Original subtitles

[Zilbalodis] Hello, this is Gints Zilbalodis

and I'm here to do the commentary of Flow.

Flow is my second feature film.

This is the first film I've done with a team.

So this film has an actual budget, and for that reason,

you're gonna see all these logos at first because for an independent film,

especially made in Europe,

you'll often see all kinds of production companies.

Flow was done in three countries, in Latvia, France, and Belgium.

And each of those have their own companies,

including Dream Well, which I founded.

But you also see various distributors.

You see the sales agents.

And it takes a lot of people just to make this film.

It's quite funny to see this in a theater.

You can get some laughs of these endless credits.

But, yeah, we actually had to fight a little bit to not make them even longer.

Sometimes after these logos,

you would have basically, like, credits designed in the style of the film

and that would mean you would have

to basically mention all of these companies twice,

but I had to kind of push to only have this version.

Because we were trying to make this film not too long.

We were fighting for every frame to make it as lean as possible,

and then we added all these logos

and that was kind of a little bit frustrating

but also funny for me that, yeah, these things add up.

So, yeah, Sacrebleu, Take Five, and Dream Well are the three companies.

And we did pretty much everything in Latvia at Dream Well,

except character animation, sound and some rigging,

which were done in France and Belgium in Sacrebleu and Take Five.

So we're gonna just jump into the film.

There's no fade in, there's no intro.

We see the character immediately.

And there's no music, there's nothing to kind of hold your hand,

and we have to kind of find our own way to attach to these characters.

And we'll come back to this,

but the first image was the cat looking at itself

in a reflection in a puddle through water, which is an important visual motif.

And we will see how these characters change once this motif is repeated.

And, yeah, so this is the second shot

and this was the first shot we animated.

I wanted to test out the look

and the style of animation, just to see if it works.

In the script, actually, there were no cat statues here.

There was supposed to be a human figure.

And once I was doing the animatic,

I realized that it's not really that interesting.

And I replaced them with cats

and moved that human statue to a later scene.

Because I needed the cat statues to convey the anxiety

that the cat feels in a later scene when the flood is rising.

So I think this shot is over a minute long.

Which is quite complicated in terms of just managing all the assets

and for animators to work on a single shot for many weeks sometimes.

And for the lighting to work.

It's very complicated, even though it's animated

and we can hide the lights.

So I guess it is easier than live-action,

but still we needed sometimes to animate the lights,

to move them, to dial them brighter or lower,

so that even though the frame changes,

the lighting just looks good or interesting

in all these moving frames within the frame.

And, yeah, this is also the first cue of the music we hear.

♪♪ [peaceful]

But it was one of the last ones that was written.

I start writing music very early while writing the script.

And I create a lot of material.

In this case, I wrote over eight hours of demo tracks.

And in the end, we only used about 15 minutes.

And I also create a bunch of variations and try things.

And I'm not really writing them for specific scenes.

Oh, here's a boat in a tree,

which some people don't notice on their first watch.

This film has kind of a circular structure where the opening image

and the closing image kind of reflect on each other.

And also in the end, you'll see a boat in a tree.

And so this is kind of again repeating.

In high school, I made a short film inspired by two cats I had at the time.

The short film is called A qua.

And, yeah, it later went on to inspire Flow.

I've been asked if I'm a cat person or a dog person,

and I've had both cats and dogs,

and we only see one cat in this film, but we see a bunch of dogs.

And so it's not really fair that we see all these dogs

and how some are better than others.

But we only see one cat, so maybe I should do a dog film next,

just to show that I like dogs as well.

[dogs barking]

This dog is inspired by two dogs I had growing up.

The cat in this film is kind of on a journey of being very independent

and learning how to trust others.

And the dog is the opposite, where it starts out being very trustful,

always looking for someone to tell them what to do.

As it is here, following the other dogs.

But throughout the journey, the dog learns to be more independent,

so I wanted to show the positives and negatives of both of these ideas.

I really like these shots where the cat is running

and the way that the camera moves.

I'm very happy how it turned out.

And this is one of the longer shots.

I really like these long shots

because I think it really creates a sense of immersion.

I think every time you're cutting, at least subconsciously,

the audience are reminded that they're watching a film.

But with these longer shots,

you're kind of hypnotized and drawn in into the action.

This hare that the dogs end up chasing, that was a fairly late addition.

In the script, it was a deer.

Also, in the first shot, it was supposed to be a deer.

But later I decided to change it into a hare,

so as not to just mix up the kind of metaphors

and the associations that the cat has with the deer,

which usually appear before the flood.

So that's why I kind of added a hare in that scene.

I thought a cat would be a great protagonist for such a story,

which starts out being very independent and introverted

and trying to avoid others,

and then it can go on that journey and learn things.

When doing these kind of longer takes, I try not to pan unnecessarily.

I try to only kind of pan 45 degrees.

Or if it's a 180 turn, then it's supposed to be jarring.

It's supposed to kind of put you on the edge.

This is like a crowd scene.

In my previous film, I would try to avoid crowds

and have as few characters as possible

because that can be very complicated.

But, actually, we ended up getting a pretty good result

by just repeating a fairly simple loop of animation for the deer.

And it was quite complicated,

as all waters in any type of film, whether animated or not.

But we had to do all these, I don't know,

dozens and dozens of simulations

just to find the right physics and the right look.

In every scene, the water requires almost a new set of tools to be designed.

Because a river is very different than a lake and an ocean or a puddle.

So everything required new tools.

Here we don't hear music.

[cat crying]

It's a fairly tense scene, and I think it's more tense

because there is no music and we get a very kind of dimensional sound

from all around you.

