Animation Nights New York Animator Interview #44 with Anouk Kilian-Debord

 

 

JOURNEY IN AMNESIA

Loïc, formerly a worker in a gravel quarry, has lost all of his memory after an accident, and cut himself off from the world. One day, an event leads him to go outside, where he witnesses the first snowfall since his amnesia. Loïc gets absorbed by long forgotten sensations and wanders. In his mind, he finds the way back to his quarry.

 

 

 

INTERVIEW

I had an opportunity to sit down with director Anouk Kilian-Debord to speak with her about her film Journey in Amnesia, featured in Animation Nights New York Program 98: STORYTELLING TIME. 

Anouk moved to Brussels in 2017 to study at La Cambre where she made Journey in Amnesia (2021). She has worked on many other projects including The Leak by Paola Cubillos (featured at Animation Nights New York in Program 100: EVOLVING TONES) and she has helped run animation workshops at the Anima Festival and served as a jury member at the Elles Tournent Festival.

AFA: Thank you so much for chatting. I’m excited to talk to you. 

Anouk: Me too.

AFA: We had a really nice audience response for the program your film was a part of and Journey in Amnesia really grabbed my heart.

Anouk: Oh, that’s good! Thanks.

 

INSPIRATION & BEGINNINGS

When I was in my second year of high school I discovered a stop-motion ad for Harrods  and I fell in love with stop-motion immediately.

 

AFA: Could you talk a little about your background? You’ve said you’ve been passionate about animation since your teens. What was this progression? Did you draw as a child?

Anouk: Well, my Mom was an illustrator for kids books and my Dad writes books for youth and he used to have a small publishing house so since I was a kid there were always books and drawings around, all over the house. I was really in this environment all the time. I have drawn since I was a kid, encouraged, of course, by my Mom. When I was a teen it became a bit more serious because I was in competition with a friend of mine. We were also always drawing during classes and comparing what we did. When I was about 13 or 14 I decided I wanted to go to a high school which provided applied arts. We studied fashion design, architecture, graphic design, and all sorts of things. When I was in my second year of high school I discovered a stop-motion ad for Harrods  and I fell in love with stop-motion immediately. It was actually the making of this ad that really grabbed my heart. What captivated me most of all was the work around lighting and cinematography, on a very tiny scale. I was just so impressed by all the techniques that were involved in the making of such a tiny, tiny film and all the love that went into it. 

So I decided, okay, that's, that is what I want to do. I applied to an art school in Toulouse, (I'm from Toulouse in the South of France.) and I spent two years there preparing for another school in Belgium called La Cambre. It was in this school that I became a journeyman. During the two years I prepared I made a lot of photos, videos and engravings. I just explored a lot of things and a tiny bit of stop-motion. I just wanted to diversify at first, because I knew that when I was in an animation school, I would focus only on animation. I just wanted to broaden [my scope] a bit first. So, that's what I did. 

Then, when I went to La Cambre, I tested out a few techniques because that's what you are supposed to do, and also, because it was very interesting. I tried 2d animation, sand animation, painted animation, and stop-motion animation. I focused on the stop-motion technique exclusively from my second year on. I made my first tiny film and I don’t really like it very much now when I look at it, because it's a bit clumsy, but it gave way to a lot of experimentation, and all these ideas nourished Journey in Amnesia. 

 

 

 

WORK PROCESS & STORY

I tried to take my time and to adapt myself to the slowness of the character. It was hard because for the slow movements, to get a fluid animation, some frames had to be almost identical, and I couldn't always tell the difference between one image and the next.

 

AFA: That's interesting. Did you do much drawing and sketching when you were planning stop motion? I’m just curious because I have a background in painting and drawing and I know that in my own journey in animation my approach to drawing changed. I am wondering about your approach to drawing. For me, I realized that my drawings were not about motion at all. They were about weight and using line as a way to show the weight or solidity of an object. I had a difficult time wrapping my head around how to utilize drawings for motion and couldn't really understand the books on animation. I didn’t understand the numbers for timing. I didn’t understand what the drawings are supposed to say. So, I'm curious, in your transition from illustration to illustrative notes for stop motion was there a difference in drawing for you?

