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MillimeterParadise Animated
Nov 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz
Desktop Production for Tahitian Animation
Way back in 1991, Francis Ford Coppola famously predicted that video would democratize filmmaking. In the future, he claimed, a masterpiece was as likely to come from, “some little fat girl in Ohio” as it was from a Hollywood studio. That was before desktop production was a well-known phrase, and before it was the means by which Guy Wallart, a 50-something artist, would find himself sitting atop a mountain in Tahiti in an in-home studio making a Disney-esque feature on the computer.
At GuiliGuili, Tahiti’s only animation studio, Guy Wallart (pictured, above) uses Cambridge Animation’s Animo software and a range of desktop production equipment—including a Betacam deck, a simple network, Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Alias Maya—to animate Teiki, a Disney-esque feature about native life in Tahiti.
Tahiti is the best-known of the 118 islands in French Polynesia, and, while the capital city Papeete is modern in a French postcard sort of way, this small dot on the map (about 3in. below Hawaii) is one of the most remote places in the world. There are no postproduction facilities in Tahiti, and it's the last place you would want to set up an animation studio, unless you were shipwrecked on the white-sand beaches with all the tools at hand.
Wallart wasn't shipwrecked — his is more of a warped Foreign Legion story. In 1969, when French-born Wallart was 19, he was faced with serving one year of military service in France. He refused. The government's punishment? Travel to Rurutu, a small island in French Polynesia, to teach native children for three years. Wallart jumped at the chance. Ultimately, he learned Tahitian, and, in 1974, married an island girl, Vatiti. When his government service was up, he and Vatiti settled in Tahiti. He had found paradise; but Wallart, trained as an artist with a few years as a self-taught animator under his belt, could not complete his dream to refine his animation technique at a name studio — at this time, there wasn't even TV in Tahiti.
It took nearly 20 years before Wallart, by now a children's book illustrator and publisher, discovered the Amiga operating system and an early software program, Disney Animation Studio, with its limited palette of 32 colors. It was a beginning. Flash forward to the late 1990s and two hours worth of educational animations later: Wallart now had a home studio in the house he built on a mountainside above Papeete. This, and Tahiti's recent addition of a satellite feed for Internet access, allowed Wallart to work online with collaborators around the world. He was now ready to turn his studio, GuiliGuili, into the base for his first feature film, Teiki.
In 2000, Wallart entered the trailer for Teiki in the aptly named “Tales From the Edge of the World” Category at the Annecy animation festival (the biggest in Europe) and received first prize.
Wallart has lived in Tahiti more than half his life, and so it's natural that Teiki is about Polynesia and the island life of native people — not the island life of the French. Cast in the style of a Disney family animation, the central character, Teiki, is young boy looking for adventure. He runs away, but soon finds himself pursued by an evil spirit that chases him from island to island. While the story has many recognizable elements of Western narratives — and, specifically, Disney animation — Wallart is passionately interested in presenting the Polynesian heritage and culture to a world audience. While not Tahitian, he has entered completely into the spirit of Polynesia and the people who live there. In many ways, Wallart is more Tahitian than French.
Wallart will direct Teiki from his own story and a screenplay by Patrice Musson. Eventually, the production team will be a mixture of local Polynesian animators and artists working remotely around the world. GuiliGuili is Tahiti's only animation studio, and the local staff is trained entirely by Wallart, who teaches art at the local college. His studio is classic desktop production setup — Macs and PCs; a Betacam deck; a simple network; and software including Animo, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Alias Maya. Lately, Wallart has been learning 3D. Some of the backgrounds in Teiki are composed of 3D geometry rather than flat, multi-plane images, allowing for more diverse and complex camera movement. He expects to use much more of this dimensional look when the movie is fully funded and into full production.
Many of the background paintings are by Wallart, and the art direction is steeped in the extraordinary scenery and vistas that are right outside his window. To create such references for Bambi, Disney was well known for bringing wildlife into the studios for artists to observe, and live deer were kept at Disney Studios throughout the making of the film. For Wallart, the reference permeates his every waking hour — whether he is driving to the store or just gazing out the window next to his computer. His house is filled with the paintings he has done of the islands over the course of 30 years, and the sun that filters through the palm trees and mango groves also lights the loft where he paints the sun-dappled forest where hero Teiki discovers adventure.
Coppola might have thought more internationally when looking into the future; the notion of technology allowing the export of regional culture, whether Cincinnati or Saigon, is one of the few developments to offset the U.S. monoculture. Wallart does not think about these things; he is concentrating on telling an animated story of Polynesia and the world around him. The digital technology that imports western culture in Tahiti is also the means by which he is able to send a message in a bottle to the rest of the world. But the message is not a plea to be rescued — it's an invitation to see Wallart's version of paradise.