Also, as the cat is afraid of the water, it's also afraid of these other animals,

and these two fears it has--

They're kind of in sync.

So, also, in the opening image, the puddle is trembling,

kind of showing the anxiety that the cat has.

And later it will calm down.

But here, the cat is also not being very friendly to the dog,

and the water is also very unfriendly.

So it's kind of a way for me to express what the cat is feeling.

[dog barks]

So, here, the dog doesn't have anyone to follow.

So it will follow the cat.

I like this next shot.

Yeah, this one.

I like the lighting in this shot

where it's only lit across the path that they walk.

And I have these kind of pools of light

with which I can kind of very precisely direct the eye of the spectator.

I like how the cat turns its ears in this shot.

It doesn't even need to look around,

but we can express a lot through the movement of the ears.

I also learned that cats don't really look around with their pupils.

They tend to look around with their whole heads,

which really adds to that kind of anxious, nervous character,

which we also needed for the cat in this film.

[dog barking]

I wanted to create some kind of movement in this scene,

so we added the kind of falling leaves, which I think add a lot.

And I tried to add wind in the grass and the leaves to kind of...

make it kind of feel alive.

And some of these things are quite complicated.

The wind in the trees is especially complicated.

It's much easier to create still trees.

I really love the animation of the dog in this scene.

It's very funny, I think.

And here we'll see kind of a moment of nothing really happening

and just there's no plot being advanced, there's no character development.

But I want to have these quiet moments in the film

which allow us to reflect on what's happened

and allow us to take a breath,

so that when the intense moments begin,

we have kind of relaxed and we've let our guard down,

and I think that makes them more intense.

This is a fairly complicated shot with the reflection of the cat's face.

It was quite hard to just find the right position.

And for the animators,

they had to, like, animate with the reflection in mind.

But this also allows us to kind of frame this shot

and see both what the cat sees and seeing its reaction at the same time

without cutting back and forth or panning back and forth.

♪♪ [mysterious]

In my original demo of the music,

there was no music in this moment,

but Rihards, my co-composer,

who took my initial ideas and then kind of developed them and expanded,

suggested that we should start earlier

and also we will end later than I had originally planned.

So this cue was originally just a few minutes, like two,

but Rihards expanded it, I think, to about five minutes,

which was, I think, a very good decision.

[dog barking]

This is the boat we saw in the earlier scene

that was up in the tree.

And here there's quite a lot of editing.

In a lot of the other scenes, the shots are very long.

But I try not to have the technique be in charge of the story.

Like, it's also not the story being in charge of the technique,

but I think they should kind of work in tandem.

So, in this scene, I think it benefits from doing all these quicker edits

and seeing these multiple moments from different perspectives.

But in other scenes, I want to kind of really stay with the cat

and not to cut to things, just to allow us to be very kind of connected with the cat.

These statues are basically the same cat rig I took

and just sculpted a little bit

to make them a little bit more bulky and more rounded.

The house that the cat lives...

Originally, there was no kind of backstory to it,

but as I was developing the animatic,

we decided to make it into a place where a sculptor must have lived,

with all these tools.

Kind of suggesting that the sculptor has been obsessed about cats,

and maybe it's this very same cat, or they've had multiple cats.

But it's kind of similar to me making a film for many years about a cat.

This shot, I'm quite happy about.

It's kind of like a drone shot with the camera turning around the cat,

and the statue almost becomes a character and we see the statue's point of view.

The image of the cat

is actually the only piece of concept art for the cat that I drew.

All the characters, or at least the main characters,

were designed directly in 3D.

And, to me, it was just faster and more intuitive

to kind of design them directly in the 3D environment.

This water line.

It's much easier to render water if it's just above or under the surface.

But when you have that transition, there are many complications with that.

So these statues of the cats really kind of represent the cat's fears,

and it sees what's happening to the other statues

and it's suggested that it will happen to our character as well.

So the whale originally was supposed to be just a real whale,

but as we saw it in this scene,

we were not really afraid of it

because I think whales are so peaceful and calming that...

we couldn't really get into that subjective point of view

of the cat who is supposed to be afraid of it.

So we changed the design to make it more mythological and scary.

And we only see glimpses of it at first and it's revealed gradually.

It's kind of representing the fear of the unknown.

And as the cat learns more about it, it starts to trust it.

And this glass sphere that we saw multiple--

These spheres in the house,

it's kind of reminding the cat of the things it's lost.

The house that is lost and--

The glass sphere, it'll come back later and it will save it in a tough spot.

In most of these shots, the water is basically procedural,

which means that it's not really simulated.

Which makes it play almost in real time.

And there are some close-ups where we do need to simulate it

and that's way more difficult.

But we developed these tools which allowed us

to render most of these scenes very quickly.

And the whole film is made in Blender, which is a free open-source software.

And we rendered everything in EEVEE,

which is its built-in, real-time render engine,

which allows us to see the lights and see the textures.

And we don't have to wait for the rendering to happen.

And this makes the creative process a lot more fun

and exciting and intuitive,

and allows us to make these films on a smaller budget and do them quickly.

And this is really exciting, I think.

Each of the characters in the film are chosen based on the theme of the film.

They're not just randomly showing up there.

They all kind of represent the idea of the individual versus society.

Each of them are on a different spectrum of this idea, but...

it's also about kind of trust in others and...

accepting your fears and not running away from them.

And capybara is like the ultimate example of not being afraid.

These characters have their own journeys.

They learn certain things or change throughout the story,

but the capybara is the only one that basically stays the same

and doesn't really have a character arc.

It's kind of a mentor figure to everyone else,

kind of teaching them how to compromise and how to...

just not worry about everything.

And it's my aspirational figure.

I really identify with the cat in this film.

