Autour de Minuit

A version of this article appeared in The Age, June 17, 2010.

Directed by a French trio who go by the collective name H5, the computer-animated short film Logorama (2009) takes place in a version of Los Angeles that feels both strange and familiar. Every inch of every building is plastered with logos – but the product placement doesn't stop there. The attractions at a zoo include the MGM lion, the Linux penguin and the Lacoste crocodile; Colonel Sanders himself works behind the counter of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, while Fido Dido strolls by outside. Modelled after a Hollywood action blockbuster, the plot involves a couple of cops who look like Michelin Men, engaged in a high-speed pursuit of a mean-eyed Ronald McDonald down a highway lined with palm trees representing a German brand of cola.

Six years in the making, the sixteen-minute Logorama needs to be seen several times to savour all the details. Practically every shot contains dozens of logos, both famous and obscure – though according to the producer Nicolas Schmerkin, no attempt was made to obtain permission from the copyright holders. “If we had to ask every company,” he says, “then of course half would have said no, and the other half would have been willing to be involved and would want their logo bigger and would want to be the good guy.” Instead, the team had a lawyer standing by, ready to launch a defense on artistic grounds. “We didn't know if after the first screening the film would be forbidden,” Schmerkin says, “or if we'd be sued.”

Instead, they wound up at the Oscars, where Logorama won the 2010 award for Best Animated Short. Schmerkin says that the major surprise was to be nominated in the first place. Though Logorama had already received multiple awards in Europe, he wasn't sure how the Academy would react to its satire of a society ruled by corporate imagery. “But once we were there,” he says, “we knew we had a chance.”

Originally from Argentina, Schmerkin began his career as a journalist and aspiring filmmaker, with a special interest in experimental work by young artists emerging from the fields of music video, animation and graphic design. In 2001, he founded the Paris production company Autour de Minuit (“Round Midnight”) which had its first success with Hendrick Dusollier's Obras (2004) a simulated ten-minute tracking shot through the ruins of a demolished suburb of Barcelona. “That convinced us we were on the right path,” says Schmerkin, who describes the film as “a prototype of what we wanted to do, mixing techniques and formats and genres.”

Autour de Minuit has since produced roughly thirty animated short films, as well as videos for bands such as Air. The studio is the subject of a spotlight at the upcoming Melbourne International Animation Festival, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year; a separate program at the festival will showcase the work of festival guest and regular Autour de Minuit collaborator Edouard Salier, whose sensibility has a dark, unsettling edge. His controversial Flesh (2005), for instance, hints at a sexual logic underlying the September 11 attacks, with live-action soft porn clips superimposed on the side of the twin towers.

Subversive as such images may appear, Schmerkin stresses that he and the team at Autour de Minuit do not necessarily see themselves as opposed to Hollywood spectacle. (He greatly admires Pixar, especially for their scripts.) Still, their productions are conceived on a smaller, more personal scale. Schmerkin compares the boom in digital animation to electronic music: in both cases, it suddenly became possible to produce significant works using tools available to anyone with a home computer.

“What we are doing now,” he says, “we could not do it before 2002. The only way was to work with big, powerful machines in very big, expensive post-production facilities. It meant working for years, at night, when the big machines were free, and only people who really knew these complicated systems could do it. Now whoever has some curiosity and talent can afford to do a great piece of art.” The most significant development, he says, is the dramatic increase in computer processing speed: where a ten-second shot would once have taken four days to “render,” the same thing can now be done in half an hour.

Accepting the Oscar for Logorama, Schmerkin joked that as the film had taken so long to make, he hoped to return with “a long feature film in around thirty-six years”. In fact, he says, the studio has a number of feature projects in the early script stages, including a science-fiction film by Salier.

He notes that the boundaries between animation and live action cinema have become increasingly blurred both in Hollywood genre movies like Sin City (2005) and in art films like Waltz With Bashir (2008). Autour de Minuit has experimented in this way from the start, and with today's technology it can be done more easily than ever. “I think we have arrived at a maturity of the machines,” Schmerkin says. “For me, and for what we're doing, mixing is the future.”