Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Director Pierre-Luc Granjon’s Favorite Shot From ‘The Night Boots’ (EXCLUSIVE)

We invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them.

Nomination voting starts on January 12 and runs through January 16.

Today, we hear from Annecy Cristal-winner Pierre-Luc Granjon about his short The Night Boots. Animated frame-by-frame with a screen of 277,000 metal pins, the short follows a young boy who sneaks out as his parents entertain their guests downstairs. After wandering into the nearby woods, he meets a friendly creature who leads him on a nocturnal woodland adventure.

Here’s Granjon’s favorite shot from the short, and an explanation of the tremendous amount of highly-detailed work required to create it.

This shot is Eliot’s subjective point of view. At this point in the film, it is late at night, and he knows he must return home. But the little creature has managed to lure him into its burrow. Refusing to accept that its new friend must go home, it carefully prepares a bed of straw for him. Eliot feels all the more sorry to have to leave. The creature has been his guide in this amazing forest, introducing him to some of its extraordinary inhabitants, and Eliot is not yet fully aware of it, but he is beginning to grow attached to this little character.

I shot this scene after having worked on the Alexeïeff/Parker pinscreen for several months. By then, it had become natural for me to draw without lines, using only masses of light and shadow. Over time, I learned to control the pressure applied to the pins so they would pop out or retract in just the right way to achieve the desired contrast. To do this, I use small glass tools, which I rub over the screen, a veritable forest of needles, to make the light emerge or, conversely, to darken the image. I quite like the overall rendering of this scene and the volume of the creature. In terms of animation, I think I’ve managed to show how carefully the little creature works to make the bed of straw soft and comfortable for its new friend. I also made the light flicker, as the burrow is lit only by a small wood fire.

I also really like the sound atmosphere that Loïc Burkhardt, Xavier Drouault, and Cédric Lionnet — respectively sound designer, foley artist, and ee-recording mixer — managed to create. After a long time spent outdoors, we find ourselves in a small, nest-like space, and it was important that the place feel cozy and warm. The influence of sound on how we perceive the image is particularly strong in this kind of scene. In fact, after a screening of The Night Boots, even though this scene is lit in the same way as the rest of the film, a child asked me: “How did you make the straw yellow?”