THEORY
MASTERCLASS
WRITING ANIMATION: MOMOKO SETO
Éthann Néon: I’m going to ask some questions about writing and animation relating to time, as that’s the research I’m currently working on. But first, as we usually do: could you briefly introduce yourself, your work and your working methods?
Momoko Seto (photo: Gabriel Hutchinson – source: Wikipedia)
Momoko Seto :
‘Animation’ is a strange word for me, because I don’t actually animate much myself. In other words, I don’t draw, I don’t do pixel art, and I don’t do stop-motion. In fact, I set up cameras to capture natural phenomena that are often imperceptible to the naked eye: plants growing, mould growing, fungi growing or dying. I compress these processes over time using the time-lapse technique. I’m somewhat on the fringes of animation.
When I write – since we’ve been talking a lot about writing in this discussion – it’s very carefully planned. People are surprised that it’s so meticulously prepared. All the shot breakdown, the timing, the elements we want to see develop within the shot, and the camera movements are extremely precise. Each shot requires very different equipment depending on whether it’s a tracking shot, a low-angle shot, a macro shot or a wide shot. So the cost per shot varies. Hiring a 25 mm lens isn’t the same as hiring a 65 mm macro lens. The script is extremely precise.
Extrait du story board de Planètes (tiré du making of de Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
Ten years passed between the time Momoko Seto began writing and the release of the film *Planètes* (75 minutes, 2025, produced by Miyu, Ecce Films, Arte France Cinéma, UMedia, CNRS Images and Reepost).
The screenplay was written by Momoko Seto and Alain Layrac, in collaboration with Mariette Désert.
Filming lasted 260 days and took place in Iceland, France (notably at the CNRS premises in Roscoff, Brittany, and at Rambuteau Castle in Burgundy) and on Yakushima in Japan. The film comprises around 700 shots.
Miyu’s website describes the film as follows: Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa – four dandelion achenes that survive from a series of nuclear explosions destroying Earth – are propelled into the cosmos. After crash-landing on an unknown planet, they set out in search of soil where their species might survive. However, they must face countless obstacles: the elements, fauna, flora, the climate.
The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, the Paul Grimault Prize at the Annecy Festival in 2025 and the Jury Prize at the Bucheon International Animation Festival in 2025.
Alain Layrac, co-scénariste de Planètes (photo : Unifrance)
Alain Layrac is a French screenwriter born in 1965, best known for co-creating the cult series Une famille formidable and for writing numerous feature films, such as *Mauvaises Fréquentations*. He is Head of Screenwriting at the European Conservatoire of Audiovisual Writing. He has also published several books on his craft, including Atelier d’écriture and Une vie de scénariste.
In my short films, for example, I’d take a photo of a bee, cut it out in Photoshop, set the framing, the background, the bee’s movement, the movement of the other bees arriving one by one, and the duration of the shot. We know you need a Phantom camera, capable of extreme slow motion. All the shots are meticulously planned out before filming. In the short films, the script is fairly simple in terms of the writing: for example, I follow the evolution of a planet as it thaws, then there’s global warming and the insects emerge from the iceberg.
I write out the script, and then I design the storyboard in Photoshop, shot by shot.
Extrait du story board (tiré du making of de Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
For feature films, of course, it’s a bit different. We had 70 pages of script written (interior, daytime, close-up, etc.). It was a rather unusual script, very different from a traditional film script, but it still took that form. From there, I created the storyboard drawings – as Éthann mentioned, very rough sketches. There were 200 pages with six drawings per page – that was a lot. We had nearly 800 shots to start with, which were then cut during editing. Those shots were all drawn. I didn’t use Photoshop this time; I drew them by hand, because there was also a lot of compositing involved in my work.
Extrait du story board (tiré du making of de Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
So I film the foreground – the insect that’s being filmed – then I film the background, then I create the animation on top of that, then I add the special effects – the smoke and all that sort of thing. All these layers are extremely detailed, written out, or at least specified. Out of the 800 shots, and once I’d drawn the storyboard for the feature film Planète, we’d done it all.
Extraits du story board (tiré du making of de Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
I’ve created a map showing how the story unfolds geographically – north, south, west and east – as well as in relation to the light. The direction of the light is extremely important for compositing. You can’t film something with front lighting and then try to superimpose it onto a background that’s backlit – it’ll be obvious that they’re not part of the same image. So all these light directions are specified in great detail in relation to the map and the time of day – whether the sun is high in the sky or low on the horizon…
I drew a sketch of the map, and we modelled it in 3D – also very roughly – with the help of graphic designers. Then, within the 3D model, we placed 3D cameras so that we could create all the film’s shots as animation, in the form of an animatic: the movements, the wide shots, and so on.
Excerpts from the storyboard (taken from the ‘making of’ by Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
We went through the script again with the editor. In animation, we edit before production begins. The editor comes in, has a look, and says: ‘We’re missing a close-up here, or we’re missing a wide shot’, and so on. He worked with Michel Klochendler. He’s more of a feature film editor; he’s worked on films by Alain Resnais, for example. As a fiction editor, he was more focused on the story and the characters. Once the editor has approved the animatic, we move on to production. The feature film took three years of writing and two years of preparation.
Michel Klochendler (photo : Makloch – source : Wikipedia)
Michel Klochendler has worked with François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette, André Téchiné, Youssef Chahine and Claude Berri.
ÉN: That already goes some way towards answering some of the questions I had. But so, you’re saying it’s very precise in terms of the storyboard, as you explained, and also in terms of the filming time for each element that makes up the shots. You must find out how long it takes for a particular plant to grow, or a particular insect to develop, and so on, I imagine.
M : Exactly.
Excerpts from the storyboard (taken from the ‘making of’ by Mathieu Cayrou – CNRS / Miyu)
ÉN: So how does that work? Because that sort of information isn’t necessarily easy to come by, even on the internet.
MS : There are lots of plants that I feature in my work and that I already have at home. For example, oxalis or succulents. I’ve observed them to find out how long they take to grow. For more specific details, I work with a botanist, of course. That was the case in the film Planètes. I work a lot with scientists when it comes to animals: slugs, butterflies… All these animals require a filming period of between three days and two weeks, or even a month for slugs. It also involves rearing them in controlled conditions and understanding their behaviour. I visit researchers at the Natural History Museum, where I often read books or watch video tutorials on YouTube, and finally I observe them myself. I keep them at home in the run-up to filming. For example, I go and collect insects from my garden.