I have these anxieties,

but I really wish I could be like the capybara.

In a lot of the films I've--

I think pretty much all the films I've made,

there is at least one scene with rain.

And this allows me to kind of play with the sounds

because you can express a lot with different sounds of the rain.

It can be very peaceful, it can be scary, it can be harsh, or it can be soft.

And often when writing,

I even try to consider the sounds and what ways we can use them.

Earlier, we saw these lights up in the sky

and I just wanted to have this short glimpse of them at first, so...

If we would only kind of see them in the end of the film,

I think that might be too jarring.

So if we kind of set them up somehow earlier,

I think that can make them believable in some way.

And here, again, I think I'm really happy with the sound.

[banging noises]

Our sound designer, Gurwal, would actually record sounds

in a boat under this kind of little roof it had.

So it's kind of hard to fake this with kind of effects.

So he had to actually record some of these sounds

from a very specific angle.

[lemur chittering]

And the lemur as well, it's collecting these objects,

but the reason it does it

is because it also is looking for a place it belongs

or it wants others to like it.

And it's kind of silly and kind of lame,

but I think we can still relate to that,

even if we can kind of laugh about it.

But I think we can see ourselves within these characters.

And this is the longest shot in the film and I think it was one...

Yeah, it was the last one that we finished rendering just a few days

before the premiere in Cannes Film Festival.

Just finishing the last water simulations and that was very stressful for all of us.

Because, in these longer shots, it's really hard to make the light work

from all these angles,

and for the camera to go in and out of the water

and, later, up in the air.

It's very complicated.

You see these--

The light kind of being reflected onto the boat and the cat,

that was kind of a challenge to figure out how to do it

in this kind of stylized rendering style.

[cat meowing]

Actually, in an earlier version of the script,

this bird we see here,

and later, the leader of the bird group, was a single character.

It had kind of, like--

It would change depending on the moment.

In some scenes, it would be very kind of aggressive and harsh,

but in other scenes, it would be very kind of soft and friendly.

And I thought it would be interesting to have this character

with kind of multiple personalities.

But I couldn't figure out how to make it compelling and interesting,

so in the writing process, I split it in two characters.

And we see how their point of views clash,

and later this bird and the leader of the group would fight.

[cat meowing]

This shot was already designed in the animatic,

but during one of the test screenings, it felt too abrupt and fast,

and we didn't really get to soak in the tension.

So I had to expand it and add a few of these moments.

But it's really complicated when all these things

are already kind of created to add a moment within a longer shot.

You can't just insert it in the editing timeline.

You have to, like, almost completely remake the whole set.

When you do a single adjustment in a longer shot like this, there--

It's like a domino effect that disrupts so many different things.

So just to add a few extra seconds in a shot like that,

like, required almost just a few days to fix all these problems that it caused.

And I really wanted to stretch this moment quite long,

so that we also see this in real time.

And the whale is kind of obscured in the underwater kind of fog.

I thought there would be also foliage, kind of these seaweeds,

to, like, obscure the whale, so it's more mysterious,

but I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

And throughout this five-minute-long shot,

there is no music, which is a very long time.

Especially in animated films, there tends to be music all the time,

kind of holding your hand and pushing the emotion.

But I really tried to have a very long shot without music.

And I think with these longer takes, it even kind of makes sense to do that.

It creates this very naturalistic feeling that you feel like

these are real animals and you can sense all the elements.

[cat meows]

This was quite tough for our sound designer, Gurwal,

to kind of maintain the intense kind of feeling and not to be repetitive.

He couldn't hide behind dialogue or even music,

so he had so much responsibility in this,

but I think he pulled it off.

[capybara grunts]

There's a lot of, like, light bloom in many of the scenes,

which makes the image softer.

Maybe there is some influence from video games,

like from Fumito Ueda.

And, like, in these early 2000s video games,

there was a lot of these effects used,

but it's also influenced by cinematographers like Janusz Kamiński

and Vilmos Zsigmond,

who would put all these diffusion filters on the lens

just to soften the highlights without really affecting the shadows,

which is a look that I really like and I miss

and I wish more filmmakers would use this nowadays.

These towers that the cat sees...

it's a necessary way to kind of convey the character's goals.

I think in a dialogue-free film, to make it compelling and clear,

all the characters should have very clear motivations.

And in this case, this...

I think, iconic design of the towers

kind of always reminds the cat to reach it.

It tries to reach that goal as quickly as possible

because it thinks it will climb up the towers

and escape from the flood, which is the highest place it can climb.

So they needed to be very big,

so that they can be visible from any vantage point.

Of course, we're adjusting the size of them in every shot

to make it look right, but it's suggested that they're visible

from anywhere in this world.

♪♪ [upbeat]

The difference between the short film I made in high school

and Flow is that,

in Flow there's a big cast of characters which were not in the short film,

and I wanted to kind of create an ensemble story,

which I'd never done.

This was also a very complicated shot, I think three and a half minutes,

and the water is constantly rising, which makes the boat move,

which would make also shadows move,

and for the camera also to go from being inside the boat,

being attached to it, and then now being attached to this floor,

and then going back into the boat as it's moving.

That was quite complicated to figure out the choreography

of what's the right speed for the water to rise

and how fast the boat should move forwards.

[lemur chittering]

And this was a very complicated moment

to do the simulation because also the objects are moving.

With the cat and the dog,

we really try to stay as grounded as possible

because we really kind of know cats and dogs very well.

Most of us have seen them very often.

But with the lemur and I guess the bird and maybe capybara,

we can push them a little bit further.

They can have slightly more exaggerated personalities.

But still we try to look at as much references as possible

to make them feel like real animals.

