him. The cat learns to trust others and work together, but I wanted to have this counterpoint where the dog is almost too trusting and learns to be more independent.” The Secretary bird replaced the seagull from the original short film. Zilbalodis says, “We needed to have a more intimidating bird that can carry the cat. It’s big and strong. The Secretary bird also wants to be accepted by other birds. It is important that we can relate and understand each animal with all of their flaws. Each of them has their own character arc and learn something. The only exception is the capybara. It already knows what’s right from the beginning and is the mentor for the other animals.”

Research consisted of finding video references and photography to get the proper posing and expressions of the animals. “I would put it on a website to share with the whole team,” states Animation Director Léo Silly-Pélissier. “Everybody had to watch those videos to understand the behavior of each animal and what they do in different situations. We didn’t copy the movement exactly because all of the situations in the movie were quite specific and a bit fantastical. It was more naturalistic than realistic.” Even though there was no dialogue, a vocal performance still needed to be incorporated into the animation. Silly-Pélissier adds, “We didn’t work with animal sounds before the animation, so depending on the situation and what the animal is doing, we would open the mouth at the time we think is more accurate and then the sound designer would put the animal sound there.” Rules were devised for each animal to ensure consistency and believability. “Gints gave us a lot of space to imagine movement, and because there are long shots, we couldn’t check the movement frame by frame as it would take too long. Some shots are 6,000 frames, so I wrote some rules for animators, like how the cat moves its ears to check the sound, and if the sound is interesting, it can move its head to look at that. Also, sometimes the tail moves apart from the movement,” Silly-Pélissier says.

Water is a character in its own right. “Water was a huge challenge,” Zilbalodis remarks. “It was one of the first things that we started and one of the last things we finished. Whether water is still or an actively moving flood, we needed to develop a completely different tool. But we also used the water as a storytelling tool as it represents the cat’s fear of others. As the cat opens up to others and starts to trust them, the water becomes more beautiful and peaceful. It’s a visual metaphor for that.” Creating the proper water and animal interaction was a two-step process. “Gints made the initial water effects as he wanted, then I went over the more important ones that we had to do before the animation,” explains Simulation Artist Mārtiņš Upītis. “After the animation was completed, I could add the final details, like these smaller splashes and ripples. It was a convenient ping-pong between the different parts of the workflow.”

Equally difficult to achieve were the long continuous shots. “It was important for me to create this sense that you are next to the cat, not observing it from a distance,” Zilbalodis states. “Usually, we are subjective, but at some points, we are also from a more distant objective point of view. Sometimes, that happens within the same shot where the camera starts out in a wide shot but then gradually glides into a close-up. With the long takes, you can get a sense of real-time. It’s a tool. The camera is sometimes expressing fear or curiosity. There are moments where it’s a little bit delayed as if the camera operator will need some time to react to things. Everything is on purpose. We’re trying to create this feeling of organic spontaneity, which I haven’t seen that much in animation, which tends to be clean and perfect. I like to have some grunginess and a little bit of a handmade feeling.”

A cinematic reference was The Revenant. “The main character gets into turbulent water, and the camera can go below or above the water or stay between the water and the air,” Upītis says. “That posed an interesting challenge. I had this idea that I should make a tool that allows you to place the camera at any angle, either above or below water, and you don’t have to switch between underwater and above-water modes or in-between modes. It does it automatically. I spent quite a lot of time investigating different methods in Blender and how to do that. At the same time, Blender announced that they will have geometry nodes. Based on that, I created a tool where you can add water and submerge objects; lighting and physics react accordingly to the rules that you give.” Extra water shots were added to the original total of 160. Upītis adds, “I was going one by one through each of the shots and individually adapting them. The difficult part was probably the fact that every shot was a different file, and to add consistency between shots, the water shouldn’t change much from the previous shot and the next shot. It was quite a lot of looking at the edits that Gints made to see if the water was consistent, like the color and movement. Also, throughout the whole movie, the water changes color from green in the beginning, then through the heights of the story it’s dull and muddy, and at the end, it gets more bluish and oceanic.”

Accompanying the water were splashes. “We cut part of the water out and added the simulated splashes on top of it,” Upītis states. “The thing is, we had to work with different scales of simulations. The close-ups had a dense simulation for the foreground, and the geometry in the background was sparser because you don’t need as much detail. Gints said that the simulations made in the previsualization looked better. In the end, the movie is quite stylized, so the splashes could be of a lesser quality.” The biggest challenge for the animation team was a long, continuous shot featuring several animators. “It was 6,606 frames, and eight animators worked together on different scenes, then we had to regroup all of the files into one,” Silly-Pélissier notes. “It was huge for the computer, and checking everything worked well. We started this shot at the beginning of the production and finished the shot near the end. This is the one when the cat looks at the fish, falls into the water, is drowning, the whale rescues him, and the bird takes him away and drops him.”

Flow won Best Original Music Award, Jury Award, Audience Award and Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the 2024 Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and it was chosen to be Latvia’s official Oscar entry for Best International Feature. “In Cannes, it was my first time seeing it with an audience, and that was a big relief,” Zilbalodis remarks. “I’ve been traveling to festivals all over the world, and I’ve been asked how people are reacting differently, and to tell you the truth, they are reacting the same because it’s quite a universal story.”