Le building (2005)

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Le Building is a 2005 French animated short film directed by a team of final year students at Gobelins, l'École de l'image. The story depicts a series of slapstick accidents that cause destruction to a three-story apartment complex. Le Building's team of five directors is composed of Pierre Perifel and Olivier Staphylas, both of whom went on to become Annie Award-recognized animators at DreamWorks, Xavier Ramonède and Annie award-nominated Marco Nguyen, who have continued their careers with animation credits on various high-profile French productions, and Rémi Zaarour, who has since become a comic book artist, published under the pseudonym Pozla.

Production

Le Building was directed as a student project at Gobelins, l'École de l'image. During their final year, members of the animation program at this prestigious Parisian university form six groups in which to create their thesis films. As an annual tradition, the nearby Annecy International Animation Film Festival features the completed works of these students as opening short films – one on each day of the festival.

Wanting their film to suit its placement as a festival opener, the team of students behind Le Building felt compelled to take it in a humorous and "punchy" direction. Settling on a storyline that all five of them could agree on was described as the most difficult aspect of production. Ultimately, the filmmakers determined to focus on a "simple idea" that would spawn a "crazy chain reaction".

All five directors contributed to the initial design work and then shared out subsequent responsibilities. Most of the film was traditionally animated, and most of the work in this medium was done by Perifel, Ramonède, and Zaarour. A previous collaboration between these three classmates had been exhibited at Annecy one year earlier, in the form of a thirty-second bumper, called Festival Qualité.

The final character designs were developed by Zaarour. He went on to review all of the CG work, so as to ensure that his style was being properly translated between mediums. Traditionally animated backgrounds were sketched and painted by Perifel, with assistance from Zaarour, and a computer-animated background was created by Nguyen.

The old woman and the Russian singer are both traditionally animated. The first scene with the old woman was animated by Ramonède, while the final scene with the character was animated by Perifel. The Russian singer was animated by Nguyen, in the scene when the character is approached by an oncoming bus. The bus itself is computer-animated, as are the demolition crane (by Nguyen) and the pizza boy (by Staphylas).

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