[capybara grunts]

I've heard a few times Flow being referred to

as being a silent film,

and I think a more accurate description would be dialogue-free.

Because the sound and the music play

an even greater role in this film than most films

because it has to convey the things

that would be typically conveyed through dialogue.

And this was very complicated to do.

The timing of this reaction,

we had to send our animator who did the shots.

There were so many revisions that needed to be done,

and usually we only have two revisions that I can give.

But somehow the shot-- Like, if you have one frame more or less,

it's either funny or not, it can ruin the whole reaction.

So we had to just go through so many tries,

but I'm very happy with the final result.

Writing is the hardest thing for me, and music is the most fun, the most easy.

So when I get writer's block,

I tend to do music because I just enjoy it.

I would do that just for fun, even if not working on a project.

We see, like, banana plants here.

And we see all kinds of different types of foliage

and also different types of architectural styles

and different biomes in a seemingly small space.

So I guess it doesn't make exact scientific sense,

but I wasn't too worried about that.

It was really just, maybe these characters were all in the zoo

and they escaped from a zoo,

so that's why they're in this single space.

And maybe as the water is rising,

they're kind of also changing the altitude,

so that could explain why there are

these very different types of plants growing.

I think we can, like, have the cat be not entirely sympathetic.

Like, the cat can behave in a very kind of grumpy

and ungenerous way,

and we can forgive it and we can still follow it.

I think if it would be a human character,

we would have a harder time to connect with it.

But because the cat is so cute, I think it's almost like cheating for us.

We can get very immediate kind of connection for the audience.

And the cat is constantly climbing up something.

At first, it would climb up its house and wait for the flood to go away.

And now it's climbing up the mast of the boat.

Because it doesn't want to kind of deal with everything

that's going down with all the new characters in the boat.

It's just ignoring problems, basically, burying its head in the sand.

Later, it will climb up these giant cliff towers

and that's like the furthest up it can climb.

But sometimes when cats climb up a tree, they get stuck there

and can't get back down, so this is something I wanted to explore.

This behavior of reindeer actually happens in real life

that they walk in these circular kind of patterns.

And I thought this kind of circular kind of symbols and spirals,

I tried to interweave them whenever I could.

I wish I could have done that more, but I think it's quite a striking image

that we also have in our studio logo, Dream Well Studio.

It's kind of tricky to do dream sequences.

It can be kind of either too direct or too vague,

or dreams often don't really have logic to them.

And sometimes that can be very interesting,

but this dream sequence, I think we could have taken out,

like you can still follow the story.

And it's not really advancing the plot,

but I think it's necessary for the end of the film,

when we see the deer again.

It makes the emotion at the end a lot more clear,

which we would otherwise not feel.

This was the first time that I used Blender.

And when I started using it, there was a big update

which made it a lot more user-friendly

and industry-compatible.

So I think it's really exciting

that these tools that are being used to make feature films

shown in theaters around the world are available for free.

And this will allow voices from around the world

to share their stories

who might otherwise not have had the chance

because they don't live in a place where there is a big industry.

And this will allow a greater variety of not just stories being told,

but how they are told, the techniques that can be explored.

When I'm designing the scenes,

I'm kind of trying to simplify the design of the elements,

so we could have done, like, multi-color flowers in the scene,

and I could have had all kinds of variety in the plants,

but having these white dots on green, I think, makes it more interesting.

This was a very complicated thing to design

when the cat is walking in the shallow water.

It's not really walking on ground, we had to do a lot of cheating

to make sure that the fish are visible through the water

and the cat is not too deep

and sometimes it's floating above the water.

It doesn't look right from other angles,

but from this specific angle, it looks right.

So in all of the scenes, there are a lot of cheating being done

where, yeah, things are kind of floating

or the size of things is adjusted for specific moments

because it looks right from that angle.

[cat meows]

That's why I've been asked

if we could do, like, a virtual-reality version of this film.

And I think it wouldn't really work

because everything only works

from this very specific angle of the camera.

And if the audience could look around,

it would really look very broken.

[bird squawks]

So this bird's leader is the closest, I guess,

we have to an antagonist or a villain.

But, still, I think even if we don't relate to it,

we can understand that it wants to protect the smaller bird.

And that was important,

that at least we understand these characters.

And the bird is the only other character that the cat looks up to.

It's really not interested or doesn't like everyone.

And the bird kind of also sees the cat following it in its footsteps,

kind of doing similar things,

and it doesn't want the cat to end up where it does.

And later that we'll see the bird

trying to make the cat not make the same mistakes.

Our budget was fairly limited, so we could only afford to design

and create the assets that we see in the frame.

So we tried to put every cent of the budget on the screen.

So the way I designed the scenes is,

I just roughed them out with basic shapes

and designed the camera.

And once that is figured out,

we only put the detail where it's really noticeable

from the camera's point of view.

So if you would look around within these scenes,

the parts of the sets that are outside of the frame

look quite broken and unfinished.

In this shot, actually, the whole set is scaled up twice as big

as every other shot in this sequence

because we needed it to be long enough to fit with the tempo of the music.

It was already kind of edited

so we couldn't extend the length of the shot,

but to make it fast enough,

we figured out that we could just make the whole set

twice as big while keeping the characters smaller.

And this next sequence where the birds are fighting

was also originally designed as a single shot.

[both squawking]

But it didn't really have the aggressiveness

that I tried to convey.

It felt very distant...

and kind of cold,

so I didn't want just to do a long take...

just to look cool.

And I decided to kind of split it up in these multiple quicker edits,

and in this case, it makes it more intense.

In other cases,

just extending a single shot can create suspense,

but also editing can be a very great tool.