Anouk:  Well, I definitely draw more abstract than before. Maybe it's strange, but when I began drawing, I was really inspired by Manga and all the comics I had around. So I drew a lot of characters that were realistic, but a lot of faces and I guess the cliché poses you see in comics. When I started studying animation, I began drawing things that were much more imaginative and way less realistic. For example, in the beginning of Journey in Amnesia, you have the scene where the character is on the top of a hill. 

AFA: Yes. 

Anouk: For these moments my drawings are much more about drawing the scene from multiple perspectives. I used drawings to explore questions like, is the character very big in the image or how small can the character be? Are there a lot of scenery that you can see? Is it very abstract? How realistic is it? So, it’s just a lot of playing around and drawing a dozen versions of the same scene. I tried to do this for as many scenes as possible. Of course, at some point, I had to do a storyboard and then the animatic, but I tried to be as open as possible to many, many different ways of using cinematography.

AFA: Let's talk a little bit about your film and the theme and the story behind it. I want to talk about technique as well, but along the lines of the story and theme, does the film touch on personal experience, if you can speak about it, because it feels so real. 

Anouk: Oh, I'm glad you said that. There is nothing personal about the story but when I started writing the film, I had different scenes in mind that I wanted to construct and make. It was about cinematic lighting and certain atmospheres and also about ideas around sounds. At first, I didn't really have a thread to connect all my ideas together. At the beginning, most of my ideas were about the beginning scene. The following scenes were generic until I came across a podcast about a guy who lost his memory from one day to the next and although I didn't want to make a documentary about it, I became very interested in the subject of amnesia. I felt I could really capture my desire to use realism blended with abstraction. The question was,  how can you show different realities from the perspective of this man who is really alone and what does he feel? I researched the different types of amnesia. In some cases a person can forget all about their past and be very clear in the present but then be very clear about their past, but forget everything they did 30 seconds ago. 

AFA: This comes across in the film. It really feels as though he's just sort of surviving or living through one moment and the time. The film makes you wonder what the thread is that pulls him through to the end of the story. So the story is about a quarryman who loses his memory because of an accident and then is drawn to the quarry again. All of these quiet moments, these tactile references, the tactile nature of his surroundings, there is a moment in the end when he is engulfed by the environment… for me, it resonated, like he was returning to the essence the quarry. To me, it spoke to the origin of man, you know, returning to the earth or to what we were before, or to our sense of self. All of these ideas seemed to be expressed. The quiet, thoughtful, delicate moments are difficult to recreate in animation. How did you accomplish it? I am always impressed when I see these kinds of moments in animation, particularly in stop-motion.

Anouk: Well, I tried to take my time and to adapt myself to the slowness of the character. It was hard because for the slow movements, to get a fluid animation, some frames had to be almost identical, and I couldn't always tell the difference between one image and the next. I like the term “thoughtful” you used because I really tried to put myself into his head. I would think, "what does he feel when he touches snow, when he finds himself in front of the quarry rocks in the cart?". I tried to be as patient as possible and to take a lot of steps back while animating because I didn't want to rush the animation. I had to accept that sometimes, a full day of work would produce only 2-3 seconds of animation. I also tried to make as many retakes as needed. If I didn't feel the emotion was right, for example, if he wasn’t stand long enough in front of the little rocks, or if he was too rapid in the motion of scooping things up, I was like, "no, no, no, this isn't right because he's supposed to be really in his head and rediscovering what he has forgotten. It’s supposed to be a very special moment and he shouldn't be rushing it, so neither should I". The process is very meditative. I'm really into meditation. I also listened to very slow music to force myself to be calm. If you become impatient and try to move fast you can knock your lights over. If you sneeze on your character, then it moves too fast. I mean, I love tiny animation accidents that I've sometimes used and sometimes not used. But yeah, I definitely learned a lot of things on this film because it was the first time that I had a project that mattered so much for me. So I just tried to tune in with the story in terms of how I animate and how I come into the studio each day.

