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FLIGHT 3: Michel & Tony Introduction
Over the years Michel moved from one animation studio to another, garnering a large list of credits along the way including, but not limited to; The Land Before Time, An American Tail, The Quest For Camelot, The Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones. Between features Michel had time to work on his own personal art and honed his craft by painting, sculpting and drawing a children’s book. A Search for Meaning: The Story of Rex was the culmination of several pages of art done within a few weeks time that all began with a scribble of a “cute little fox facing a strange creature”. A Search for Meaning: The Story of Rex was the beginning of Michel’s foray into becoming an author and self-publisher.
Michel first contributed to FLIGHT with its second volume and is using the anthology series to serialize the further adventures of his creation; Rex. Michel’s contribution to volume 3 is titled "Underworld". I know when I think of animation artists I think Michel Gagné. Sometimes I’ll make jokes about how almost all the Canadian comic artists came out of Sheridan College, and you’re the original example... That makes me feel old... …In 1998 you formed Gagné International Press and we started seeing your expressively odd and adaptive style available in book format. You’ve got to be the widest known artist in the FLIGHT book and yet you’re humble as hell... Well, I don’t know about that… …Are you at the point where you can essentially pick and choose what you want to work on or do you fall back to the starving artist mentality of never turning down work?
Let’s talk about Rex, the first story was a short and sweet sorta spiritual/psychological story tale of wisdom and journey for meaning. When you create a story like that, or something like ODD NUMBERS, who is your ideal audience? It seems like many of these pieces are created largely for yourself and we’re just lucky enough to see what comes out of it. My target audience… hmmmm… that’s something I don’t think about very much. I do stuff that inspires me. If my wife likes it, I’m happy. If I like it, others will too. That’s how I think. Publishers, retailers and distributors can figure out who the target should be. What’s your process for your FLIGHT contributions? From the weight of the lines in certain places it almost seems like part of it starts in your hand and another part with a wacom and then continues from there. I figure out the whole story in my head. Sometimes, that takes weeks. Once I’m happy with the idea, I thumbnail very loosely all the pages at ¼ size. Then, I do the pencil layouts on 11” x 17” Bristol boards, using a 0.9 technical pencil with a B or 2B lead. I ink with micron pens and sharpies on a separate piece of paper. I scan the finished ink drawings in Photoshop. At that point, I make corrections to the line work and add colour. It’s all pretty basic really. You must have a wide range of influences, your FLIGHT story almost looks like Bambi has been thrown into Heavy Metal, what artists do you feel have had the most influence on you as you shape your style, both artistically but also in your storytelling?
But at a more basic level, I find that the Flight project is a huge inspiration in itself. Quite a few of your stories begin in space, has this always been an interest for you or was it something you found interest in later in life? Yeah, I’ve always been obsessed with space: first with comics (Lee/Kirby’s Fantastic Four), then with films (Star Wars) and later on with literature. Space is a total mystery. It drives me insane and it inspires me at the same time. How did you get involved in the XEKO trading card game? My association with XEKO started in early 2005 when I met Amy Tucker at the Emerald City Comic-Con. She pitched her idea to me about a game where you could teach kids (and adults) about ecology and endangered species – a trading card game with a social conscience. The whole thing revolved around a made up mythology called Xeko (pronounced zee-koh). I did a first set of illustrations to help raise money for it. A few months later, I got a call from Amy announcing that investors had come through and the game was a go.  What sort of research has this project pushed you to do? I’m learning a lot about animals and endangered species. It’s awesome to bounce off artistically from the amazing designs that nature creates. Nature is the ultimate artist, that’s for sure. On a technical level, I’ve had to push my Photoshop skills way up from where they were. The paintings I’m doing now are a lot more detailed then what I could do just a year ago. Well taking this image of the bird as an example I’m left wondering if this is all you or have you juxtaposed photos into your paintings? The process is like this. Using a lot of photographic reference, I do a series of thumbnails or roughs, which are reviewed by the art director. Once the rough is approved, I do a tighter drawing delineating all the shapes within the image. Then, I use textures sampled from photos, custom brushes and all sorts of Photoshop tricks. In the end, I always try to push way beyond just copying a photo. I would feel like a thief if I’d just grab somebody else’s photo and pasted it in my image without modifications. But I certainly won’t hide the fact that I do use and study a