This shot with the bird breaking the wing of the other bird,

I was really impressed

and quite shocked when the animator, Veronique, who did this shot,

she made it a lot more brutal than I had expected it would be,

but it felt right and we didn't want to kind of soften it.

[bird squawking in pain]

And I left it as she did.

I think we end up really connecting with the bird because of how far it went.

There's many ways you can express emotions.

I really think flight can be so expressive.

You can feel exhilaration and joy and also sadness

and being lost and falling.

And this is something I wanted to explore with the bird character as well,

that it loses the ability to fly and that's how we connect with it as well.

The sound designer of Flow is Gurwal Coïc-Gallas,

and I learned from him that often less is more

and sometimes you can convey a lot more through silence

or by exclusion of sounds and just focusing on one thing at a time.

Gurwal also works kind of similarly to me

that he wants to be very involved

and he basically designed all the sounds himself.

There wasn't a big sound team.

And because he wanted to be so hands-on,

he had to start very early,

before even any of the animation was started.

So he had to imagine a lot of things.

This musical cue will be heard again

when they actually reach the towers and climb up.

And so when I'm writing the cues,

I'm not thinking of specific scenes or characters,

I'm just exploring ideas

and basically trying to score the moment,

to make sure that the moment is not compromised

and it's as effective as it can be.

But when Rihards, the other composer, came on board,

he made sure that these themes are developed throughout the film

and they work as a cohesive whole

and they're not just individual pieces.

So he would take a melody written for a scene where the cat appears

and he would treat it basically as the cat's theme

and he would put it in other scenes

and have them develop throughout the film,

which I couldn't do on my own.

So we see the characters kind of being able to navigate the boat,

which probably real animals couldn't do.

But it was important that these characters have agency,

that they're affecting the story.

If they would just sit in a boat

and couldn't really affect which way it goes,

then we couldn't have these moments of conflict

where they have to argue which way to go

or whether to let these other characters in the boat or not.

And because there's no dialogue,

we learn about the characters through their actions and their decisions.

So in the writing process, I'm trying to find

as many moments as I can where they have to make decisions.

So that's why we made our decision to have them able to steer a boat.

But because we got used to them

as being real cats and dogs from the beginning,

I think we can gradually accept this

and it doesn't really put you out from the story.

- [cat meows] - [water splashing]

[bird squeaks]

Again, we see some shots which don't really advance the plot,

but it was important to have these moments

to kind of let us understand the characters...

and see their relationships with each other.

Here, the animation, the acting really does a lot of work.

It's really great comedic timing, I think.

This kind of subplot with the other lemurs was a fairly late addition.

I think it also wasn't in the script, this scene.

It was added after the first edit of the animatic was finished.

And I wanted to introduce the lemurs earlier,

to have us understand the lemur's motivations

so we can connect with it earlier.

♪♪ [upbeat]

When I find an idea that is about a plot, that's not enough.

And, also, when I find an idea when it's just abstract

and it's just emotion, that's also not enough.

But when there's something that kind of is in sync with these two ideas

and that they can express each other, then I get excited about the story.

This shot is meant to imply the image of the whale in the reflection.

I tried to have more moments like that,

but there was no other opportunity, really, to have that image.

[bird squawks]

This musical cue is kind of different from what we've heard earlier.

♪♪ [inspiring]

There's brass instruments which we haven't heard before.

I want it to feel like it's kind of unpredictable where it's gonna go

and there can be some unexpected turns quite late in the film.

But at the same time, it had to feel kind of part of the whole...

and it's kind of a tricky balance.

But the whole city sequence was really complicated

because it was originally built as one big set...

for me to figure out the layout and the blocking of the scenes.

And that set got super heavy on my computer

because of all the heavy assets, which were not really optimized.

I tried to work as quickly as possible

and just put the assets in there,

and it just took many, many minutes to open this file every time.

And it would crash just to open the file.

The action, what we see, is-- It's not that dynamic,

but the music is kind of really driving the scene.

And I kind of like that when the visuals are fairly understated,

but music and visuals can work on kind of different layers.

And I like when music is kind of saying something different

than the visuals and it can evoke something more interesting.

The world in Flow isn't really our world.

We wanted to make something you haven't seen before,

to create that sense of adventure that everything is new.

Because the cat is seeing these things for the first time.

So we made these new places, which are inspired by real places,

like the architecture in Southeast Asia or Central America or Europe.

But we combined them and made something new.

And it was also important that it feels kind of timeless.

There are no skyscrapers or cars.

So there's kind of like a fable-like aspect to it.

The sound designer, Gurwal,

he knew in which scenes the music would be used

and in which scenes there is no music.

So the sound and the music are not competing.

They're collaborating.

And so there isn't a scene

where there's the music dialed up to 11 and also the sound is very heavy.

So when the music is very active,

Gurwal would step back and let the music take care of the scene.

This was complicated, with so many characters within the frame,

just to make sure that as the camera is moving

that they're all kind of framed and visible,

and there's enough time for each of them.

- [lemur chittering] - [dog barks]

Just to figure out the layout of this shot,

this was, like, way more complicated than most of the shots.

But I think it's interesting

that it's not a bunch of close-ups and inserts,

but we can see everything within the wide shot,

and everyone can look around at whatever they chose to look at

and almost become an editor themselves

by deciding what's the most interesting thing to look at.

In the animatic, there was a deleted shot, which was never animated,

that included the fruit that fell down.

And it was about how the lemur couldn't manage to eat it,

and it was just about the capybara helping it.

It was just character development,

as the lemur allowed others to slowly support it.

But it wasn't really necessary.

[cat meows]

The environment is really there

to convey what the characters are feeling,

so it's not there just to look pretty.

I always kind of start with the emotion I need to convey

and then build the environment around that,

kind of reverse-engineering it.

