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Hello friends, I just achieved this movie (not really animated but "layouted" for sure, and painted)

Transmission of the memory 1 - The occupation in Moret

A drawn fiction inspired by real facts.

A movie by Julien Stiegler,
designed with 7th grade students and Magali Beauville, school principal and teacher.
With the voices of the inhabitants of Moret, memory keepers of the occupation.

The film was first screened may 2025, during the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the victory against Nazism in Moret (France, Seine-et-Marne, 77).

Production : La Charrette Orchestrale, achieved thanks to the support of the South Memorial 77 association
http://www.cinema-theatre.org

You can watch the integral movie online here


Here is the story of the process in short :

Module 1 : storyboard
- Cinema lessons : I gave concrete exemple of what a storyboard is with my movies (and some masterpieces from Kurusawa, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, etc..), also what is an animatic, a layout, etc...
- We've started to practice with children by creating an imaginary shared drawn space / fresco, with some basic questions (draw your favorite place and its opposite, place your own drawing in the collective fresco, etc...) so the children don't put the pressure of the past on themselves from the start, and to free their imagination...
- We've then created an imaginary drawn space / fresco about war...
- Those rough child drawings are only used in the movies when characters are dreaming...
- I kept teaching cinema, in parralel with the invention of writing since prehistory, pictograms and ideograms in parallel with kouletchov effects, etc...
- We visited some important places of world war 2 in our town.
- Some memory holders came in the classroom to tell the story of occupation during world war 2.
- We've created 7 groups, asking children to choose one of 10 the memorial places. One place became one sequence.
From the start it was clear that we'll invent a fiction, by creating fictional links between the places, and alternating with real oral testimonies.
- I first asked to draw the places and the main characters.
- Some basic question about each sequence : name it ? main characters / background elements ? what will we be descovering in the sequence ? etc...
- We've created the storyboard together with children, the basic rule was basic : start with an establishing shot to present the place, then present each character with closeup, and only then reveal the interest of that sequence. Children don't know that story telling must reveal things progressively...
- We focused on understanding by the public, by adding some insert shots , and reordering the shots. You can see the raw story board in the end of the movie, during the credits.
- I kept interviewing more seniors in residential care homes...

Module 2 : layout
- I was very frustrated by the roughness of that result !!!
Untill then, I avoided to take too much of control of the drawings to respect the childrens art but...
I decided to go ahead and create a 2d layout ! Drawing on A3 paper allows reusable backgrounds, 2d camera motions etc...
- I draw all the scenes on A3 paper with criterium/mechanical pencil, with perspective, shot/countershot, and asked children to decal on tracing paper (so we don't have to buy 32 lighting tables), separating characters, overlays, underlays, backgrounds, on separate sheets.
I intentionaly started to draw in a rough style, to force the children to define the designs themselves (for those who wanted to) ! And progressively added more precision, for more coherence...
- I added more character poses on separate paper sheets. The economic choice was to suppress animation inbetweens ! All the creative process was only pleasure to do !
- The camera layout is ultra simple, just draw the camera frames on the sheet, no computer needed !

Module 3 : shadows and colours
- I then painted all the shots in colour inks (in the present shots) and blacks (in the past shots) on polyester semitransparent A3 paper, that doesn't crinkle with liquid inks...
- I shot all the drawings in UHD/4k with my animation stand (GH5 / decklink) using my own software (since all other softwares are either too expansive or too painfull to use for my taste, and I don't use pirated s...)

Module 4 : post
- I did the layout in Davinci Resolve software, using only edit and color page...
It's a real pleasure to use and i could create hundreds of cinematic shots very fast !
- The multiplane camera is just manually keyframed clips transforms in the edit page.
First i did the layout with pencil black and white drawings, with no voices, only music.
The only tedious task is creating masks with power windows (last time, for my previous movie, i asked some friends to draw all the mask in black on papers, but that wasn't a funny task either).
- I asked some memory holders to come back and record some additional voices.
We also recorder the childrens voices for the fiction (in the past, adults are silent...)
- Color grading your own paintings is a treamendous pleasure...
In the past / black and white shots, i recreated cold/hot lighting colors in the color page.

The movie was screened in loops during 3 hours, during memorial day / 8 mai 2025, and everyone cried, even politics, many people stayed 3 times to watch it...
I will continue this work on memory as a movie serial... And not only about wars...
I think that's good for every people, and provides peace to everyone, and create links...
I hope that this description of the process was clear enough, don't hesitate to ask for some clarifications if you will... that would just help me to be more clear (english is not my mother language).

Creating a 22 minutes movie in only 28 hours in classroom plus 400 hours at home is so cool !

Thanks, take care !