Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Get with the Program:
An Interview with Gints Zilbalodis (Flow)
By Kambole Campbell

In the new animated film Flow, a cat must flee its home as a giant flood washes away most of the area. Its only hope is a small sailboat, piloted by a capybara. As the film proceeds, more animal refugees join them in their fight for survival. Directed by the 30-year-old Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, Flow depicts their turbulent relationships without featuring a word of dialogue. Like his previous film Away (which he made completely by himself), it’s a simple story whose dynamism comes from how it communicates through animated movement alone. Zilbalodis told me in an interview, conducted in person at the London Film Festival in October, that his stripped-back approach allows for spontaneity in a way not always possible via more traditional approaches to animation.

His silent approach makes the film’s otherworldly encounters even more striking. The animals, of course, don’t have the vocabulary for what they’re seeing—thus it becomes a test for the audience in turn, of interpretation and meaning. That kind of trust is exciting in a landscape of animated films that trend toward overstimulation and didacticism, and it’s but a small part of what makes Flow stand out amidst this year in animation. Zilbalodis talked about creating this physical language and sustaining it for feature length, as well as how his work changed in the leap from working solo to working with a (still fairly small) team.

Reverse Shot: It’s interesting to see a film from this animal perspective, but one that also resists anthropomorphism. What drove that approach?

Gints Zilbalodis: So, in all the films I've done so far, I've never used dialogue, and I also knew that I would do that in this film. It's just the way I'm more comfortable in telling stories visually, and through the music and sound. I feel like we don't really need to exaggerate animals or make them more humanlike. I think we can understand them and care for them—they’re also much funnier the way they are, more than if they would just tell some jokes or behave like people. I guess with films where animals are behaving like people, we've seen that so many times. The animators also found it exciting to be very expressive with their body language, though it’s about finding a balance. We’re not trying to make it too realistic, as there are some artistic liberties taken. We’re trying to keep it grounded; we are studying nature, but we are interpreting it.

We're not copying nature, so the approach is to kind of keep things simple in all ways: in terms of the story, in terms of the visuals and also the music. By keeping that simplicity, I think we can understand them—having a very simple goal and making sure that it's always clear what the characters want and building emotion on top of that and being expressive with the camera. I think with the cat and the dogs we stayed a bit more grounded because we know them better than lemurs.

Probably the biggest artistic liberty in terms of these behaviors is that we have animals steering a boat, but that was necessary to show them making decisions and having these conflicting points of view, because that's how we learn about characters, through the decisions they make. Plus we don't have dialogue, but we do have these physical movements. So I think we can understand what they feel, not just by their movements, but the music, the way they're framed, how we're editing the film—we’re using all these tools to get into the heads of these animals.

RS: Speaking of tools, you animated this in Blender, your last film was in Maya. Were there any significant changes with this from your previous production, other than doing everything yourself?

GZ: It's pretty much the same thing, but Blender is great because it's free, and on a small production it does help to save some funding. It’s also very customizable, so it allowed us to build some custom tools, for example the water—which is a big technical challenge. What’s also great about Blender is that it has this real-time render engine called EEVEE. I haven't exactly researched all the different softwares, but I don't think Maya has something like that. But basically, you can see exactly how the film will look while you're working on it, all the lights and the textures—you don't have to wait for the rendering, which makes the work a lot more spontaneous and creative. You’re always in the flow, so to speak, always thinking creatively rather than about technical stuff, and that allows me to make more variations. So, I can very easily shoot from this angle or all these different angles and see if it works or not. I'm framing the shot, I can see it with lighting and shadows and the fog, which influences the way I would place the camera. I guess because I haven't worked in a big studio, usually it's divided by these different departments and someone does the camera and other people do the lights, I can't imagine like working like that. I need to know the way it all fits together, so I work on everything.

RS: So, you're multitasking across these departments just so you can see the complete picture as you go?

GZ: Yeah, I'm working on the animatic basically, which is a basic version of the film done before production. Usually in animation they create storyboards, a hand-drawn version of the film, but we didn't use that because I've never really done it, and even though I had resources to hire storyboard artists, I decided to do it the way I was used to. It’s kind of like a process of discovery for me, because I would find it really hard to describe my intention to a storyboard artist just based on the script. I need to try things and make discoveries, and so I built an environment in 3D before production. It’s like a basic version of the environment for the film without too much detail, and there I can place the characters and the camera, and I can explore the environment like a live action set—almost like location scouting—and make discoveries and tweak things. I can move trees and mountains if necessary, and find shots. Sometimes I don't know where the shot will end up. I might start and finish ten seconds later, but sometimes I just keep adding, and adding, and it grows into like a five-minute single take. It’s very intuitive, there's no strict rules that I've written for myself.