And because it's not a real place that we're trying to replicate,

I think I have more freedom to design what's needed

specifically for this scene rather than just replicating a real place.

Again, here's the kind of circular, spiral-like motif,

which I tried to use as much as I could,

similar to the deer running in circles.

- [capybara grunts] - ♪♪ [lighthearted]

The cat is underwater for a long time,

not really taking a breath.

But I think we can believe it

because we're following the story, hopefully.

A cat being afraid of water

is something we don't need to explain with dialogue.

It works visually and everyone understands it across cultures,

so I think it's a very strong concept.

But, yeah, it's really-- I'm more interested in the idea

of the cat being afraid of others than the water.

The next few shots with the whale leaping out

required the simulation to be very, very detailed,

and these were the heaviest files we had.

Each frame had many, many gigabytes of data for the water.

[music continues]

In the whole city sequence, the light is very overexposed.

And I kind of like that pastel-like look

of overexposed film photography,

which I tried to replicate in this digital render

where it's a very soft fall-off of the highlights.

It's kind of hard to convey smell through images and sounds,

and I think with the flies I think you can smell them.

Our animators work in passes.

They first design the rough blocking, which is just the key poses.

And there's no kind of smooth movement between these poses.

And then they do the spline pass,

where it's more smoothly morphing between these poses.

And, finally, they do the polish pass, where you add these finer details.

I really like the cat's reaction and the voice it had.

That wasn't in the animatic,

that was something our animator, Francis, suggested.

So sometimes I would design these shots and have a fairly clear idea,

but we tried to have animators be able to suggest things.

If it doesn't completely make us redo the whole layout,

there are some subtle things that animators suggested

that really made a huge difference and added to the film.

And sometimes that's very complicated.

Like, it requires me to adjust the camera or redo some things.

But because the team is pretty small, they can send me their files,

and I can make adjustments to the camera very quickly

and send the files back to the animator.

And it takes just an hour or so.

But in a bigger production, it would have to go through many meetings

and department heads.

And on a smaller team, you have kind of more flexibility

to move more quickly and try some alternative ideas,

and I think that's the benefit of a smaller team.

♪♪ [upbeat]

To me, the image of a cat swimming is quite striking.

It's something we are not used to seeing and it can be very expressive as well.

It's almost dance-like.

I think we can express a lot through movement,

which is something that I'm always looking for.

How to express things with movement rather than dialogue.

This sequence is not just edited to the tempo of the music,

but within the shot, the cat would jump

or look around on the beat of the music.

So this was really helpful

that the music was written in pre-production,

so the animators could use it.

We didn't need to use temp score from other films

and then have it be replaced by original music.

We could use the original music from the get-go and animate it.

There are a little over 300 shots in the whole film. I think, 309.

And the average shot length is about 14 seconds.

And were it not for a sequence like the one we just saw,

which had many shots which were, like, a second long or half a second,

those make the average shot length a lot shorter.

I think, without this and two more sequences,

the average shot length would be, like, 30 seconds, which is quite a lot.

[dog barks]

[dog barks]

I made the fish really bright and shiny,

almost like a light bulb,

but it had to be very clear.

So, yeah, it doesn't really make sense,

but it had to be, like, a very clear moment.

This is the other longest shot, almost five minutes long.

And, again, there's no music in this shot as well.

And this entire shot was animated by our director of animation,

Léo Silly-Pélissier.

He did all the characters.

In many of the other shots, there are multiple animators,

each of them doing one of the characters,

and sometimes even two or three doing just a single character.

But in this case, Léo did everything,

and it's very complicated and very hard

to do so many characters in such a long shot.

[dogs barking]

But as I said,

we understand the characters through their decisions.

And I think it's interesting when both decisions are good

or both decisions are bad,

and there are no easy answers.

And so we can understand why they want to let the dogs in the boat,

but we can also understand why the bird is against that.

And I think that makes more interesting storytelling.

We treated the voices of the characters basically the same as dialogue.

Our re-recording mixer, Philippe, said it wasn't really any different for him,

and it didn't feel like a different film

than what he's used to working with typically.

Here, again, it was complicated to avoid panning as much as possible.

So it was decided to kind of have the dogs, like,

move from one side of the tower to the other

and to have the boat kind of rotate around it,

to make sure that the camera is not being rotated as much as possible.

So, to me, kind of designing the set and designing the camera and the lighting,

it's all one process that I can't really separate.

It is kind of listed as separate things,

as cinematography and editing and art direction.

But, to me, it's really one process where decisions are made kind of in sync.

The set has to be built to work with this specific camera move,

and that's something that, for me,

is hard to explain to others.

That's why I kind of designed the animatic myself

because there are so many kind of decisions

depending on each other.

I'm not able to convey this to others,

so it's just easier for me to design the shot myself.

[lemur chittering]

Some of the gestures that the lemur does here

are the most cartoony.

[all making noises]

That's something we try to avoid

in many of the other scenes,

to make them feel really believable and naturalistic,

but sometimes you also need to break those rules.

And, in this case, it worked better

to kind of push the design a little bit further.

I spent a lot of time and energy on this location,

this prop, the boat,

which most of the film takes place in the boat.

But it's not like a confined space

because it's always moving and it's open.

And I wanted each of the scenes to be very different,

and there's a variety of things we see.

So even though it's like a single location,

it doesn't feel claustrophobic.

I didn't go to film school, and I also didn't study music.

I learned music for my first feature film, A way.

At first, I opened this professional software

which had so many buttons you can press.

But then I decided to try using an app on the phone,

which made things a lot more simple,

so everything you press will be in key.

And this made me learn the basics.