Image taken from Mathieu Cayrou’s ‘making of’ (CNRS / Miyu)
I’m going to observe them and try to film them with my director of photography. Take the behaviour of insects, for example: often, when we placed a stick there, we realised that the insect would climb up it rather than go down. They seemed more inclined to climb than to go back down the slope. So if we wanted to get them moving, we’d place the stick and tilt the camera in the direction of travel.
We’re working with living creatures, so we really need to understand them. And many animals are often nocturnal. So when we shine a 2 kW light on them, they stop moving. We have to balance these kinds of constraints with their natural behaviour. We also do a lot of preparatory work with researchers and by studying reference material.
Image taken from Mathieu Cayrou’s ‘making of’ (CNRS / Miyu)
ÉN: You’re actually creating a structure that combines different scales – whether spatial or temporal – because you play very strongly on the micro and the macro, between infinite space and the infinitely small, such as insects, and by shifting from one to the other in certain shots with some truly beautiful sequence shots. There’s one in particular in *Planète Σ* where you move from the stars to mould. And it’s absolutely stunning.
To bring different types of temporality together within a single shot, compositing is certainly one option, but when you’re planning it in advance, do you really just impose the elements because you’re interested in making them coexist, or do you genuinely consider the temporality of each element separately and how you’re going to bring them together within the same shot?
Planète Σ (2015, Les Films de l’Arlequin)
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
In terms of compositing, the film’s director of photography, Élie Levé, described it as follows during a talk at the Chefs O’ en Lumière Festival in Chalon-sur-Saône: This image is a composite of many individual images. We filmed a slug moving at real speed on the floor.’ The radishes on the left were filmed in another room using time-lapse. In the background, there are sets from Iceland, and we added vegetation growing via time-lapse.
We can add to this description the 3D-animated achenes created in Liège, Belgium. Momoko Seto is keen for everything else to be shot on location, with all the constraints that entails. Élie Levé: It’s a collage. The images aren’t in the same place at the same time, but they’re still natural images; it’s a montage.
Planètes
depicts supernatural shifts in scale, such as these giant tadpoles (filmed in slow motion in Burgundy; they measure just a few millimetres) flying over an Icelandic river lined with giant anemones (filmed against a blue screen, a year after the shoot in Iceland, by recreating, on a smaller scale, the movement of the drones) and propelling the 3D-animated achenes.
The anemones were filmed at the CNRS premises in Roscoff using underwater optics, namely a periscope camera, at an angle. As the two periscope camera systems purchased from a supplier had taken on water – the manufacturer had not yet fully tested them – the engineers working on the film created a customised diving suit using a 3D printer.
The periscope camera in its specially designed housing.
The river as filmed in Iceland using a drone.
The anemones filmed in Roscoff using a periscope camera that replicates the drone’s movement.
Tadpoles filmed in slow motion using macro photography at Rambuteau Castle in Burgundy.
As the film’s production spanned three years, the directors of photography kept a close eye on technological developments in filming equipment, even if it meant adapting the production schedule in line with new innovations coming onto the market.
The camera crew managed to overcome 90 to 95 per cent of the technical challenges posed by the script, as Élie Levé explained at the conference in Chalon-sur-Saône, but one scene could not be filmed: a scene nicknamed ‘The Valkyries’ by Levé, in which a swarm of 500 mosquitoes attacks a slug, due to the difficulty of filming even a single mosquito.
The oyster mushrooms, filmed in time-lapse against a blue background and which ended up in an omelette, were releasing spores that were clogging up the camera lenses.
MS: The challenge isn’t to say, ‘This is very slow and that’s very fast – how can we make them coexist?’ It’s more that the image itself is the driving force. The question is: how do we create a scene in which there’s a bee flying above some mould, which is a very different size to the bee? I have the image in my mind and I want to bring it to life, regardless of the different time scales involved.
So the question of time scales comes later. In fact, what’s interesting is when you start filming, for example, using time-lapse.
Planète Σ (2015, Les Films de l’Arlequin)
In Planète Σ, in a scene where pure white mould grows on strawberries, it took four days to make the strawberries go mouldy. I collect around 2,500 to 4,000 photos, which I compress in After Effects, and I manipulate the timing to make it both slower and faster. I can speed it up 300 or 400 times, or make it grow very slowly, to the very limit of what’s perceptible. And what interests me, for example, in the growth of a plant, is when it reminds me of something. In this case, the shot I really like in Planète Sigma is the one of the bee flying against a black background with that white flower growing. It reminded me of a field of flowers with a bird flying over it. The mould becomes a field of flowers because the way it grows and the way it blooms resembles a field of flowers in my imagination. The bee was slowed down to 1,500 frames. And when it flies, it looks more like a bird than an insect, because it’s so slow.
There are endless possibilities, and there comes a moment when you say to yourself: ‘That looks like something.’ It’s a juxtaposition of images we have of the world, which we transpose into a macro world that comes to resemble an imaginary universe.
Planète Σ (2015, Les Films de l’Arlequin)
Zepe:Are you familiar with Jean Painlevé’s work?
MS: Yes.
Jean Painlevé (Archives Jean Painlevé)
Jean Painlevé was a French filmmaker and biologist (1902–1989). He is best known for having made over 200 scientific documentaries. In 1936, he directed the first colour stop-motion animation film: Barbe bleue.
Macro-cinema, as seen in Planète A, Planète Σ and Planète Z, originated as a practice developed within the field of scientific cinema by scientists who combined cameras and film equipment with microscopes to observe insects or plants, with the aim of making science accessible to the general public.
Looking back in time, we might mention Robert Hooke (1677–1683), an English polymath considered one of the greatest experimental scientists of the 17th century and a key figure in the scientific revolution of the modern era. He improved the capabilities of microscopes by adding lenses. In September 1665, he published his book, Micrographia, which contains numerous drawings produced using microscopes and telescopes.
Another notable figure is Jean Comandon (1877–1970), a French doctor and filmmaker who made 400 films, notably by attaching a camera to a microscope. He also studied the growth and movements of plants, taking images at intervals or using time-lapse photography.
Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), a Dutch producer and director of scientific films, filmed plants, micro-organisms and minerals, using in particular the so-called Zeitraffer technique: at intervals of fifteen minutes or more.
