Paris Spotlight: Pierre & Bertrand

Just as they were beginning to crack the ad industry as a directing duo, Pierre & Bertrand – former graffiti artists, now co-founders of Mécanique Film, took two years off to finish a passion project. Mad, but it worked…

You’ve formed a young directing partnership. You’ve studied hard, made a great graduation film and off the back of it you’ve been signed to a London-based production company. You make some idents for Nickelodeon that bring in more big clients. You’ve made it. All you need to do now is sit back and let the work roll in. But that’s not what you do. No, you decide to take two years off to sweat over a passion project, a short film, exhausting yourselves and your savings. It sounds mad, but that’s exactly what Pierre & Bertrand did.

A mutual love for their previous lives as graffiti artists brought Pierre Ducos (from Nîmes) and Bertrand Bey (from Toulouse) together while studying at prestigious CG school Supinfocom, also in the south of France. Knowing that they shared an artistic vision, the two collaborated to make their graduation film, True Colour, in which a 3D-animated robot coloured a grey world.

While Pierre took up further studies at animation school Gobelins, in 2005 True Colour wowed the international festival circuit and caught the eye of Dan O’Rourke, who was working at Nexus London. He soon signed the duo to his new London-based animation studio, Not To Scale.

Payday rolls around

Their first paid project was a trio of Nickelodeon idents that led to bigger jobs, and over the following two years the directors worked on ads for Volvo, adidas and Navman. But after completing a Mars Planets spot in 2008, having done the hard work of establishing themselves and building a heavyweight reel, the duo decided to take a break and reinvent the short film, La Détente, that Pierre had started at Gobelins. “I didn’t finish it in the year [at school]. I wasn’t satisfied,” he says. But because it started life in 2D, it was practically a new project, explains Bertrand: “We had to pretty much start again. The idea was there, but we had to re-make it. We wrote new scripts and storyboards and then started the technical parts again.”

For two years they worked on nothing else, except for one music video early on, for Charlie Winston’s Kick The Bucket. Not that it would help pay the rent. “We blew the budget on the video and made nothing from it,” says Pierre with a grin. Living off the money they’d made on their earlier commercials, the pair took turns hosting makeshift studios at their apartments before Kawanimation, a company run by a friend from their Supinfocom days, offered them sanity-rescuing office space and computers to work on.

The result of their vigorous work on La Détente is an eight-minute short that looks like a cross between Saving Private Ryan and Toy Story. The meat of the film is a journey through a mind-blowing CG warzone created from everyday items. Trenches are built from clothes pegs. Pillows substitute for sandbags, and balloons burst rather than soldiers’ heads. “I wanted to talk about war in an unusual way,” explains Pierre. “I wanted to use toys to make a contrast between different worlds. Our generation in France doesn’t know about war,” he says. “We can play war with computer games, but we know nothing about war. We don’t experience these kinds of situations.”

Two black and white, live-action scenes bookend the cuddly CG action. The directors spent a week building the trench set (on a farm owned by the parents of Bertrand’s girlfriend), rented some costumes and props and shot everything in two nights. “We wanted to do it all by ourselves, so we’d have freedom, and to show that we can organise a project and find the money to do it,” explains Pierre. Shooting live action was new territory for them, but they loved it.

Finally, after causing their friend Patrick Stemelen, who composed the film’s entire soundtrack, a certain amount of distress, the pair finished the film in January 2011. They then started taking meetings with production companies in the search for work. “We needed to eat!” laughs Pierre. One of those meetings was with Baptiste Massé, co-founder and chief creative officer of 3D print and animation company Mécanique Générale, who admired the film and the directors so much that they eventually struck a deal to open a new wing of the company.

Larging up the live action

While La Détente was touring the world’s biggest animation festivals picking up awards galore (eight prizes since July) Pierre & Bertrand were busy founding Mécanique Film, which launched in January. They are partners and directors of the new wing, which will incorporate live action and animation in its productions. To demonstrate the company’s intentions, three compelling, dark, idents using its logo were created. “In Paris a lot of people think that animation is only for cartoons, but in London people are a lot more open to new ideas and animation for commercials. If we show only that we can do CG animation we’d only get cartoon projects from the agencies, so we had to do some live action to show what we can do,” says Pierre. There has also been some interest from two Hollywood studios off the back of La Détente and, although they know it’s just interest at this stage, the guys aren’t phased by the thought of working on something massive. “Why not? We can do a feature film,” shrugs Bertrand.

They might have appeared mad to give up working for two years to make a passion project, but with the new arm of a successful company to run and having grabbed the attention of the movie industry, it seems the gamble paid off. After all, the line between insanity and genius is measured only by success.