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Ariane Payen • Producer

Producer on the Move 2006 – Luxembourg

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After several years spent working in animation, in 2001 Ariane Payen set up LuxAnimation, a production company and studio, together with Lilian Eche. Since then, this production company, very much influenced by the love of cinema, has produced more than 170 hours of series and cartoons and is now taking on new challenges, such as Renaissance [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Aton Soumache
interview: Christian Volckman
film profile
]
(see Focus).

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Cineuropa : Passionate about cinema, what made you want to work in animation ?
Ariane Payen: I started out working in fiction features in Antwerp. The school was excellent but a little tough. After six whole months without being paid and quite a few humiliations of all sorts (I kept my physical integrity, I promise!) for two years, I said to myself that I had definitely made the wrong choice... That’s what made me apply to "the other side", that is distributors, TV channels, the MEDIA programme. In the end, I got a job with Cartoon. It’s as if I “landed” in animation by accident. However, after four years, the administration and technocracy linked to Media drove me crazy and I then decided to "seek another position" – this time in production and thanks to my four years at Cartoon, I had made several contacts, but they were in animation... That is how I ended up in Neurones in Liege (which later became Neuroplanet), a group of production companies and studios in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Canada, Portugal and Korea.

You are Belgian and you have worked in Belgium for several years. However, you founded your own company LuxAnimation in Luxembourg. What were your reasons for doing this?
When Neuroplanet went bust, we set up something similar in Luxembourg thanks to the government’s CIAV subsidy, a simple yet reliable system. Through founding LuxAnimation, we first used the know-how that we already had, but I still had only one wish: to return to my first love – cinema and fiction. That’s how the co-production of two features came about, first Renaissance followed by la Jungle. Renaissance is a film that should have scared off one or more producers because of the motion capture technique. In fact, even if we worked with real actors on a real film set with a fairly regular structure for traditional films, 24 infra-red cameras, “combination" costumes full of captors, the set which was sketched in black seemed very strange but not to a producer of animated films who, rightly enough, feels reassured working with this technology. I was very happy to commit myself to this project, a cross between a classical animated film and a live film. Then, the same producers gave us the possibility of co-producing La Jungle, a pure fiction first feature by Matthieu Delaporte. Our goal is to continue in this direction...

What do you think of the EFP initiative? It’s the first chance for me to participate at the Cannes Film Festival and I hope to be able to see how things really work from the “inside”. I am also expecting to make contacts for the long term and to meet people with the same, or similar, mindsets…

What films are you working on next?
We have just signed a deal with the US to make a feature from a short called "9", made by a promising young director, Shane Acker, who has worked under the guidance of Tim Burton. All of the 3D animation will be done in Luxembourg with Attitude Studio, with whom we have already worked on for Renaissance. We are also working on a film called “La Planète des Vents” with Denis Friedman Productions, a top quality 3D animated feature. In both cases, the target audience is not children...

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