Z : Do you ever find yourself taken by surprise by the unexpected ways in which forms develop? You talk a lot about post-production – I’m not sure whether you edit the sequences yourself or whether you supervise the compositing artists. Do you let yourself be surprised by what happens as living organisms evolve, and do you adjust the script accordingly?
MS : Yes. That’s happened to me a lot in my short films. In Planète Z, there’s a palm tree that secretes yellow spores. That wasn’t planned for the film. I found that palm tree whilst buying a small pot of moss; those little palm trees were the fruits of the moss. I thought to myself: ‘That really does look like a palm tree; I’ll include it in the film.’
Planète Z (2011, Sacrebleu)
In Planète Σ, bubbles rise very slowly from the water, burst and send plumes of smoke into the air. My production designer used dry ice to create the smoke. We thought it looked incredibly beautiful when filmed in extreme slow motion. I incorporated this into the film without disrupting the narrative too much, because there is, after all, a central thread running through the story. It’s not about upending everything we’ve tried to tell, but about integrating it.
Planète Σ (2015, Les Films de l’Arlequin)
Among the pioneers of slow motion in cinema was Lucien Bull (1876–1972), a Franco-British innovator in cinema and photography, a pioneer of chronophotography and a student of Étienne-Jules Marey. He developed ultra-high-speed cinematography: he achieved 1,200 frames per second in 1904 and 100,000 frames per second in 1928. He surpassed one million frames per second in 1951. Alongside ultra-high-speed cinematography, Lucien Bull invented the first microcinematography camera (which allowed for 8 to 10 times magnification) and a device for accelerated recording (images taken every 15 minutes).
The high-speed Phantom camera, used in Planètes, which enables slow-motion filming, captures 1,000 frames per second and requires more light, as the camera loses sensitivity when the frame rate is increased due to the considerably high shutter speed. This can reduce sensitivity to 1 or 2 ISO. Added to this is the fact that filming is done with macro lenses, which further reduce sensitivity. As a result, a significant amount of light is directed onto the film set, which makes it difficult to film live animals such as those used in the film – namely insects and slugs. Consequently, a fan system is used to cool these animals and keep them alive. The positioning of the lighting is carefully planned to accommodate certain animals that shy away from light.
For the feature film, a little less so. There were surprises, of course. I changed certain parts. For example, because of the behaviour of certain insects. In the script, the praying mantis was simply supposed to jump out and frighten the character. But in reality, praying mantises love climbing on leaves; they don’t stay on the ground. We couldn’t film it stationary on the ground – it was constantly climbing. So we incorporated it into the foliage, trying to catch the characters from above.
For the feature film, a little less so. There were surprises, of course. I changed certain parts. For example, because of the behaviour of certain insects. In the script, the praying mantis was simply supposed to jump out and frighten the character. But in reality, praying mantises love climbing on leaves; they don’t stay on the ground. We couldn’t film it stationary on the ground – it was constantly climbing. So we incorporated it into the foliage, trying to catch the characters from above.
Image taken from Mathieu Cayrou’s ‘making of’ video (CNRS / Miyu)
These are minor adjustments, but I can’t stray too far from the script, because on set, as I’ve explained, every shot is extremely costly and meticulously prepared. Given the background, the special effects and the animation that have been planned, if I add a shot and say, ‘Ah, that’s lovely, I’ll include that. ’ the whole production team will look at me and say, ‘But how are we going to do the background? What are we going to do with the character?’ It’s a shot where we’ll be integrating the main character in 3D, which means an extra pay slip for the graphic designer. There are too many financial implications and complications for me to be able to deviate as easily as I do in short films.
Z: To what extent does the production team get involved in the process? Do they ever, for example, steer the script towards something more ‘moral’ or more mainstream?
MS: I work with Myu, an animation production company in Paris run by Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, the producer, who was quite interventionist.
Emmanuel-Alain Raynal (source : Linkedin)
When it comes to editing, there are artistic considerations, of course, but also many economic factors, because that is, after all, their primary concern. For example, in the feature film, right at the very beginning – within the first three minutes – a bomb explodes. Is it a meteorite, or is it an atomic bomb? For me, it was very important that it be an atomic bomb, because it is humankind that destroys the Earth, of its own accord, and not nature. A falling meteor doesn’t convey the same message. When they read the script, they assumed it was a meteorite. I explained to them that it wasn’t. In terms of cost, it makes no difference. But the meaning changes. At the end of the discussion, they agreed with me.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
Another example: we were still at the animatic stage; the main character arrives in a frozen world, tries to jump but can’t get a foothold, and then all the characters end up on the ground because it’s so slippery. So the hero helps his mates get back on their feet. And the production team told me that the main character should first help his friends get back on their feet, and only then try to get a foothold – the idea being that this character must help his friends first before thinking of himself, by trying to get a foothold on his own. I accepted these kinds of minor adjustments because it was a good idea, and it’s quite ethical: what message do we want to convey through the main character?
They would intervene regularly. This is just one example among fifty others, and it was sometimes positive. In the end, there were a lot of interventions and cuts.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
The feature film cost 4 million euros, which is a low budget for an animated feature film. It was actually estimated at 4.5 million. We didn’t receive the European funding we’d been expecting. The production team came to see me and told me there was a shortfall of 500,000.00 euros. You can’t do everything. The film was 1 hour 20 minutes long to begin with. We inevitably had to make cuts. It’s not a question of making less beautiful shots, but of removing sequences. We sit round the table and ask ourselves which sequences to remove. It’s a decision that’s at once script-related, artistic and a matter for the production team.
ÉN: You mentioned the opening of *Planètes* with the atomic bomb. In Planète Σ, Planète Z and Planète A – which I rewatched at Le Frénoy – it seems to me that, each time, it ends with the decay or death of the elements. It starts with the birth of these elements and goes right through to their end. Whereas, in the feature film, it’s the opposite. It begins with the death of these elements and culminates in their re-establishment. Is this a conscious choice? Was it your intention to have reversed this paradigm in the feature film?