AFA: That's amazing. What wonderful insight. Thank you very much for sharing it. What about that moment when the main character chooses not to answer his phone, because that was a decision!

Anouk: I didn't want the character to come across as a powerless man. I mean, he's lost his memory but he hasn’t lost the ability to control his life. I wanted the film to go in a positive direction, but of course it wouldn't work if all of a sudden he remembers his family, his dog, and he's super happy because then the film would be super cheesy. So, he has to be happy in some way….

AFA: Or left standing there not knowing,  left helpless and hopeless.

Anouk: Yeah, I felt it could also be really dark because I know my stories. I know that what I find kind of hopeful doesn't necessarily come across as really happy for all viewers and I wanted the audience to be able to take something out of it. So I was like, "okay, this guy is very lost. He's very lonely and it's very strange that he's lying in this rock pile". I wanted him to choose an action showing that he is going to be happy for himself. He doesn’t care if it's weird that he’s lying in this pile of rock and it makes him happy to turn away from his medical call, his medical obligations, and just enjoy the moment, whatever happens. Of course, I didn’t really have all of this in my mind when I was writing the story. I don't know how you feel about it when you work, but sometimes you can’t really tell people what the film is about until two or three years later. Like when I speak with you, for example, and I'm like, oh, that is what the film is about. 

 

 

AFA: Well, there is an inevitability and acceptance as part of the message, at least that's what came across to me. In the end, there is an element of hope about that as well. We are all sort of tied together. That's really interesting. Yeah, sometimes I think in projects where we have free reign to create them ourselves, we're almost speaking to our own minds... 

Anouk: Yes. 

AFA: …our subconscious…and then years later, you are kind of like, "what was I trying to say? What little puzzle piece is?". 

Anouk: Yes. 

WORKING WITH TEAMS

In the future, I would love to make more team projects. It depends on what comes across and what I can afford to do because a lot of artistic projects have low budgets. You have to decide whether to fill your fridge or help your friends and it's not always easy to do both.

 

AFA: In addition to your animation work, you've been involved as a jury member. Yes, how do you approach that job? 

Anouk: The job as a jury member? 

AFA: How was that for you? 

Anouk: I loved it. I only did it once. It was a festival which had screened Journey in Amnesia, and they asked former directors to be the jury for the next festival. I really enjoyed it. Obviously I love working on my projects, but sometimes I feel a bit disconnected from all the other work around me. I really miss seeing movies and meeting people. So I was first really happy to be in a movie theater with friends and people from the audio visual industry. I wasn't alone in my room, editing my movie. I love trying to connect with a movie, whether I like it or not. Because I was on a jury, I made an extra effort. If I didn't connect with a film on an emotional level or on an artistic level or because I didn't like the look of the film, I tried to ask myself, “OK, how am I supposed to feel as a viewer? How can I evaluate this film with as much objectivity as I can?”. Obviously when I go watch a film on my own, I don't care about objective criteria. It’s just about whether I like it or not. This was more about how I could communicate my feelings with the other jury members to be fair and to be helpful as well. When you delivered your decision to the directors, you had to explain it as well, so when you choose their films you have to be attentive. I loved being very focused for the duration of the screening, on all of that. 

AFA: Have you worked with many other people when you've created films so far? Have you worked with many teams or have most of your projects been solo endeavors? 

Anouk: Well, Journey in Amnesia was my first serious film. It was the first project I didn't consider just a school assignment. On this project, I had help from my Mom. She did the costumes. 

AFA: Awesome. 

Anouk: Yes. My boyfriend also helped with a lot of tiny stuff that I could hand down to someone else but it wasn't really a team project. I was just on my own. Obviously, you feel alone at night on your project, when it's just you and you. It's a bit lonely. I am still working on my master film and I am trying to involve a few more people in it mainly because I have a bit of funds. I try to involve people in the puppet making process and in the set making process. All the post-production will be made by other people for their artistic input and for the gain of time, obviously. So all the sound design, color correction,  music composition… It is super important that the  music is made by someone other than me. I play a bit of music, but I'm not a music composer and I don't want to score the music for my own films. It is important to have someone else's input on this. In the future, I would love to make more team projects. It depends on what comes across and what I can afford to do because a lot of artistic projects have low budgets. You have to decide whether to fill your fridge or help your friends and it's not always easy to do both.