large amount of photographic material. The goal is to bring out my design sense and sensibilities even though I’m working in such a realistic style. If the picture looks completely like a photograph, then I feel like I’ve failed to some degree. that served as its basis and inspiration:  Having your work appeared in animation, print, figurines, tattoos and even an NBA scoreboard, are there any mediums or venues you’ve yet to conquer that you’d like to work in some day? Absolutely. Life is for the living. Any creative outlet has potential. I used to say that if there were no electricity, no paper and pencils, I’d go look in the garage to find small pieces to assemble together and make art out of it. I’m a compulsive obsessive person and art is my outlet. I’m open to any means to manifest my disease. I mean, I’d like to design sets for a ballet, an opera or a heavy metal band. I want to invent stuff… I want to maybe write a novel, compose a symphony… who knows. I don’t want to put any limitation at this point.  Do you set clear goals on personal projects that you hope to tackle, like starting a novel, or at this point do you find you’ve enough ideas to fill any spare time for the foreseeable future? My goal in life is to keep creating, remain original, love my wife and be a decent human being. I work hard and I’m always pro-active with my projects, but I never know for sure what I’ll be working on in a year. I like not knowing... The origin of ZED actually began years ago, how do you describe the book to new readers? ZED started in 2001. It was the realization of one of my pet dream: to have my own comic series. Issue #7 just came out at the beginning of this month (July). I do one issue a year, which is a good pace for my busy schedule. If I’d have to give you a description about what the series is about, I’d say, ZED is a cute and disturbing science fiction epic. It’s adorable, disturbing, juvenile, gory, reflective, cute, shocking, childish, mature, sadistic, spiritual, and innocent. ZED is full of contradiction. For more Michel visit Gagne Int.com.  Tony Cliff
Tony’s style is a mix of classical animation sensibilities and the kinetic speed and movement of Asian films and animation. This is Tony’s first contribution to the Flight anthology and his contribution to volume 3 is titled "Old Oak Trees". “Old Oak Trees” was inspired by your grandmother, what did she think of the final story? Have you found that once you take an interest in your family’s past, other relatives come forward with their own interesting stories? I am told she enjoyed it thoroughly. I never presented it to her myself... she was in the hospital when I finished it, and I requested that my father print it out and read it to her. Her eyesight had been seriously failing at the time I started on the story, and by the time she was in the hospital her vision was almost completely gone, so she never actually *saw* it. But my father did end up reading it to her, and that was maybe a week or so before she passed away. She was really in-and-out at that point, so I'm not sure how much of it she really got, but I hope she was really happy with it. I'm not sure why I was so reluctant to read it to her myself -- looking back I suspect I might have been afraid that she wouldn't have liked it, and then that would be my major memory of the end of my grandmother's life -- but I definitely regret not doing it myself. As for the rest of my family, we're just not very close. I suppose if we ever got together, some stories might come out, but no one's come forward suggesting I write about anything. I'd definitely have to go digging. Other contributors have referenced your story as setting the tone for the new volume, how’s it feel to have been such an inspiration to, not only the book, but your friends? It was a surprise to hear that! I was just sort of doing what I did... but it makes me happy to know I could spur some other people on, and I hope I can give people as much help as they gave me in shaping my story.
The style in Oak Trees is about as close to a "natural" style as I have. It had to be natural - I was trying to get the pages done quickly, and trying to ape a style is time-consuming until you get really into it. If I had all the time in the world, I would have liked use a more olde-timey storybook style - like the original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (for example), and I would have liked to pair it with a nice watercolour colouring technique. A lot of your animation is Flash based, does this seem like a common format when most animation schools push towards learning either systems like Maya or studying classical animation? When I studied animation, it was "classical" animation, but all of the animation I've done professionally has been Flash-based. It's a fine tool - as an animator, you get instant gratification. When you look at a scene in Flash, you know that's what the scene will look like when it's on TV. And if anything needs to be changed or tweaked - composition, acting, colour, whatever - you can do it, right there. No waiting for cleanup and ink & paint or waiting for the lighting/rendering/compositing crew to get through it. There's no excuse for a scene to leave an animator’s hands looking like rubbish. Plus, it's really inexpensive, which is probably the key factor in its popularity amongst animation studios these days.