Planète Z (2011, Sacrebleu)
MS: I didn’t think to myself: “In my short films, I’ve killed them all. So, in the feature film, I’ll do the opposite”. What interests me is talking about life, in the sense of the metamorphosis of all these living beings. It’s not just because they die that they die; there’s more to it. I’m not talking about a philosophical or Buddhist perspective. It seems as though the plants are dead, but in fact they grow back, because the roots are still there. There’s a symbiosis with the fungi that breathe new life into them. What interests me is precisely shifting the focus away from the human perspective in all my films. It’s an aspect I pay very close attention to when writing. If it were a human story, someone dies, everyone cries, and that’s the end of it. If it’s a story about plants, death doesn’t have the same meaning as it does for us. Just because you cut down a tree trunk doesn’t mean it’s dead. It will sprout again because the roots are still there. I like the idea that the concepts of living, being born and dying do not have the same meaning as they do for humans. The perspective is shifted and focused on avoiding the dramatisation of life and death. There’s a quote by Emanuele Coccia that I really like: ‘Western philosophy has largely been written by men.’ Men, male philosophers. And there’s a lot of talk about death. Death is a very important theme in philosophy. He adds that if there had been many more female philosophers, perhaps there would have been more discussion of birth. That’s something that really struck me.
Emanuele Coccia (photo : Frank Perrin)
Emanuele Coccia (1976– ) is an Italian philosopher. His research focuses on the theory of the image and the nature of life. In 2020–2021, he was an artist-in-residence at Le Fresnoy, the National Studio for Contemporary Arts.
There is this tradition of dramatising death as a kind of end to be avoided, as a tragedy. When we look at plants, it’s not the same paradigm at all. It’s not about pitting men against women, but simply shifting our perspective by asking: ‘What does it mean to return one’s body to humus, to the soil, which will in turn give rise to other forms of life?’ This constant metamorphosis of all things is what interests me in storytelling. Short films don’t simply say ‘it lives and then it dies’, and the feature film doesn’t say ‘we’re going to kill, and then we’ll be reborn’. It’s simply a matter of saying that this cycle, this constant metamorphosis, interweaves all things.
ÉN: They’re almost films to be watched on a loop. The ending calls back to the beginning, on a more philosophical level.
MS: It takes the drama out of it. In Planète Z, everything rots away and we return to the ground we started from, and, in the end credits, the sound editor has included the sound of water welling up again. Everything has rotted away, but it carries on; it’s cyclical, just like the Earth itself, which is also cyclical in its metamorphosis and temperature. The sound of water takes the edge off the disappearance of the living beings we’ve just witnessed. It creates a sense of stepping back from what we’re currently experiencing.
Planète Z (2011, Sacrebleu)
ÉN : As Georges and I were saying, we didn’t get the chance to see Planète ∞. I wanted you to talk about it a bit more, particularly in terms of how it was made, because, as it’s filmed on glass, it’s 360°. Were there any aspects of the time-lapse filming that differed from your usual way of working?
Planète ∞ (2017, Barberousse Films, ARTE France, Awkeye)
Planet ∞ (or Planet Infinite) is an immersive virtual reality work designed to offer a multi-spatial experience. In a post-apocalyptic, desert-like world, life is beginning to reclaim its place. The film plunges us into the infinitely small, where fungi and mould are proliferating on the corpses of insects. Gradually, a change in the weather takes place: rain floods this arid landscape, giving rise to a teeming aquatic ecosystem populated by giant carnivorous tadpoles. The work won an award at the Berlinale, was honoured with the CNRS Crystal Medal, and has been exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
MS :
Yes, of course. A 360° shoot requires far more footage than a 2D shoot; you need shots from behind, in front, above and below. You have to film them; you have to visualise them. Often, VR and 360° films are either shot like documentaries, using a GoPro rig that captures everything around it, or produced in full 3D, because you can place a 360° rig within a 3D world. That’s what usually happens, and it’s the simplest approach.
In my case, when I’m doing macro photography, it’s impossible to use a 360° rig, because there are no macro 360° rigs available. There’s an optical conflict – in fact, a physical one. So I shoot in macro mode, and then I map these 2D images onto a 3D world. It’s a form of collage. It’s actually a dual creative process. I film all the elements one by one, like a craftsman.
The film begins with a field of black trumpet mushrooms, which we fly over, and we come across a clearing in this forest of mushrooms; we pass through a black trumpet mushroom and arrive at a huge mushroom that’s growing, and a dead insect bursts open. All of this is filmed in macro.
Planète ∞ (2017, Barberousse Films, ARTE France, Awkeye)
What I find interesting about 360° is the physical aspect of the experience; you have to look up to see these mushrooms, which isn’t the case in the cinema. In the cinema, even with a close-up, you’re always facing the screen. In VR, there’s a genuine physical experience. The concept of editing is different in 360°, as everything is continuous. There are no cuts; it’s conceived in long takes, and there’s no shot-reverse shot. The film, which lasts 7 minutes, comprises four long takes. In the first 2-minute long take, we arrive inside this mushroom; in the second sequence, we’re above an ocean and a multitude of ladybirds are falling into the water; then we dive into the water and enormous tadpoles come to try and eat us – they also appear in the feature film; finally, the underwater environment gives way to space. So I have four sequences. The film lasts 7 minutes.
Planète ∞ (2017, Barberousse Films, ARTE France, Awkeye)
Rendering the first 2-minute long take cost over €10,000.00 and took a week. Just the rendering.
As well as the filming and these composites, we had to render these images in 360°, and so create the texture. We had to hire a render farm in Eastern Europe – in Poland or Bulgaria – to process the shots. If there was a single setting we’d got wrong, we had to start all over again. It took three days to download the entire file from a server. I don’t know, I thought it was almost there. That was in 2017; it might be quicker now, but these production processes are a bit mad.
ÉN: In terms of writing, how did you conceive this 360° world? By guiding the viewers’ gaze? Or by trying to fill the space with the various narrative elements?
MS: I’ve always wanted to ensure that the sets are also characters in the film, with a few key elements, such as the mushroom, for example. I couldn’t grow all the mushrooms due to a lack of production resources. But there’s a corner of the field where they do actually grow, so I’ll draw the viewer’s attention to that area using sound. The basic technique of 360° filming is to direct the viewer’s gaze.
Planète ∞ (2017, Barberousse Films, ARTE France, Awkeye)
ÉN : At a conference, the topic came up that you used to watch Nausicaä de la Vallée du Vent on repeat when you were young. In interviews, you don’t deny the influence of Hayao Miyazaki, as far as I can tell. And, generally speaking, the way you use time-lapse reminds me of a shot in *My Neighbour Totoro*, where the Totoros, Satsuki and Mei make trees grow in a night-time scene. It’s almost a dreamlike scene, because the next day, everything has disappeared.