And then when I opened the professional software again,

I realized you don't need to press all the buttons.

But, yeah, music is really my favorite process

of the whole filmmaking journey

because it's so fast compared to animation,

and it has such a big impact in the final experience.

♪♪ [dramatic]

There's a lot of fog and a lot of clouds

and atmosphere in the whole film.

And it's important to create the sense of depth and scale, of course.

But it's also helpful to hide certain things

and to kind of guide the eye of the audience of which way to look at.

And so, yeah, that's something I use a lot.

It's really kind of a cat-versus-nature story,

so we tried to make the nature kind of scary,

which I think allows us to develop the characters and flesh them out,

rather than have the characters drive all the conflict.

This is nature being very scary.

The camera gets very close to certain elements.

There are some very extreme close-ups with wide angle lenses,

which can be tricky to make sure

that it looks of a piece...

with the rest of the set

because they're, like, different levels of detail.

[cat meows]

It is somewhat easier to kind of create a more graphic art style

with longer lenses,

but I wanted to have these very wide lenses

to be very intimate with the characters.

[cat cries]

To make us feel like we are inside this world

and we are these characters.

So maybe there was some compromise

with the look of the film or just the visuals.

But, to me, it was more important

to create that connection with the characters.

Yeah, I was willing

to kind of compromise the textures, I guess.

This scene was really kind of influenced by the music.

I knew that they would be heading towards this destination

when writing the initial idea for the script,

but I couldn't figure out what would actually happen

when they get there.

And when I had this piece of music, it opened up a lot of ideas for me.

It's both kind of melancholic but uplifting at the same time.

♪♪ [dramatic]

And I like that,

when there are kind of multiple ideas clashing

and creating something different.

And it builds for quite a long time.

And had the music been written later,

maybe it would've just cut to the point where it quickly is up on the tower

and there wouldn't really be this longer build-up.

But I think it's really important to create that sense of anticipation,

to stretch out the suspense.

I had used some electronic instruments in the piece I had written,

and this really gave me the idea

to kind of use this cosmic imagery in this scene.

So it was really the music kind of guiding the scene.

♪♪ [inspiring]

And I always get asked about what happens

and what's the explanation,

but, like, even when I was making it, I wasn't really able to articulate it.

I had the piece of music and it felt right.

It felt like there was a strong emotion.

[music continues]

And it was something that...

It's impossible to convey this experience with words.

Maybe you could adapt it into something,

but that's the reason why I make films,

is to express things that I can't with words.

And I think it's enough just to experience things

and to have an emotional reaction.

And maybe ideas might be more interesting

when they're not explained.

They might lose something if they're overanalyzed.

So music and film are more similar.

Music doesn't need to be explained, it either works or it doesn't.

So I think films should also be treated in a similar way,

that there shouldn't always be, like,

a definitive kind of explanation for everything.

[cat meows]

Again, there's that kind of spiral visual idea.

The music in this kind of last moment...

♪♪ [ethereal]

...we used glasses which were filled with water,

and they're played with the finger on the top of the glass.

And, again, like, glass and reflection kind of...

suggest also this visual idea.

So maybe what happened was real,

maybe it's all in their heads, maybe it's magical realism.

And either way,

the cat and the bird were up in their fantasy, basically.

What they imagine, rather than, like, facing the problems of reality.

So the cat has to literally climb back down into reality

and jump into the cold water.

Otherwise, it will stay there alone.

And, yeah, maybe it escapes all the bad things,

but also it escapes the good things,

and so it doesn't want to do that at this point.

[cat meowing]

I tried to make the water very kind of inky, black-looking

and kind of express through the texture of the water

the kind of desolation that it feels.

But, yeah, in our case, we really had to, like, find ways how to prioritize

the most important things that really matter to the story.

I can't give, like, infinite amount of notes

because we have our schedule and we need to get things done.

So I have to really figure out what notes are important

and what are not so important.

This was also kind of tricky,

to have the film slow down after a very climactic moment,

where you usually have a moment like that at the end of the film,

just for the pacing to make sense.

But we also needed for the cat to feel kind of hopeless in that moment.

So, yeah, it was very tricky to find the balance,

what is fast or slow enough.

Here is a very complicated shot

where a lot of things happen within a single shot,

and there's nothing to kind of hide behind.

It's very wide and turns around 360.

And we see the water really receding.

It would be a lot easier to do this in many close-ups

or just static camera movement.

♪♪ [mysterious]

When I designed the shot, I tried not to limit myself

because I thought that would be someone else's problem,

to figure out how to do it.

And, in many ways, it was.

And we had amazing, like, artists working on this,

but I was really kind of upset with myself

that I didn't make it easier.

Because people don't really care

whether it was difficult to be made or easy.

They just care for the emotional impact.

And sometimes something is extremely simple and quick to do

and has a huge effect...

and no one really cares if something took months.

That can even be distracting, that you think about how difficult it is.

That is something I would just suggest

for, like, first-time filmmakers without a big budget,

to try and figure out things that are easier to do,

whether in animation or in live-action,

to kind of find your strengths and weaknesses and use them creatively.

That's what I tried to do with my first film, A way,

where I tried to design the story around things that are simple to do

and avoiding complicated things.

So these kind of limitations can actually be very interesting

and give you original ideas.

This shot was also one of the heaviest ones

and crashed my computer a lot

because there's a lot of foliage.

And there's I-don't-know-how-many dozens

of millions of particles of these moss and plants.

In terms of my background,

I think maybe the beginning of the film where we see the cat's home

could resemble Latvia and the nature of it.

Unfortunately, we don't have the giant cat statue yet,

but maybe there could be one.

But I think what represents our culture is,

I guess, the character and specifically the cat.

