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The Story Behind the France2 Christmas Animation

Bart ·

Geraldine Karolyi has an inspiring story to share about the creation of the amazing Christmas animation that featured on French National Television.

Geraldine writes:

I would like to tell you that this project was a really amazing experience.

If you have time, let me tell you about the whole story (sorry in advance for my bad english)

Everything began 2 years ago, when I was asked by a production company to create and to direct the new Christmas design for the main national channel in France: ‘France2’. I asked my favorite animator Cédric Hansen to work with me. We were very used to do broadcast design for TVs, but both of us have always wanted to do ‘real’ 3D animation. That was a great opportunity: Cédric told me he would make it with Blender, even if he was just a “beginner” with this software.

The producers gave us very little money, and let us alone to do everything, just the two of us (!!!)… we had very bad moments, but still a very high motivation! We worked night and day: I wrote the scripts and designed the characters, while Cédric gave life to all this: what a terrific feeling it was…

The result was great: this was the first 2009 version and we were happy about it (but no comparison to this second 2011 version!!).

In Autumn, France2 called me back, but then they asked whether my own company, 17mars, could produce it. I was so proud! I decided to invest a lot in the project to get the best image. Cédric, my artistic director Brice Boisset, and I, had to form a team very quickly: but we didn’t know any professionnal working with Blender!

After some email exchanges, we luckily met Michaël Guédon (Blender clan) who introduced us to other Blender men : Dono, Paul Sajzner and Denis Parrot. We really appreciate this community: everybody was very enthusiastic, worked a lot, with passion, during 2 months.
This year, we were 7 instead of 2!!!

I am very proud: proud to have worked in a great state of mind, and proud of the result! But that was also a team work and in this respect I’m also proud to be a producer who prefers to pay the appropriate people to get a good result rather than to earn more money.

I hope we’ll manage to develop animation, this is our ambition. We plan to produce a short film/series for TV, and I hope this experience will help us. I’ll go back to the channel in January to plan all that, and try to get some money…

That’s was a Blender story… I hope it is not the last one.

_Geraldine Karolyi

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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