Do you have any other influences, including those outside the world of cinema?
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
MS : Ce n’était vraiment pas conscient. J’avais 6 ans quand je regardais Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind en boucle, un des premiers films de Miyazaki en 1986. L’histoire de Nausicaä se situe après la troisième guerre mondiale, et l’humain a tout détruit. On ne peut plus respirer l’air de l’extérieur. On est obligé de porter un masque pour respirer, parce qu’il y a trop de spores, de champignons. C’est la moisissure qui domine ce monde, où la nature est détruite et les humains sont obligés de vivre dans un bunker, ou dans un vallée, où le vent évacue la moisissure et ils peuvent respirer.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
Animals, particularly insects, have grown to enormous sizes. One of the insects, with a multitude of eyes, is as tall as a five-storey block of flats. There is also a giant dragonfly. It is an apocalyptic world, with deformities affecting living creatures. Someone pointed out to me the link with the metamorphosis of animals in my films, and with my obsession with fungi and spores.
I really like the shot of Totoro you describe; the acceleration of time is magical. Just like time-lapse footage of plants: by manipulating time, and scale too, it becomes magical, like in a dream.
Mon voisin Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1998)
A friend of mine, who’s seen my feature film and works in Cannes, described Planètes as a dream, because it’s a collage of things that exist all around us, but which are placed in a different context. Often, in dreams, we see our grandmother sitting on the bonnet of a car that we’d seen earlier that day. It’s a mix of familiar things placed in zany situations. That’s the link to Surrealism. The film features only familiar things, but on a different scale and in a different time. It elevates reality. Plants live just like us and become animals that move, talk to us and truly coexist with us.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
As a side note, the Surrealists, fascinated by the unconscious and the marvellous, saw scientific cinema (particularly the use of the microscope, time-lapse and slow motion) as a means of revealing an invisible and poetic reality. They naturally included scientific films in their screenings.
Illustration no 71, Stephoidea from Kunstformen der Natur by Ernst Haeckel, 1904.
We should also mention, in terms of aesthetic influences, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a German biologist, philosopher and freethinker who popularised Charles Darwin’s theories in Germany. One of his works, Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1904), reveals Haeckel not only as a great researcher but also as a talented draughtsman; his illustrations and plates are striking for their fidelity to nature and their artistic quality.
Cucurbita, Karl Blossfeldt (1928)
In a similar vein, we might mention Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), a German photographer known for his catalogue of fundamental plant forms and structures. Karl Blossfeldt began studying sculpture in 1881 and went on to work as a moulder in a foundry. From that time onwards, he used tree leaves as motifs for ornaments.
Extrait du story board du Voyage dans la Lune, Georges Méliès (1902)
We cannot fail to mention this scene from Méliès’s (1861–1938) film, overrun with giant mushrooms, conceived by the tinkerer and brilliant inventor from the early days of cinema?
Le bar à oranges, Michel Blazy (2003-2007)
More recently, Michel Blazy (1966– ), a French artist who has, in particular, worked with mould to create pieces that take shape autonomously.
Marc-André Selosse, a biologist whose work I’m reading a lot at the moment, says that humans need things to resemble us – with eyes and a mouth – in order to elicit empathy; otherwise, we don’t understand. If it’s just a leaf or a flower, we don’t understand. If it’s a cat, that’s fine.
Marc-André Selosse (photo : 4Exodus4 – source : Wikipedia)
Marc-André Selosse (1968– ) is a French biologist and science communicator specialising in botany and mycology. He has carried out research into symbiosis, particularly in the fields of evolution and ecology.
Time-lapse also allows us to feel close to something we aren’t supposed to feel close to; it enables us to project a different image onto that particular plant – for example, as an animal, as a living being, like my dandelion seeds, which become characters just like us. And all of a sudden, empathy kicks in. Beyond this technique, it is also this elevation that leads us to say to ourselves: ‘We are in the world, and yet we are not quite in the world.’ And this is the threshold of the infraworld: ‘We are still here on Earth, but we are no longer quite here on Earth.’ ’ It’s the poetic stratosphere – as when Edgar Morin speaks of pragmatism and the poetic; it lifts us up. The stratosphere lies beyond the atmosphere; it’s a thrill of the unknown. We’re still on Earth, yet we see things as if we were dreaming. This threshold of the infraworld fascinates me and moves us.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
GEORGES SIFIANOS: The issue of empathy is very important. What is your background? What did you study? Are you a biologist? How did you end up working in science films? What is your relationship with Japan, and with France?
MS: I was born in Japan in the 1980s, and I studied art at the Beaux-Arts in Marseille, France. After that, I attended the École du Fresnoy in Tourcoing, in northern France, for two years.
Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing
(photo : Velvet – source : Wikipedia)
Founded in October 1997 in Tourcoing, the Studio national aims to enable young artists from all over the world to create works using professional technical resources and by breaking down the barriers between different forms of expression.
I have no scientific training whatsoever, apart from the scientific baccalaureate I obtained at the age of 18.
I currently work at the CNRS, the scientific research centre in France, in a laboratory, as a film-maker, not as a researcher. I assist researchers in producing video corpora or conducting interviews in the field of the humanities and social sciences. I am not involved in biology. I’ve been working with art historians and philosophers for 20 years.
You’re going to ask me where this interest comes from. My final-year film at Le Fresnoy featured salt crystals and the metamorphosis of these crystals, which I found truly fascinating because they form a perfect square. It’s a way of seeing nature as a completely mathematical, completely organised phenomenon. We get the impression that it’s not organised at all, that it’s organic in a sense that’s the opposite of mathematics, but in fact, it’s very close to mathematics, on a fractal level, on an arithmetic level. That aspect of nature fascinates me; it has a logic and an existence that is beyond us humans, which we cannot see, because it operates on different scales, as in a metaverse. It is that aspect of nature that interests me, rather than necessarily its ecological aspect or its beauty.
Planète A (2008, Le Fresnoy)
Planète A depicts a world that has become a vast salt desert, where the intensive and excessive cultivation of cotton has caused severe drought. This dystopian fiction directly echoes the real-life ecological disaster of the Aral Sea, highlighting human responsibility and economic greed. The film was directed by Momoko Seto whilst she was studying at Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts.