So, I’m adding lights and moving the set around and placing the characters—which are not animated yet—they’re just placed in the situation and they're just basically the key poses which are necessary for the framing. Once that is finalized, I'm editing the film as well, using the music I'd written while writing the script. I write the music not really thinking about specific scenes. It's a big library of music which I try in various scenes and see if it works here or there. Sometimes it fits very well, sometimes only a little, but the good thing is I can fix the edit to fit the music, or I can do both and go back and forth and adjust things until they match. But this is still just a sketch of the music. Later we brought on another composer, Rihards Zaļupe, who’s a lot more experienced. I just started making music with my previous film Away—I didn’t study music, I just write it electronically. Rihards made it fit more to the scene and more cohesive. Each piece was unique, and we had to make sure that it felt like part of one thing. Then, we would rerecord those samples written on the computer using real instruments, and we had a real orchestra.

That’s to say, I sketch things and then I give it to the team, and they add a lot of detail. For the animation, they’d take the shot which I'd sketched with these key poses and bring so much character to them. They're basically actors—I had it quite thoroughly planned but I was open to ideas and suggestions from the animators. Sometimes they would say maybe the cat should stop here for a moment and look around, but the camera's already moving and it's kind of moving past the character, and it's already edited to the music, so we can't really change the length. Instead, we have to find some creative solutions to make it work, maybe making other parts faster to find room for that moment.

RS: You mentioned Away, which you made by yourself. What was it like to move to a bigger team with this one, even if it was still rather compact?

GZ: Yeah, for me it was a big team, but compared to big studio films it's very tiny. I would imagine the budget is like 50 times smaller than most of these films. It was very stressful for me at first. I was quite anxious because I've never worked in a studio as an animator, and now I had to sort of establish our own studio and figure out how to run it. All the responsibility for the budget and all the people—I found the whole process more difficult than working alone, but this type of film I couldn't do by myself. We have so many complicated elements like the water, and more characters, and it's a lot denser than my previous film, which was sparse and minimalistic. I had to learn how to articulate my thoughts and to explain them to other people. Before, I would just imagine things and then make it. I think that can be a good thing, but also you have to be careful about overexplaining things. I wanted some moments to have some ambiguity where I'm leaving it up to the audience to figure it out, and it’s hard to explain to the team how it will all work together when it's quite abstract.

RS: You've mentioned the water a couple of times. Could you talk me through the process of animating it?

GZ: It was one of the first things we started, and one of the last things we finished. Water in animation is one of the most complicated things I know. When I made Away, I based the story around things that are easy to do so, but in this case I knew there would be a team to help figure that all out. Still, I had to really be quite involved, and I was kind of upset about myself not making easier things, because the audience doesn't really care if this thing took months or if you did it in a few minutes [laughs]. Like, I've heard some people get excited about some detail that took like a few minutes to do, but they didn't even notice something that was really hard.

Water is complicated because every type of water is completely different—there’s not one tool for every case. If there's a small puddle that's one system we need to develop, and if it’s a stormy sea that's a completely different system. So, everything needed so many types of tools, and that takes a long time to process. You set up all the physics of it and press the button to simulate stuff, but then it takes a few days just to compute a single shot.

Often it doesn't work, and then you make some adjustments and have to wait a few more days. That's quite frustrating as it's so unpredictable, and because there's so many different types of physics and coding, which I really don't understand. Luckily, we had people who took care of that but yeah, it's hard to control water.

RS: Do you think you'd ever do a film with dialogue?

GZ: I'm doing that right now. I'm writing my next film. I’m trying to have some dialogue because I don't want to make the same film over and over. I want to try different things and if it doesn't work out, I can always go back to making films without dialogue. It will still be visually driven. If I can come up with a way to kind of communicate this idea with the camera or music, I would do that first. But because the story of the next film is about people, it doesn't make sense for them not to speak. I was quite afraid of writing dialogue before, I had tried it, but I didn't feel confident. But I find it a lot easier when I have a pretty good idea for the story. The way I am writing it now is that I start making the animatic, and I write the dialogue almost like subtitles. It's easier to write having visuals in front of me, instead of writing on a blank page, because then I can already kind of imagine that they're looking around and seeing these things and reacting to them.

RS: For this film, do you think you’ll keep using Blender?

GZ: Probably, yeah. Maybe using the same software but using some different techniques. I’m so used to it now, it's like built into my muscle memory. In terms of the cinematic language, I’m pushing some things I tried with Flow a lot further, and it's quite ambitious. I’m still doing some tests for it, and I'm not even sure if I can pull it off. So that's why I'm not saying exactly what it is, but I'm trying something that has not really been done in animation.