The Production Designer in Animation: The Case of Persepolis - Text 1
The work of the production designer in animated cinema is not the same as that of the production designer in live-action films, even though the job title is the same. I will focus here on the work of the production designer in 2D animated films in France, and to do so draw on the case of the feature film Persepolis.[1]
The reason I will discuss 2D is because the issues are not the same as those involved in a 3D CGI-animated film or in a stop-motion film. It should be noted, however, that it is frequent today to merge techniques, with decors modelled in 3D found in 2D films, particularly to facilitate camera movements. This, moreover, is what was done for a few rare elements of Persepolis.
In addition, the reason my remarks are restricted to France is because working methods and the way tasks are divided up are not always the same there as in other countries. Finally, the reason it seemed essential to discuss the example of Persepolis is that animated cinema has a production process which is both industrial and highly varied from film to film. “Thinking on a case-by-case basis,” to take up the title of a book edited by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, makes it possible to set out problems and establish a framework for thinking through questions, a “virtual space of intelligibility.”[2] Persepolis, produced from 2005 to 2007 entirely in France, lies at the crossroads of paper and the digital, as the designs were made on paper even as part of the work, and in particular the decor, was done by computer. The film is in black and white and is derived from a series of four graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi. It was directed by the author and Vincent Paronnaud, and produced by 2.4.7 Films.
Zaza (Marisa Musy) and Zyk (Patrice Szewczyk), two French production designers who have worked on a number of animated films in France, describe the stages of the production designer’s work in the following manner:
When the exploratory work begins, we create reference decors. Then, during production, comes the moment of the layout, a highly technical storyboard with a sketch of the decor without any creative element, really, which sometimes draws on our reference decors and in which the characters are in the right places and framed. This is the designer’s baseline: there is a scale, a size. The work then consists in taking this basic decor and giving it a style, pencilling or inking it in, and then digitally applying colour. The drawings are scanned and the colourists work with a digital palette.[3]
Work on the decor thus takes place in two stages: in the preparatory work (pre-production), reference decors are created in the form of drawings done by hand; then, during the production phase, the work of adding texture and colour to the layout decor is carried out. For Persepolis, the reference decors were created by Frédéric Boniaud, a regular collaborator of Winshluss (Vincent Paronnaud) on his graphic novels. Because Marjane Satrapi’s albums employ a minimum of detail in the background, they had to start from almost nothing for the decors. Frédéric Boniaud was able to draw on photographs of Tehran taken by a friend of Satrapi. He also drew on the memory of Satrapi; although leaving Boniaud free to choose, she filled in some details, such as the “poster on the wall,” and indicated the kind of ground, the subject matter and the materials, while setting the general tone of great sobriety.