AFA: Definitely. You mentioned that you worked on The Leak with Paola Cubillos. 

Anouk: Yes.

AFA: She is actually also an Animation Nights New York filmmaker.

Anouk: Yeah, she had her film at ANNY as well. 

AFA: Yes, Lines of Oblivion. 

Anouk: Oh, yeah, and I haven't seen this one so far. 

AFA: Yeah, there's an element of environment and memory in that film!  How was the experience working on The Leak? What was your role and can you sort of contrast that with the Journey in Amnesia experience? How was it different for you? 

Anouk: Well, it was really nice to be working on someone else's projects first. 

AFA: Yeah, it takes a little pressure off right? 

Anouk: Yeah. But at the same time, Paola was also quite lonely on this project because it was a graduation film from school, so she didn't have much help. I felt that part of my role was also to try to cheer her up during the process, and I liked that our collaboration wasn't just about animating, but supporting each other, since it was my first time animating for someone else. I love her films. I was really happy to be part of something beautiful and meaningful to me. I animated only for a week because she didn't have much, as is always the issue, she didn't have much money to cover a lot of animation days. I tried to get into her shoes as an animator because she asked me specifically to work on the slow animations. There was a character she didn't know how to animate. It was the adult in the film. She's supposed to be very slow and she has a sort of anger inside and she's anxious. I was honored to be trusted with these complex, emotional shots. I really tried to get into the head of the characters. That was quite like Journey in Amnesia, I tried to be like, "what does the character feel?"

It was way more intense than Journey in Amnesia on some levels because there was a very specific time frame to make a certain amount of shots. Whereas Journey in Amnesia was my project so if I'm late, I'm the only one who's late. Whereas, if I'm late for a shot for Paola's film, it sucks for her as well. I tried to be really efficient. It was a nice challenge because it didn’t only have to be good, it also had to be fast. I had to be focused even when I was stressed out and tired.  It was nice because at the end of the week it was like, oh, I did all of this and she likes the shot and I'm proud, and we’re both happy, and it's possible even though I didn't think I was capable of this. It was really a good experience as a human and also as an artist. 

AFA: That's amazing. So when you approach shots, I don't know as much about stop motion animation. I've never really tried it. I know that there are a few newer tools and techniques, but are you acting out the motion to give yourself muscle memory as you animate or are you just sort of going for the shot? I know once you make a decision to move the character, that's it. 

Anouk: Yeah. You have to go with it. 

AFA: That's amazing. 

Anouk: It's also really frightening when you are, four hours into your shot, and you're like, “oh, I don't know if it's good and I have to go with it because maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but maybe I just know tomorrow”. So I just have to, to move on and just try to trust myself. 

USING REFERENCE

Sometimes video reference is useful, sometimes not as much. 

 

AFA: So how much extra preparation do you do? I know that there are certain films where lots of preparation is done and even extra tools are added where some of the mock-up is done in CG. There is really fine-tuned preparation. Then there are other folks that just animate straight ahead. Do you act out the motion in order to animate the shot? How are you translating that, especially those quiet moments where you have to take an extra beat. I guess I’m asking a specific production question.