I work a lot with biologists, thanks to the films. I visit the Natural History Museum regularly. I’ve also taken an interest in philosophy: what do we need to understand today about the world we live in? So ecology, sociology, or anthropology – with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsin, The Mushroom at the End of the World, with Baptiste Morizot, or, in Belgium, Vinciane Desprez, who also talks a great deal about nature. That’s the route I took, and that’s how I discovered Darwin, Selosse and all those incredible biologists.
Le champignon de la fin du monde – Sur la possibilité de vivre dans les ruines du capitalisme by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2017)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952– ) is an American professor of anthropology. She works at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Division of Humanities, the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Environmental Studies.
Baptiste Morizot (1983– ) is a French philosopher. His research focuses primarily on the relationships between humans and the rest of the living world.
Vinciane Despret (1959– ) is a Belgian psychologist and philosopher of science. She works in the fields of psychology and ethology.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) was a British naturalist and palaeontologist whose work on the evolution of living species revolutionised biology.
Also worth mentioning among Momoko Seto’s references and reading material is Christian Sardet (1946–), a French biologist and artist. His research and artistic works focus on cells, embryos and plankton.
And Philippe Descola (1949–), a French anthropologist. His fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, amongst the Achuar Jivaro people, has established him as one of the leading figures in Americanist anthropology and ethnology.
What I love about real biologists is that they tear philosophy to shreds, saying: ‘Those are just ideas, they’re just concepts. In real life, it doesn’t really work like that. ”
GS: Could you elaborate on that?
MS: Yes. There’s a book by Marc-André Sellosse that I’m currently reading, which shatters all preconceptions about nature. For example, he writes: ‘Nature is well-made’, then crosses out that sentence. It’s wrong: ‘Nature isn’t well-made. ’ He then spends the whole chapter explaining why nature isn’t well-made. He hates it when people say: ‘Plants communicate with one another.’ He says: ‘Plants don’t communicate with one another. They don’t help one another.’ He hates anthropomorphism. When a plant is attacked by an insect, it releases chemicals. This isn’t to warn its neighbour of danger; rather, it produces these chemicals anyway, and the neighbour picks up the residual signals. This is what a biologist says. He breaks away from the formalism and anthropomorphism into which philosophers tend to fall. On the subject of plant communication, he tries to be more precise in the chemical and biological sense of the term. I like this reality, which is different from the reality we have embellished. There is a great deal of wastage in nature: 90 per cent of seeds are eaten. Nature is cruel, as he explains in a whole chapter, pointing out that in the Middle Ages, life expectancy was 40 years because most children died. There are viruses and bacteria – he is a specialist in bacteria. He sets the record straight.
Nature et préjugés – Convier l’humanité dans l’histoire naturelle
by Marc-André Selosse (Actes Sud, 2024)
In this essay, biologist Marc-André Selosse debunks common misconceptions and cultural myths (such as the Aristotelian view or the cliché of a ‘perfect nature’) that have historically separated human beings from their environment. Drawing on concrete examples — from the tricks of orchids to the strategies of viruses, via our own microbiota — he demonstrates that humanity is neither above nor separate from nature, but is an inseparable part of it, dependent on both internal and external ecosystems. The author thus calls for the reintegration of the humanities into natural history, so that our future actions (in agriculture, health and urban planning) are based on the observation of living organisms rather than on our domination of them.
In my film, I don’t want to portray nature as something beautiful either: it’s there to be eaten, and parasitism is everywhere. It’s also a form of life, which isn’t what we might conceive of as something beautiful or good. It’s about doing away with these Christian notions of good and evil. I’m from Japan; I’ve never read the Bible. Living in Europe, I’ve come to realise that we don’t share the same concept of good and evil. Not only are there intra-cultural differences in thinking, but also, amongst living beings, there are those who operate according to a completely different logic.
GS: How is this logic viewed in Japan, which tends to follow an animist tradition? Is nature well-ordered, or not?
MS: Nature is dangerous in Japan, as we’re regularly devastated by earthquakes, tsunamis and natural disasters beyond our control. There are earthquakes every day in Japan – small tremors that we don’t even feel. Japan sits on three tectonic plates; it’s constantly shaking, and all Japanese people are always prepared for major earthquakes at any moment. We keep small tins of food to hand at all times. We live with the constant possibility of destruction, because that’s how it’s always been in Japan.
Yakushima (image satellite : NASA – source : Wikipedia)
Image taken from Mathieu Cayrou’s ‘making of’ video (CNRS / Miyu)
For the feature film, I lived for two months on an island in southern Japan called Yakushima. This island is supplied by a boat that brings food, and it rains 360 days a year. It rains all the time. There are typhoons all the time, and the boat often doesn’t arrive. After three days, there’s nothing left in the supermarkets. And when it rains so heavily, there’s no school, they can’t drive. If you go outside, you get swept away. They live with this, and we don’t decide what we’re going to do today. The weather tells us what to do. And I like that subordination.
Yakushima National Park (photo: Yosemite – source: Wikipedia)
Filming in Yakushima. Images taken from the making-of by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
The Yakushima forest, which inspired Miyazaki for Princess Mononoke. What interested Momoko Seto about this site were the ancient mosses that grow there. The aim wasn’t to collect the moss, but to install on-site recording, time-lapse, and video systems around the mosses. Another form of temporality (after those of growth, time-lapse photography, accelerated motion, and slow motion) is invoked here: that of nature formed over millions of years.
Beyond the flora, there was also an interest in collecting the fauna: dung beetles, butterflies, and so on. To collect the dung beetles, cow dung had been placed in certain locations, and the cinematographer, Élie Levé, would come in the morning to capture some specimens.
The phosphorescent squid washed up in March in Toyama, western Japan, where they were collected for the film, along with fireflies. Lacking studios, these insect shots were filmed in hotel rooms: the insects were collected from the wild, filmed, and then released back into nature.
What really shocked me when I came to Europe was this desire to control nature, in tradition too, in philosophy, in the garden—it’s very controlled. There are other forms of gardening in Asia, which are different from this perfect symmetrical control. Everything is trimmed. I was at the French school in Japan, so I had to read all the maps. There’s this desire to dominate, to establish a pyramid of importance: humans at the very top, then large animals, then small animals, then plants, then bacteria, and then everything we see at the very bottom. In Japan, as you said, in our animistic tradition, objects are very important. When I was on Yakushima Island, I enrolled my children in the local elementary school. And the school’s slogan, written in huge letters, is: “Pay attention to your friends, to humans. Pay attention to nature. Pay attention to objects.” “Objects are just as important as nature and friends. That’s because they also have a soul. They’re not just objects. I thought that the paradigm of the importance of things goes even further. It’s our vision of the world.”
