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This article was written for the
July-August ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 351). |
This year’s winner of the Jury’s Choice Award at SIGGRAPH is Jour de Vent (Windy Day), a wordless poetic short about various people encountering a very strong wind in the park. The project was a labor of love for Martin Chailloux, Ai Kim Crespin, Élise Golfouse, Chloé Lab, Hugo Taillez and Camille Truding — graduates of ENSI (École des Nouvelle Images) school in France. Here is what they told us about their lovely student project.
The idea behind the short: We made Jour de Vent (Windy Day) for our graduation movie, at our school ENSI in Avignon. The wind here is called ‘The Mistral’, there were times when it was so powerful that it was impossible for us to walk straight. We wanted to know what would happen if people were carried away by the wind. The six of us wanted to make a poetic short with a stylized 3D render, so the movie grew into itself quite naturally.
The details: We knew we would be working together on this particular project in mid-July, and started working actively on it early September. The first three to four months were a lot of research, both for the story and the visuals. We then started the production, and we finished during the last days of May, after nine intense months. Interestingly enough, the story kept changing until the last day: The final shot was decided only three days before the end.
The team and the tools: Overall, six people were working on it. We used Maya for modeling, rigging and animation, Substance Painter for the texturing, Guerilla Render for the shading, lighting and rendering, and Nuke for the compositing. We also used Photoshop and TVPaint to create 2D textures and animations, and Reaper for sound editing.
The fun parts: We just loved working together. It is our own project so we were able to tell anything with it, and it was wonderful to see it shape itself into something that resembled each of us. Seeing the finished version for the first time was amazing: We realized we really liked our short!
The not-so-fun parts: We had to find new ways to use the 3D software we knew about, because we used them to create 2D-looking pictures instead. We did not know how to achieve our visual goals, so we needed to invent new ways of working with them. We also had a lot of characters for our short production time. There was a moment where we thought the dog would not be included! Plus, it was a great puzzle to give the best amount of screen time and importance to each character.
In a sense the most important character was the wind. We decided to not show it directly to keep its metaphorical aspect, but it also meant that everything else had to move along with an invisible wind: the grass, the trees, the clothes, the tiny and light-weight objects. That was very hard to achieve!
Animation heroes: We decided that we wanted the movie to look like a graphic novel, so most of our inspiration was from the comics world. The visual style took inspiration from the art of [Bill Watterston’s Calvin & Hobbes and Sempé. The mood of the story resembles Jiro Taniguchi’s books, especially The Walking Man.
Ideal Impact: We hope they love the movie as much as we do. We put a little bit of ourselves into each character, and we hope they can also find themselves in the movie. We hope that people who watch it again in a few years will understand the shot differently because they grew older. It might be the same for us!
Windy Day is continuing to tour the global film festival circuit, you can follow its progress on Instagram @jour_de_vent. Distribution for the short is handled by Miyu (miyu.fr/distribution/en/windy-day).