I want to do more. I'm disappointed with myself that it's been so long and I've only got that one tutorial up there. It's actually a really useful Photoshop trick for people doing, say, costume design or concept art. I got really frustrated with having to work hard to make small colour changes, and then I found this little Photoshop technique. I thought it was so useful. I just had to share it. And it was a challenge to see if I could describe everything in an easy-to-follow, understandable manner. And I might have been a little bored at the time. I don't teach in person, though it's certainly something I can imagine doing. What I'd really like to do is write a book about Professional Flash Animation. I mean, I'm not a super-expert or anything, but I've yet to see a good book like that. Tell us about the Pucca series you’re working on? How does it feel being involved in adapting these shorts for a North American audience? It's actually being developed primarily for a European market. The series was commissioned (I think that's the right term) by Jetix in the UK. I'm not really sure what one does to adapt something for a particular market... it's a quality show and quality should transcend cultural or market boundaries. Plus, most of the kids watching The Show will be growing up in very multicultural societies (at least, that's the way it is here in Vancouver) - they're already fluent in Asian animation conventions, so I think all you can do is make the best show possible! The series isn't strictly true to the shorts - for one thing, there's dialogue. I would have loved it if the entire series could be done without dialogue, but some people seem to think that's not marketable. I guess it makes it more of a challenge for the writers, too. And there are other concessions that have been made to make it more friendly to a broad TV audience.
When working with an animation script do you find you have a lot of freedom to add to the story, whether it be in setting, tone, expressions, etc? It varies from project to project, but mostly No. The script is given to a storyboard artist, and the animator works from the board. Sometimes the board can be very limiting - at the start of "The Buzz on Maggie" we received very, very specific timing instructions with very, very specific poses. Eventually we realized we could use whatever timing we wanted, so long as it looked good, though you mostly had to stick to the poses. In a case like that, it can almost become like filling in a colouring-book. You're just there to add motion to someone else's ideas. There's more freedom on Pucca as the boards aren't nearly as specific. General posing and staging is indicated, but the animator is relied upon to provide a lot of the acting poses. Even then, though, you must stick to the dialogue and make sure you're hooking up with the neighbouring scenes, which may or may not be your responsibility. I suppose you can look at it as more of a craft, and take pride in helping the scene to fulfill its greatest potential. Even when your entire window for creativity is as small as deciding when to make a character blink, that's still something that has the potential to make a joke ten times funnier, and that's something to be happy about. How would you describe the premise behind Pucca to new viewers? I've been describing it to friends and family as "Hello Kitty... but with ninjas". Then I send them to the website. There's a lot of kung fu, and a lot of kissing.
Delilah Dirk is something I've been casually working on in my spare time. The setting is Europe around the end of the 18th century, and Delilah is an international adventurer specializing in the repatriation of works of art (significant and otherwise). I've been reading a lot of the Horatio Hornblower and Sharpe series of novels, and that quasi-historically-accurate adventuring really appeals to me, so Delilah is my bid to get involved with it. Plus, doing it in comic-book format means I can get excited about exploring the visual opportunities available with the setting. I found some rough pages for an "origin story" I started working on maybe a year or so ago. Figuring that I'd never have the time to finish them properly, I posted them in the Flight forum. I'm rethinking things now... it would be a lot of fun if Delilah could actually see the light of day. For more Tony visit Tony Cliff.com. Introduction
 Interviews Conducted by Co-Editor in Chief, Jonathan Ellis. E-mail Us To Comment On This Article.  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-Mail Us - E-Mail Us To Comment On This Article. Flight Comics.com PopImage FLIGHT 2 Interviews Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
