Staff Pick Premiere: “The Bolt Connection”

When Jeffrey isn't busy curating the best videos to watch On Demand, you might find him watching more movies, biking to movies, or painting distorted Where's-Waldo-esque landscapes. He's programmed for the Tribeca, Hamptons and Rooftop Film Festivals.
Jeffrey Bowers

This week’s Staff Pick Premiere, “The Bolt Connection,” mashes the future with the past for an electrifying take on greed and addiction. Co-directed by six French university students (including lead Nicolas Lebas, along with Claire Cartier, Mathilde Dourdy, Thibault Grunenberger, Maurine Lecerf, and Shih-Hui Pan), this stylistic noir tale revolves around a robot mafia in a cyberpunk world.

The retro futuristic look of “The Bolt Connection” references gothic classics such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” while being funneled through the graphic stylings of “Batman: The Animated Series” and the work of comics artist Mike Mignola. The style and design perfectly suit the story, which grapples with the rise and fall of a low-level robot gangster as he confronts his dreams and mortality.

Ahead of this week’s premiere, we reached out to director Nicolas Lebas to learn how this ambitious student project came together.

On the film’s inspiration:

“At first, I had this picture in my head of some evil mafia robots breaking down a door with some 1930s machine guns and red glowing eyes. Something brutal, with almost no light and a lot of darkness to make nice simple compositions. I figured the thing robots lacked were organs, so they could organize some kind of illegal traffic around that. Then the idea of the rust coming from the human limbs came quite quickly. It added the subject of addiction to the movie — and the urge to feel alive. It gave the main character a purpose. Of course, the scenario was a mess and it took a lot of time to simplify, but this work is the most thrilling part of making a movie, in my opinion.”

On collaborating as directors:

“Since I was behind the project, the team trusted me to direct the movie, but anyone could express doubt or share ideas. I made sure to ask for their opinions during the production. The idea was to make a movie were we all had a say. On some points — especially the scenario — we couldn’t go too far because it quickly becomes too complicated. But directing a movie is not supervising everything. And many other aspects of productions were led by far more competent people than me; for example, Mathilde Dourdy led texturing and compositing and she also took care of production planning. Everyone was in charge of some steps of production, and I’m glad we all had different specialties.”

On the technical side of making the film:

“All the 3D was made on Maya and rendered on Arnold. We had tiny bit of FX on Houdini; the compositing was made on Nuke. We also used After Effects for 2D FX, Avid Media Composer for editing, and of course Photoshop for pre-production. We used a lot of Post-It notes, too. I love to use them for storyboarding.”

On overcoming challenges:

“We faced many challenges — some artistic, some technical, and some communication-related. For the artistic part, we wanted something very stylized, and stylization can be hard when you go outside of your comfort zone. The only way to solve this is through trial and error, and to have some good references nearby. Once we figured out our style in 2D, we had to make it in 3D, and various issues came up in the process. We had so few 3D animation references and they were so imprecise that it was hard to communicate our vision. Eventually, that problem went away when we had our first look dev picture finished. We basically made our own reference. For this, we had to come up with a special way of treating shading and lighting, which involved creating light that had influence only on certain characters or certain shaders. It worked, but it was long to set up and expensive to render.”

On advice for aspiring filmmakers:

“Unless you’re doing a non-narrative film, focus your energy on scenario, storyboard, and a basic animatic. It’s the core of the movie. If you get this right, your movie will be good no matter what — the rest is just polishing. And the good news is that you don’t need much for this: a pen and paper, a free writing software, and a basic editing software.

I would also recommend limiting the amount of feedback you receive. Anyone can have an opinion on your work, but that doesn’t make it useful. Listen to people who know what they’re talking about and whose work you value. Reject remarks that are a difference in taste — the ones that don’t have any argument. If you don’t have to answer to anyone, the only taste that matters is your own.”

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