Yakushima. Images taken from the making-of by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
In Japan, in the 1980s, we were still under the influence of the United States. We had been colonized by the US since 1950. There was a large military base. All of American culture arrived; it was the Americans who changed our entire constitution. There’s still a lot left over. We eat McDonald’s. In the 1980s, on top of that, there was an economic boom. We consumed plastic, and tomatoes were available 360 days a year. There was a lot of industrialization, which skewed things. Despite all that, there’s always a fundamental concern, and that’s what I love about Miyazaki’s films: he always talks about how to coexist with nature, even in Princess Mononoke or Kiki’s Delivery Service. How do we coexist with the tree, with the forest that we’re destroying?
Princesse Mononoké (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
Before becoming a symbol of Hayao Miyazaki’s film, the kodama (谺) was a creature from Japanese folklore. Literally, its name means “tree spirit” or “echo,” and it belongs to the large family of yōkai. In the West, these deities are the equivalent of forest spirits, so much so that, in the Studio Ghibli feature film, that’s how they are called in the French version.
It’s a question that keeps coming up, and that’s what resonates with me, because the real tragedy isn’t that the other is killed, it’s that we’re destroying our habitat. It’s something I also wanted to incorporate into my filmmaking.
EN: Yesterday I was listening to a researcher, Camille de Ginestel, who is also an artist, explaining that she exhibited a tree at the Grand Palais in Paris. Despite the tree having all the right conditions for survival—light, water, a probe planted in the ground collecting electrical data for her artwork and to interact with the public—this probe detected, at one point, that the tree was declining. She consulted a botanist who told her that the environment in an exhibition space and in a forest are not the same. Atmosphere, in the context of a forest, isn’t just a trivial word; it’s a term from the scientific community. For a plant, atmosphere encompasses all the negative ions produced by the forest and a great many other things we don’t perceive. This simple shift in context created a message completely contrary to what she intended to convey in her work.
I was wondering if, in relation to your films, you encountered any ambivalences, such as deploying enormous technological resources to capture extremely small and simple phenomena. Did this ambivalence—between the means employed and, not the end result (because the image is indeed incredible), the phenomenon unfolding under the camera—lead you to question yourself at certain points in the creative process?
MS: I’m not sure I fully understood the question because I feel like there are two things involved.
The conditions created for filming the elements to achieve the desired image, and the contrast between technical and production resources.
EN: Indeed, there are two things.
MS: And I get the impression that the second part of your question is more ethical. So I’ll start with the end: we have technical resources, but they aren’t huge. Even if we had a robotic arm that cost 25,000 francs, it’s not enormous, to be honest. Even if we had 20 cameras running, it wasn’t enormous either. We made sure that we didn’t need artificial lighting, air conditioning, or temperature control equipment to grow and boost the plants, like in laboratories. That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. We filmed in a greenhouse, and all the shots were linked to the seasons. That is to say, one plant was filmed in the spring, more specifically in April, while another was filmed in June, because that was its optimal condition. The less artifice involved, the better the living things thrive. You still need a camera to capture the images, though. So, we did the bare minimum to do it.
Image tirée du making of de Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Regarding the first part of your question, there were times when I thought the conditions were perfect. But not at all. For example, we couldn’t get the dandelion to bloom for a long time. I kept thinking, “A dandelion is amazing; you can cut one off in the street, put it in a glass of water, and it will still bloom. It’s impossible that it wouldn’t bloom in front of the camera.” We watered it, but we rarely got shots where it was actually blooming. Funny thing is, I found the solution by reading a book by Goethe. People teased me, because all botanists knew this story. Basically, if you want a flower to bloom, you shouldn’t water it. And that’s what Goethe said. I recounted this, as if it were a revelation, at a conference during a study day. A botanist told me, “But everyone knows that. You must have read Goethe!” When you stop watering a plant, it enters a critical phase of its existence. There’s no more water, no more nutrients, and it flowers because it’s forced to give everything for its offspring. Whereas if you water it, it’s perfectly fine; why bother trying to flower? It can wait a little longer. This stems once again from that form of anthropomorphism that biologists detest.
Rafaella Tringali, botanical scenographer.
Image taken from the making-of video by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Filming at Rambuteau Castle.
Image taken from the making-of video by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Filming in the castle’s orangery took advantage of the glass roof to allow access to sunlight during the day. Plasma screens plunged the room into darkness to harmonize the light intensity for the photographs. The panel closed automatically for one second, just long enough to take a picture, and then allowed sunlight to enter for the remaining 59 seconds to allow the plants to grow. Seven studios, each approximately 9 square meters, were set up in the space and equipped with multiple cameras—up to five cameras, some mounted on a 400 kg robotic arm—synchronized with flashes and irrigation systems placed at the base of the plants, in the soil, to avoid spraying the plants, which would cause image distortion. All 25 cameras, used on different sets, were desynchronized so that flashes wouldn’t interfere with each other’s shooting, given the limited space. Uncertainty remained about how the plants would grow. A single shoot could last three months: if the plant obstructed the lens, the shot couldn’t be reshot because, given the plant’s seasonality, it would have taken a year to reshoot. A ton and a half of soil was used to create the plant models. In January, at the start of filming, the greenhouse reached -10 degrees Celsius, requiring the recreation of a favorable environment for the plants, and 35 degrees Celsius in July. Nearly 1.5 million photos were taken in this orangery during the nine months of filming, representing 1,000 terabytes of data (backed up twice).
This filming setup therefore involves three temporalities: that of nature, which makes the plant grow; that of the camera, which captures the plant’s growth at specific points; and that of the time-lapse and its accelerated progression. Compositing further multiplies this accumulation of differentiated temporal rhythms by combining slow motion, fast motion, real time, and animation, just as it blends a multitude of distant spaces at radically different scales.
Similarly, Rambuteau’s shooting setup takes into account three distinct types of light: natural light, sunlight, and the spotlight that illuminates intermittently during filming, along with the obscuration of the sun and the projection of the composited and color-graded film (whereas a traditional film relies on only two types of light: the shooting light, which can synchronously combine natural and artificial light, and the projection light).
