Article written by the National Centre for Cinema and Moving Images (CNC)
Published on 23/09/2024 by Pauline Jaubert
Located in Orly, to the south of Paris, the École Méliès has been training “Image Artisans” for 25 years. Its founder and general director, Franck Petitta, describes the school’s DNA, how it adapts to contemporary technological challenges, and how he sees the future at a time when the school is one of the 68 winners of the “France 2030 – La Grande Fabrique de l’image” call for projects led by the CNC.
Franck Petitta has every reason to be proud: one of his first students, Guillaume Rocheron, received the Génie d’honneur at the 2024 edition of the PIDS Enghien special effects festival. The visual effects supervisor, who has worked on numerous American films such as Life of Pi, Ad Astra and Nope, was in fact part of the school’s very first year group. In 2019, he even won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for 1917, directed by Sam Mendes.
Based in Orly since 1999, the École Méliès trains “Image Artisans”, a notion that Franck Petitta particularly likes to emphasise. “It is the school’s DNA,” he explains. “Our philosophy is to work at the crossroads between the traditional and the digital worlds. And what do we mean by tradition? Painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic design, photography, the camera… All of these feed into digital imagery.”
Forms and techniques
Stop motion, “traditional” animation or computer animation: named after the first great filmmaker to transpose imagination onto film, the school trains its students in animated-image professions across all their forms and techniques.
The institution offers an optional Applied Arts and Cinema Preparatory Class to enter the school, as well as two Master’s degree programmes (M2) developed in partnership with Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA):
- an “Animated Image Artisan” track focused on animation cinema,
- and a “Cinema and New Technologies Artisan” track oriented towards video games.
In their fifth year, the school’s 300 students can specialise in character animation or in images and visual effects.
“What matters most in the first specialism is the desire to pick up a pencil, felt pens, and build one’s career through drawing. The second specialisation, on the other hand, highlights all the new image-related technologies,” sums up Franck Petitta, who also insists on what sets character animation apart from motion design in general, which is used to create logos, title sequences or ambience effects.
“Fundamentals are taught throughout the entire course of study: it is only at the end, during their final-year project, that students truly showcase their specialisation. This is essential. By specialising too quickly, after just one year of a common core curriculum, there is a risk of not having an overall understanding of the production pipeline, regardless of the industry: animation cinema, visual effects, video games, architecture, medical imaging…”
Franck Petitta spoke on 8 February during the conference “Training in innovative techniques: knowing how to stay in the game”, as part of Paris Images 2024.
Objective 2030
Cinema, which is at the heart of the school’s training, accounts for 50% of its programmes. Students learn how to make “real” cinema, on set, through shooting, lighting, editing and broadcasting. They use green screens and LED walls, and are introduced to volumetric techniques and different forms of motion and performance capture.
“The goal is to turn them into young, versatile professionals within the film industry,” explains Franck Petitta.
As a French non-profit association (law 1901), the École Méliès also offers free evening classes, has invested in environmentally friendly buildings, and co-produces charity animated films with the Fondation Abbé Pierre, Les Enfoirés, Les Restos du Cœur and France Nature Environnement.
The school is one of the 68 winners of “La Grande Fabrique de l’image”, the strand of the France 2030 investment plan dedicated to film studios, digital production studios and training in image-related professions.
The institution spent a year and a half developing its France 2030 project, “Artisans de l’image”. In collaboration with INA and UPEC, the École Méliès plans to double the number of people trained within five years, by constantly adapting its teaching methods to technological evolutions while pursuing a dual objective of inclusion and decarbonisation.
“Our ambition is to strengthen the ties between the animation and visual effects industries and those of video games and architecture,” explains Franck Petitta. “We want to reach out to high school students to help them discover the professions we train for and the technologies currently being developed. They need to start asking questions about their future well before the baccalaureate. They should be wondering: which tool do I want to use to tell stories – a pencil, drawing, or a camera?”
Craftsmanship facing the future
At the start of the 2024 academic year, the École Méliès will also launch a third specialisation, “artistic direction and storytelling”, dedicated to narrative pre-production.
“Creating an image means creating a story,” reminds Franck Petitta. “Knowing how to operate a camera on a set, lit for real, then reproducing the same gesture in 3D software, relies on the same fundamental principles. You need to know how to choose a focal length, frame correctly, understand camera movement – in other words, understand storytelling. Even a still image must contain a narrative dimension. This is why the word ‘artisan’ is so crucial.”
Today, the school is reflecting on the challenges raised by artificial intelligence. “AI is not a tool, it is a machine. A pencil is a tool. A machine is something that replaces humans. AI is here; we will not be able to make it disappear. We have to learn how to tame it,” states Franck Petitta.
“This also means defending a certain ethic in the creative process. We must use AI to tell stories in a specific way: creation must always happen in a space of moderation, calm and serenity… Creation takes time. AI can be used to make a rough – a composition sketch or draft – to conduct research or to explore particular graphic renderings, but it will never replace humans.”
