Passion director Félicien Colmet Daâge captures both the ennui and violence in the daily life of disenfranchised Paris youth in this languid and cinematic video for French acid indie-pop band Kriill.

Félicien Colmet Daâge: “The young minors staged in this video, are a reality of the 18th arrondissement of Paris. They come from a tough immigration background and are exposed to real daily physical violence as well as a more underhanded, state-sanctioned one.

“The challenge was to explain the birth of aggressive behavior among them by staging these two forms of violence in a very short video format.

“So I focused the narration on a succession of shots, each articulated around a strong symbol. The sequence of scenes in no apparent order gives us an idea of a life, that can only be described as chaotic.

“It was a real challenge to tell this story in an urban context. The main difficulty of this project was to make this city coherent and lively while still limiting the amount of character animation work.

“We had to simplify the story to obtain a straightforward narration and favor the cinematographic framing rather than movement.

“As the writing progressed, the sets ended up becoming as important as the characters. Each scene was thought out through this logic and had to translate the desired emotion. The contemplative tone has proven to be very effective in blending still and moving shots smoothly.

“I needed a perfect mastery of rendering scenes and this meant inverting the whole traditional 2D animation pipeline. All the shots were composited even before the animation was done. The lights and the grading were finished first as well as the sets and a colorized fixed key pose.

“Once the rendering seemed suitable to me, all that was missing was to animate the characters and place the camera. This unusual process was very reassuring and even allowed the animator to know in advance exactly what their shot would look like.”
 

Label: Bellevue Music
Artist: Kriill

Director: Félicien Colmet Daâge

Storyboard/art director: Félicien Colmet Daâge
Animator: Camille Chao, Sarah Colmet Daâge, Arthur Sotto, Félicien Colmet Daâge
Compositing: Félicien Colmet Daâge