But it's really more a personal story

rather than kind of conveying an entire culture.

But I would say the Latvians,

I know many of them are maybe relatively introverted

or might seem kind of distant at first.

But once you get to know us and we become friends,

we get really attached and become kind of friends for life.

So I guess the journey of the cat

kind of represents part of Latvian culture, I would say.

♪♪ [lighthearted]

I really like the lighting in this scene.

There are, again, these pools of light.

It's not just like a single sun that illuminates everything.

There are many, many lights and objects casting shadows,

just to make sure that these images work from all these different angles

as the camera moves.

There was originally planned to be a longer sequence

of the cat just wandering around the forest, being lost.

And it really needed the momentum.

So it was shortened a lot.

And now we see the lemur basically coming to the cat right after.

But, originally, there was the idea

that the cat would be lost for a few minutes...

and feeling very hopeless.

[lemur chitters]

♪♪ [upbeat]

This whole kind of sequence after the flood

was kind of inspired by a place in Madeira, Portugal,

their Fanal Forest, which is high up in the mountains,

which is often covered in clouds, which looks like fog.

And there's these very old, ancient trees covered in moss.

And I went there just to be inspired while making this film.

[dogs barking]

This sequence with the boat in the tree,

again, was quite complicated.

And while I was writing this scene,

I would do, like, a very rough model of the boat in the tree,

to figure out the various angles that it needed to be,

to make sure that it makes sense.

That it needed to be, at first, too high for them to jump out,

and later, it's the right amount of distance.

Later, it's too low again,

and I wasn't even sure if it would make sense.

So I had to, like, basically design this scene in a 3D model

before the script was written.

And that's kind of helpful as a writer,

to be able to do these kind of mock-up models

to figure out what could happen in the scene.

So often, while writing,

I'm also kind of developing the look and the layout of the scenes,

which can often also give me ideas,

which I wouldn't have come up with if I would just be writing on the page.

[capybara grunts]

I was considering various characters

who could be the last one who is stuck in the boat.

At one point, it was the golden retriever, or it was all of the dogs.

But, yeah, I came to the realization that it should be the capybara.

We really care about, and, again,

the film kind of returns to where it started,

as the capybara being the first one in the boat in the beginning

and now the last one to leave it.

I still don't play any instruments.

I write the music on my laptop,

moving the notes up and down, and reacting to them as I listen to them.

I think because I didn't study music,

maybe some of the choices I make are unexpected

and make the approach more interesting

because I don't know the right way or the wrong way.

I thought there would be water down in the gorge.

It would be scary that there would be these scary waves crashing against rocks.

Again, water is, like, what the cat is afraid of.

But that was just too complicated to pull off,

and we ran out of time and budget.

And so we made it into this just fog where the boat disappears,

and we don't even see it crashing anywhere.

But I think it actually works better than having water.

And when writing the film and also developing the shots visually,

it took me a long time to convince myself

that this ending makes sense and it works,

and that we understand what the cat is thinking.

Because it's kind of hard without dialogue to convey these things.

So that's why it's not just the acting of the characters,

it's not just the voices, but it's the whole structure of the story.

That's why we needed the deer in the beginning.

That's why we needed that dream sequence

to kind of convey what the cat is feeling in this moment.

So it's really about the context, how we reveal the information.

♪♪ [dramatic]

And the cat is running away

because it's implied that there might be a flood,

but it's also running away from the other characters.

It's running away from intimacy.

We've seen it kind of overcome some of those fears,

but it was important to show that, despite everything,

as we evolve as people or as they evolve as animals,

that still, there's some things we can't change about ourselves.

And maybe that's okay,

and we have to learn how to accept that and allow others to support us.

So that was important to show,

that there isn't, like, a simple solution to everything,

that you can just become brave and everything is perfect from now on.

I think, as everyone kind of learns things,

that, yeah, life is more complicated.

But that doesn't mean that it's hopeless.

But this felt just more honest,

that it's not like a simple happy ending or a sad ending.

Hopefully, there's a bit of both.

[music continues]

And in the beginning of the film, the water was trembling.

And it's still trembling,

but it will calm down when the other characters join the cat.

And I thought it would actually return back to its home near the house

where we started the story, but it didn't make sense.

It's just too far.

And when I realized that it's enough just to have an image like this,

of them looking in the reflection,

that's actually a lot more powerful

than just returning to the same place geographically.

[music fades]

♪♪ [dramatic]

And the credits are pretty short.

They're, I think, about two and a half minutes,

which is not a lot for an animated film.

But, yeah, when the film was pretty much finished,

I had to figure out what to do with the credits,

so as not to have just a plain black background.

And I thought that I could put some images of underwater.

But then, quite late,

I decided to kind of have the camera emerge from the water,

which we'll see, but it felt kind of empty.

And it was very late that I decided to add that extra moment

where we see the whale again.

That wasn't in the script, and all the team had left.

We couldn't just ask an animator to create something new,

so I decided to reuse some animation from an earlier scene.

But because it's a very different angle and it's quite far, it worked.

But, yeah, there isn't really, like, a clear logic to it.

It was a very kind of spontaneous decision that, again, I couldn't explain myself.

It just felt right, and it might be what's happening chronologically,

what happens next.

It might be a memory of something that the whale had.

It might be a different whale. We don't know.

But it just felt right to leave

on what could be a hopeful moment for some characters, but also quite...

the opposite of that for others.

But no matter what I think...

Even if there is another flood,

I think these characters will find a way to make it through

after what they've gone through before, so...

Thank you for watching, and...

I'm quite happy with this film, like--

Of course, there are some things that I wish I could improve, but...

it's quite rare, I think,

when you can make something that you're pretty happy with.

[music fades]