Carn: around the world with a French short film !
Every year Imaginove organizes a contest based on its images industry job site, Ganuta: www.ganuta.com. The competition rewards creativity in five categories: short films/video, animation, video games, mobile/pad apps and illustration. Winner of the 2012 Ganuta prize for the Animation category, Jeff Lebars was invited to accompany Imaginove to Kid-Screen Summit, where he could show his short film called Carn.
Interview with Jeff Lebars
Carn began in summer 2011 when I was looking for ideas for my graduate project, a short film. After three years of study at the Ecole Emile Cohl, for the last year students make their own personal short film, from scriptwriting through to final edit: a lifelong dream!
I read a number of stories and then decided to write something on Wolves, beginning by doing research on the animal. One book of fairy tales caught my attention: “Les Loups” by Sylvie Folmer, especially a Greek story called “The Island of the Wolves”.
In this tale Poseidon changes humans into wolves after they’ve devoured families that they’d mistaken for sheep.
This rather bloody case of mistaken identity caught my eye, and I think it’s what inspired me for “Carn”. After mulling over this for a time – dreams full of wolves – and after many writing attempts, in September I started back to school, project file in hand, and a story that was pretty much the same as the final film. Items of the story were changed slightly after discussions with my teachers (Should it be the child or else the wolf that strikes the bargain? How would they have met up?), and a number of cuts were made to get it to fit into a reasonable format, but basically the story structure and the background remained the same.
It was a real joy to do the animation. Although it was a challenge to bring this she-wolf to life, along with the little boy and his parents, I’m really impatient to do another short so that I can experience the same emotions as I had when producing this one!
I received great backing and advice from the school’s instructors and I’d like to express my gratitude to the teaching team for this year spent together.
I’d also like to thank Sylvain Livenais from the Maaav school, for the sound design and music. He worked with me during the last weeks up until the ultimate edit, so that we could get the final results we have today.
On the last day of the school year at Emile Cohl, Magalie Rofidal (in charge of promoting new talent at Imaginove) came to talk to us about the Ganuta contest and I signed up as soon as I could. The web-user voting phase was a bit stressful: I was afraid that I wouldn’t get enough votes to move into the second selection phase, but finally things turned out fine.
I was really happy to learn that I was one of the ten Ganuta contest winners and I’d like to thank the entire Imaginove team for organizing this event.
During the awards ceremony I discovered out who my sponsor was to be: Jean François Sarrazin, director of “Vanilla Seed” the Lyon animated film production studio. And – wow – what a surprise! I get to go to New York City for a week and attend Kid Screen SummitNever in my wildest dreams! Thanks again! I can hardly wait to get there and see what there is to discover there!
See you soon, on the other side of the Atlantic!
Jeff Le Bars.
Contact Informations
Jeff Le bars: jefflebars@yahoo.com
The recrutement website by Imaginove called Ganuta has just created a new International page for talented people who are willing to work in the french industries.
http://www.ganuta.com/
