The specially commissioned Young Director Award ident which introduces the show in Cannes has itself become a feted hot spot and 2014’s film is no exception. This year the directing honor went to the young creative duo, Norman Bates, from Standard Films in France.
Known for their feisty live action music videos – such as Roscoe’s Lowland – or great commercials such as their film for Samsonite – the boys have a talent and imagination to work with cgi and effects.
Here, Norman Bates talks about creating the YDA film, Birth:
Damien and Gabriele from BETC Paris approached us through our French producer Julien Pasquier (Standard Films). They had this amazing idea for YDA to have a baby film his own birth, making him the youngest director ever. Obviously, we liked the idea and we also like the Young Director’s Award tradition in making interesting films to announce the festival.
After liking the idea we came to the point where we were looking for ways to make it happen.
Our main challenge was to give the film and the whole birth process a certain amount of realism, although we kind of pushed the limits to dramatise the birth and the dimensions of the womb a little bit. But we felt that this film really asked for an organic approach. We wanted to be able to experiment while shooting because this leaves room for ‘happy accidents’. So we decided to avoid a complex cgi process and to recreate the whole organic world for real in a water basin.
We had the honour to team up with Jean-Christophe Spadaccini, a special effects make-up artist and model maker who worked on films like The Bourne Identity, The City of Lost Children, Amélie Poulain and Delicatessen. Not only is he an amazing artist, he is probably one of the sweetest guys in the world.
It felt like this subjective experience of the baby would work best when it became a real time experience in one single camera move. We all agreed upon that, but from an idea on paper to actually doing it was quite of a challenge.
There are some cuts in the film, but already on set we tried to match the shots together in terms of movement and atmosphere.
Later, in post production, the whole team at Nightshift Paris helped us out to make these transitions seamless.