Anouk: Yeah, it's fine. It depends on the shot actually because if the shot is difficult and I don't know how it should be animated, I will make multiple videos. Yeah, and just like you said, it’s  muscle memory. In my master film, there is a shot with a little girl. She's climbing on a mountain and she arrives from behind the mountain, so you see her head, then her shoulders, and then the rest of the body. I spent hours going up and down the stairs, jumping and being like, “okay, I'm a little girl. I'm climbing a mountain. How do I feel?” and then looking at the videos thinking, “I can enhance this”. I also had to think about the movement of the head going on the side. Additionally, I try to extract specific things. I enhance movement in my animation because I am not rotoscoping my video. I just look at it from time to time. I keep it on my phone and once in a while, I look at it and think, “oh, yes, I can’t forget [that]”. For example, when you climb a mountain, the ground is uneven, so your steps wouldn’t always be regular. I used the occasion of being on a vacation, there was a mountain and I made a video there because the ground wasn't even and I felt that could help me. When the motion has to be very specific, I mean, I'm a very junior animator, so [some specific motion] might not come easily for me. When I feel I might have difficulties animating without a reference, then I shoot reference first. And then sometimes, for example, for Paola, she didn't have an animatic. She just had a sequence of videos where she acted the scenes. In that case we just had the videos and it was very important to her that I try to have the same rhythm. That was helpful because it was not my film. In that case, it's nice to have someone else's reference. I guess this is why on most of the animation movies that are made with teams, you have video references or very specific timed animatics. Whereas on Journey in Amnesia, I knew what I had in my head. I didn’t really have to show it to someone else, because I knew what I wanted to do. On Journey in Amnesia, I made very, very few reference shots because the shots weren’t very complicated to animate. I mean, it wasn't because the body mechanics were not difficult. I sometimes took a few pictures when I wasn't sure about the angle of the body and what would look natural, but what you can do, sometimes the puppet cannot necessarily do. Sometimes video reference is useful, sometimes not as much. 

AFA: Right, you could spend your accidentally mimicking reference, realizing that it's not working at all. It becomes more practice. That's funny. Thank you for all of that info.I think that's really interesting. So what, what are you currently working on? And I'd love to hear about that. Actually, let's just start there. 

Anouk: Well, it will look a bit like joining amnesia too at first. It's a stop-motion film, between eight and nine minutes. It's my master project and it's called Horizon, and I didn't want it to be about amnesia at first, but I completely got back to the theme. It's about a mother-daughter relationship when the mother gets a kind of early dementia, it's not really specific in the movie. Like Journey in Amnesia, I don't want the viewer to pinpoint, “Oh, this is this type of disease”. So, it’s about how memory loss affects the relationship and addresses how the daughter tries to connect with her mother. She doesn't try to bring her mother back to reality. She tries to bring memories back to her mother. It's way more experimental and abstract because I really try to show what memory looks like. I wanted to see how abstract I could go. I blended a video with stop motion and other animation techniques. It's mostly 3d volume but I tried to think more about the best way to show what I have in my mind because I don't want stop motion to become the automatic way to animate for me just because it's the way I know. So it's like if a scene is more coherent in video, then I will make it in video, and if it's more coherent animated, [then I will animate it]. It's a bit technical, but there's a scene where I just animate a sequence of images on Premiere. It's just way more organic, and it's less sharp. I tried to make it more emotional. I don't know if it makes much sense when I just describe it that way, but all of this just to say that I try to experiment with different techniques, depending on what I want to say, to try to get out of my comfort zone and try to make the viewer connect the emotions in a way that I haven't tried before. I’m not saying it's a big breakthrough, but for me it's new. 

 

 

AFA: Yeah, no, that's good. Well, that was another question I wanted to ask…,you know, there are so many different animation tools…well, actually, I don't know. I feel like there's always a lack of animation tools to be honest even with whatever progress we make in technology, I feel like the animation tools come last. But let's just say that the landscape is changing a lot, right? My hope is there will be more tools for animation as a result of it that are powered by humans. 

Anouk: Yes, of course. 

AFA: But where do you see the future of animation going? What's your perspective and how do you hope to be a part of that? 

Anouk: Well, I definitely hope it will be human made. Even though I have to say, I'm quite impressed by the techniques for, for example, when 3D gets blended with stop-motion like 3D animation with stop-motion textures. I'm quite confused about the way I feel about it because I'm like, okay, it looks good, but my stop-motion core animator is like, “oh no, it's not that easy. You cannot make stop motion just that easy, it has to be hard and painful”, but I know it's quite silly to think that way. So I mean, I'm really impressed by all of the techniques that are more advanced than stop motion. I'm impressed by, for example, the 3d that I don't know how to manipulate, the digital 3d. I guess I hope that in the future we're able to, in a smart way, connect the things that are very useful tools and the human emotion and the human creativity to gain time. Not every process has to be painful and stressful, but we need to stay in touch with what makes animation beautiful. I'm really always moved when I look at stop motion. This is in part because you see it's handmade,  you see people have put all their love into it. I’m really a big fan of that. Of course, I’m defending my own medium. 

