…After making a few shorts, I realized that I’m not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera. And so at first, I used Maya, which was taught at our school at that time.

After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender in 2019, mainly because of [realtime rendering engine] EEVEE. I started using the 2.8 beta or even alpha release. It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender.

EEVEE was interesting to me because it was all playblasted, which is not like proper rendering, rather it’s like previews.

I was excited to find that workflow in Blender, but in a more advanced way that gave me greater control. Speed is really important to me—not just in rendering but also in working with files, setting up lighting, and creating the overall look. I like to work on multiple aspects at the same time; for example, when setting up the camera, I also need lights in place because lighting influences camera placement and how the scene looks. That’s why EEVEE was so appealing to me.

Since I handled a lot of tasks myself, it was simpler to work with large files where everything was imported. In each file, I made extensive adjustments to assets. For example, when setting up lighting, I tweaked materials for the assets in each shot, making them slightly lighter or darker to get the right look. I know this could be done with library overrides, but I was also working across different computers: my desktop PC and my MacBook.

Switching between operating systems sometimes caused issues with linked assets, even when using relative file paths. To avoid breaking links, I found it easier to keep everything within the file itself. Some of the smaller scenes were around 300 MB compressed, while a few of the largest ones reached nearly 2 GB compressed.

“I love Jacques Tati, and [he] does exactly that,” Coïc-Gallas said. “You don’t hear everything. You choose one sound, then another sound; we made ‘Flow’ a bit like that. We chose sounds to create an emotion.”

“There’s always movement. There’s absolutely no continuous sound. The birds are moving. The water is moving. Everything is moving around all the time. And all the sound environments reflect the emotion of the cat.”

Now that I’ve made eight films, people kind of know [my working methods], but it was so important for me to have a Zoom meeting with every single crew member, even the PAs, in which we got to know each other. It took a long time, and people were like, “This is so different [from other productions],” but this should be the norm. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy. I should be able to talk to you, and you should be able to talk to me at any time, and that’s the way it was.

The reason I take casting credit now is that it’s not like I have a casting director come on and present me with names. I take my time: I scour Instagram, I watch films deliberately to look for talent, I find people on the street. When [producer Samantha Quan and I] see somebody in public who makes an impression, we approach them. That’s how we found Suzanna Son in Red Rocket. Ivy Wolk, from the candy store scene, came from an Instagram interaction. Casting is everything to me. I almost need these faces in order to write.