Creativity After Hours: The Visual Evolutions of Michel Gagné

Creativity After Hours: The Visual Evolutions of Michel Gagné
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After Bluth laid off his employees in August 1992, Gagné used the pencil test version of Prelude as a demo reel to acquire work, landing a job at Rich Animation and ultimately heading the effects department on The Swan Princess. Gagné stresses, "I don't want people to think that's all that it is, a demo reel. It is really a work of art."

Then Joe Campana, the sound designer of The Swan Princess, saw the pencil tests. "He immediately wanted to do the sound and he donated his own time," Gagné says. "He linked me up with Shirley Walker [composer for Batman: The Animated Series, Space: Above and Beyond]. She saw the film and agreed to score the whole thing and conduct the orchestra. She did not get paid for this, which is incredible. I still owe you one, Shirley, by the way."

Scenes from Michel Gagné's short film Prelude to Eden. © Michel Gagné.

"We ended up getting an orchestra. All the musicians came and worked for half scale. It was amazing, how it happened. It was at a point where Cinesite started breaking into animation, so I went to London and talked to them. They basically ended up outputting the entire film with their Cineon technology, which was groundbreaking at the time. I didn't have to pay for any of this. It all fell into my lap. It's kind of like, ‘Build it, and they will come.' It always seems to work. You do it patiently and at a steady pace and things fall into place."

Gagné completed the three-and-a-half minute short in April 1995, and Cambridge showed it to studios throughout the world to promote their software. Warner Bros. and DreamWorks later purchased the Animo and modified it to use on their own features.

Although Prelude was successful in selling Animo, Gagné encountered a major rejection, which was enough to steer his creative drive in another direction.

"After I poured my soul into Prelude to Eden for nearly four-and-a-half years, I submitted the film to festivals and basically got rejected," he laments. "Nobody wanted to screen the film. It was very much a letdown. I was ready to show the world what I had done and I couldn't get into the festival circuit. After it got around and people started seeing it, then it got its way into festivals, but it was very much a letdown getting these rejection letters. After Prelude to Eden I immediately started working on a second short, but then I stopped because I got too depressed, and then I started saying, 'You know what? Animation is going to be my job, and what I do in my free time now is not going to be animation.'

"So I started painting.

A Painting and Sculpting Journey
"I went through this period where I really didn't want to do, not only animation, I didn't want to do realism or anything. I wanted to just go wild. I started putting blotches of color on the canvas to see how they would turn out."

Gagné's "painting phase" lasted two years, during which he headed the special effects department on Quest for Camelot for Warner Bros. At night and on weekends, he devoted his time to painting for himself.