AFA: Sure. I mean, honestly, I have a negative physical response. Like, when I see AI generated videos, they make me feel queasy, like my stomach feels queasy.

Anouk: It’s a mix of different things.

AFA: It's strange and I wonder how that will develop. Do you have advice for folks just getting into animation? Sometimes that question is not helpful, but it's always nice to hear [the answer to]. My feeling is if you're pulled into something, which we all kind of are, we are grabbed and pulled into the arts, it’s [more of ] a force that we can't really escape, but what advice would you have as folks are pulled into the arts? 

ADVICE FOR NEW ANIMATORS

Be patient and take a lot of breaks while you're animating.

Anouk: I would say be patient because it's really difficult to get into. I mean, again, I'm only talking about stop motion because I don't know enough about the other mediums to be really specific. Be patient and take a lot of breaks while you’re animating because I think it’s really horrible when, and I guess this applies to all the animation techniques, you rush through the animation to save time, and because you don't notice your mistakes as you're doing them, you realize at the end of the day that your animation isn't good, and you have to start all over again.  It's also very important to respect what your body needs. I don't count the number of days when I went to the studio when I was just tired or on my period and super tired, or sick and so forth.

In the past, when I just was like, “I cannot waste a day in bed, I have to animate”. In the end, you just make everything worse because it's even worse the day after that. Now I respect myself a bit more. If I don't feel like it, I'm like, “okay, today's not the day. I guess tomorrow it will be better”. I try not to push so much. If a shot is not working, I have learned to take a step back and be like, “okay, the word is not ending. If you don't finish your shot today, you deserve to go back home and sleep a bit and when you come back tomorrow, it will be easier”. So I guess it's just all about  de-dramatizing the project, even though it's very, very close to your heart, you don't have to suffer insomnia because of it. I don't know if it's the same for you, but when you're so involved in a project, you don't have much space to think about the context around it and you are so into the project that you don't think about how you feel about it. In the end, you just do it because you feel like you have to even if you don't even want to anymore. 

AFA: That's good life advice. 

Anouk: I always have room for improvement, but I guess, yeah, just try to relax. 

AFA: Yeah, take some space for yourself. Yeah, that's excellent. That's really good advice. Where can we find you and your work? 

Anouk: I have this LinkedIn page where I tried to put all my newest work updates. I also have an Instagram. Recently, I've worked as a DOP on a medium length documentary film. And I really like to get involved in projects that are multi-medium. This was a live action film and I made a tiny stop motion sequence in it. It was so much fun. I really would like to work on other projects that are not only animation because it's fantastic to work with people who come from other backgrounds. 

AFA: That's cool. What about VR and webXR, have you worked in that space at all? Are you interested in it? 

Anouk: Yeah, I'm interested in it, but I haven't found time yet to explore it. For example, this medium length film I worked on was very specific, it was three weeks long, so it was perfect because it was quite short and I had time to work on my film. But, I would like to make room for more projects, of course. 

AFA:  thank you so much for taking time to speak with me. This has been really interesting. Thanks for sharing your insights and your process. Yeah, it's been, it's always fascinating. I love speaking with animators. It brings me hope for humanity. It's all about it. Thank you.

Anouk: You are very welcome. Your questions were really interesting, so I had a lot of fun too. So thank you!

 

Anouk Kilian-Debord Social Media Links

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anouk_kiliandebord/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anouk-kiliandebord/ 

The Generic: https://legenerique.be/profile/316

 

Anouk Kilian-Debord Demo Reel (2020)

Demo Reel Link: https://vimeo.com/411390406 

Interview by Yvonne Grzenkowicz

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