2. How many persons have worked on the animation film ?
Almost a hundred people have worked on this film. But some of them have only worked a couple of hours or just a few days, people such as the actors or the musicians for example !
The main compositor of the music has worked during several weeks. The drawers and the background artists who have prepared the work for the animators (the people who make the characters move) have worked for many months.
The animators who have animated the characters have drawned for a period of six months and more.

3. What are the different teams who have worked on the film ?
Here are the different steps for the making of a cartoon :
- starting from a text adapted from a novel, we draw what we call a « story board », which is in fact the scenario or the script in images.
The story board consists in drawing the different actions that are put end to end to make the whole story.

Each action is called a scene. After the story board is done, the drawers draw each scene (there are about four hundred scenes in this film), separating the drawings for the backgrounds and the drawings for the characters. Several drawings precise the motions that the characters have to do, or define the frames and the camera motions...
After that,all these drawings will be couloured by a computer. This is a quicker way to put the drawings in colour than with a brush.

The background artists colour the backgrounds of the film. These will be used as backgrounds for the characters.
The animators make the characters move by redrawing each frame. There are twenty-four frames to make one second of film. But they can only draw twelve drawings for a second (sometimes even less) because the human eye can only see the motion with about ten drawings a second. This is what we call the «persistence of vision».
When this animation work is done (that is to say the motion of the characters), each drawing is coloured one by one.
Then a camera shoots the drawings «frame by frame», that is to say twenty-four times, separately, to make one second of film. The drawings of the characters have to be replaced by different drawings each time they move. However, a couple of tricks are used to make less drawings :
- for example, a walking character repeats several times the same motion. So, we reuse the same drawings by moving them along the character’s path.
- another example, a car moves from left to right. We can use only one drawing that we move just a little bit at each frame being shot. In case we want to see the wheels turn, these have to be drawn separately.
When we make a character talk, we use different drawings according to the sound coming out from the mouth : a, e, i, u.... and so on. We have to spot when a word or a sound is pronounced to put the mouth in the good place and then we get the impression that he is really talking.
After all these steps, all the scenes are assembled together in order and we can start the sound effects and the music.

5. What are the different steps to the making of an animation film?
I have already talked about the different steps of the making of an animation film when I talked about the different parts where the teams have worked on.
To sum up :
- written adaptation
- story board
- model sheets (characters’ models)
- lay out (drawn actions and positions)
- backgrounds
- animation
- colouring
- recording of the voices
- editing
- sound effects
- music

6. Where was the film made ?
The preparation of the film was made in France : adaptation, story board, lay out, backgrounds, graphic research.
Most of the animation was made in Hungary (in Budapest) and in Latvia (in Riga).
The colouring, editing of the scenes, sound effects and music were realised in Montreal, Canada.

7. How to proceed to make a drawing from a text ?
To make a drawing from a text, we draw a story board which, as in a comics, combine the written explanations, the dialogues and the drawings of the characters’ actions.

8. We have noticed that the book and the film follow a different order. In the book, the life of the wolf is first being told and then the boy’s. In the film the characters tell their stories in turn, by little bits. Why ?
If we had decided to follow the book, we would have had two different films : one on Blue Wolf’s life and one on the boy’s. By alternating with each one’s rememberings we could better describe the feeling of dialogue between « Blue Wolf and Africa.

9. What is the name of the music instrument that Africa carries all along the film and that do not appear in the book ? Why did you decide to add it ?
This music instrument is an « amzad », at least it is called so among the nomades who cross the desert. It is very well spread in Africa and has different names according to the regions where it is found.
In a film, the sensations are not only literary but also audiovisual. This means there are sounds, music and voices, images. As we did not have enough time to tell the whole story in details (we were limited to twenty six minutes as we needed at list double time), we could not illustrate the stories told by « Africa » in the book. By using the amzad, it allowed more to show the boy’s talent for story telling.

10. When we read the book, we feel that Blue Wolf’s story is longer thant the boy’s. In the film it is the contrary, was this intended on purpose ?
It is right that in the film we talk less about the Wolf’s life than the boy’s. This is for the simple reason that the life of the wolves is for us humans, less diversified and more difficult to be told through « images » than the life of men.

11. In what exactly consists the director’s work ?
A director is a little bit like a conductor. He has to organise all the steps of the work, choose the artists, explain how to proceed through the work and decide of all the artistic and technical methods.

12. How many years do you have to study to become a cartoon director ?
The cartoon film is a bit like fiction films. There are schools which are specialized in cartoon films. Most of the time, people go to these schools after having studied arts or painting. The best thing is to have a gift for drawing.
We have many good schools in France in a city called Angoulême. They make special courses and trainings for comics and cartoons.

13. Have you directed other animation films ? Which ones ?
I have directed a fifty-two films’ series of five minutes each, called « Small Stories » that can been seen on TV. These short films are adaptations of famous French books for children called « Les Belles Histoires de Pomme d’api » (« Little stories »).

Hoël Caouissin

THE EYE OF THE WOLF
(Credit / Technical Sheet)

Director Hoël CAOUISSIN
Lenght 26 mn
Production Les Films de l'Arlequin
Co-production Ciné-Groupe / Canal J / France3
Adaptation René Laloux & Hoël Caouissin
Story board Zoltan Szilagyi & Stéphane Cartro
Backgrounds Jean Journaux
Editing Nathalie Lamoureux
Music Anthony Rozankovic
Voices Briac Barthélémy,
Marc Brunet,
Danièle Rezzi

Animation Studios Rija Filmu Studija (Latvia)
Exist studio & Firka films (Hungary)

Animation Frame by frame
Colouring & compositing Computer : Pegs system
(Toonteck Studio, Montreal)
3D effects Philippe Coenen (Pixitoon, Belgium)