However, light was meticulously considered during filming so that the composite elements could be integrated into the compositing and color grading, which would unify everything using digital effects and color adjustments.
An endoscopic camera, housed in a tube, was used to film the animals and to easily perform forward and backward tracking shots. As a fun fact, each animal had its own nickname; this frog, for example, was named Nick Cave because of its Australian origin.
To film the slugs, a shoot that lasted two and a half months, the environment in which the slugs had to move was modeled in 3D and 3D printed to give the impression that they were clinging to the scenery. One shot in the film shows a giant slug walking along a waterfall, filmed in Iceland and recreated in a 3D-modeled setting.
GS: I’d like to discuss the question of empathy and identification. In a feature film, to keep a broad audience engaged, as you intend, it’s necessary to create identification. What are the strategies for achieving this identification? Let me give you an example related to the choice of technique. Timelapse is a performance that unfolds before our eyes. Computer-generated imagery is another. In the case of timelapse, the plant is filmed growing, little by little, and this produces an impressive and potentially moving feat.
Let’s take another example with a 2-meter line. If I draw it by hand, with a pencil, on paper or on a wall, it’s perfectly straight, which can inspire admiration. If this line is created mechanically, it’s commonplace.
I’d like you to explain the methods used to help viewers identify with and follow the film on an emotional level.
MS: How do you feel the human element? You were talking about lines: a line is drawn, using an industrial process, it’s straight, but it doesn’t resonate. A line that trembles slightly, drawn by someone who has put in a bit of effort, evokes empathy. That’s the whole point of my characters, who are computer-generated. Again, producers are very sensitive, because it still needs to generate revenue. People mustn’t get bored. Beautiful images aren’t enough. So, how do you ultimately feel the human element behind it? What seems completely contradictory, in relation to everything we’ve just said, in relation to this desire to decenter, is that we’re forced to refocus on the human element, to feel the human element, because it’s made for humans. That’s what my sound engineer told me, saying that if the film was made for seeds, we wouldn’t use the same sounds as if it were made for humans. Humans need to feel human through others. There has to be, at the very least, a point of entry, a minimum of empathy. Empathy is what I see in others. I didn’t want to give my characters eyes, a mouth, arms. That’s what they used to do, in Disney films, in the Silly Symphonies, where you’d see trees with eyes and mouths. I didn’t want to do that anymore.
Silly symphonies – Flowers and trees (Burton Gillett, 1932)
So, where do we draw the line? Will they walk like humans? Yes, but they don’t have legs. They’ll still fly like seeds, though. Will they speak, like humans? No, we won’t use words, but we’ll use a kind of language, as if they were communicating with each other, even if we humans don’t understand them, but we sense that they are words. When they meet, the characters hug each other; they don’t have arms, but they still give each other a kind of embrace.
We always add a little bit of humanity, but we also remove some, so it’s not too human, just enough for us to understand the intention. That’s the balance we maintain, whether in the writing, the animation, the sound, or the image composition. It’s funny you used the example of line, because my characters are like a stem with feathers. I was convinced that with a stem, you could cry, laugh, and feel empathy, through trembling, for example. When the stem suddenly faces danger and starts to tremble, you feel its emotion, its fear, its fragility. To express its joy, the stem stiffens and begins to jump. It’s gestural.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
Before using computer animation, I hired two actresses and an actor to portray the characters. They did a lot of mime, theater, and dance as well.
The question arose of how the body can express emotion without words, how to feel human, because it’s intended for humans. In the time-lapses, the plants end up resembling animals, which are closer to humans, and that evokes empathy. We only have these human lenses; it’s our only sensory experience, it’s a human vocabulary.
Oriane Lautel, Maxime Lévêque, Victoire Legois et Anne Steffens pendant les sessions d’acting. Image tirée du making of de Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
EN: The botanists you work with don’t have that kind of relationship at all. They’re perhaps more interested in the plant’s strangeness, in the fact that it’s a separate entity, that doesn’t function in the same way.
MS: Exactly, when I was talking with this botanist, who is anti-empathic, anti-humanizing, in any case, he said that at the same time, we have to humanize in order to raise awareness. It’s as if he were telling me that Artemis 2 has to circle the Earth twice to be able to fly. We have to use that kind of vocabulary to be taken elsewhere. And even this biologist was aware of that.
Z: The public’s engagement also stems from the characters’ journeys, often framed in very simple and easily understandable narrative structures: failure, success, the initiatory journey, redemption, etc.
EN: Let’s go back to timelapse. Timelapse is often used to show the acceleration of time, to make events pass quickly and to transport the viewer to another place. When you use it, you don’t get that feeling of acceleration at all. You’re truly somewhere else, in a present-day temporality, even though you’re seeing something happening extremely fast. You explained, in particular, that the light is extremely directed, and that contributes to the fact that you don’t get that feeling of acceleration. It’s also due to studio techniques: to achieve that kind of relationship, outside the time frame of the event you’re seeing, you have to move out of the place you’re filming, or remove the element from its location.
Tournage en Islande.
Images tirées du making of de Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu).
Filming took place over three years, depending on the seasonality required by the script. Access to the Icelandic ice cave is only possible at specific times. Reaching these glaciers requires a 45-minute to one-hour hike in extreme cold conditions that test battery life, with winds that make piloting drones difficult.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
In the making-of, we see that you went to greenhouses, which are places primarily dedicated to plant cultivation, but you also filmed plants on location in Japan, creating mini-studios. All of this leads back to the timelapse. Are you interested in it for the movement it creates or for its connection to the extended timeframe of filming, between the moment of shooting, which can last several months, and the moment of viewing, which is only a few seconds on screen?
MS: You don’t necessarily see that it’s timelapse, because we remember timelapse sequences where we often see plants growing very quickly while moving frantically in all directions. I avoid that effect. If the movement is more reminiscent of an animal, again like a metaphor for another living being familiar to us, like a snake, we don’t think it’s timelapse; we think, “This plant is moving like a snake.” “So, we already have this code within us, in our image capital, in our memory.
Image tirée du making of de Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
What interests me about timelapse is the idea that the plant ceases to be a plant, or that the crystals cease to be crystals. It’s about transforming these elements into something else, as if with a magic wand: “You, salt crystals, you will become a plant, or you, succulent, you will become an animal.” And it’s this change of name, of meaning, of definition, that we can achieve thanks to these tools.
Timelapse produces images we’ve never seen before, like, for example, a plant filmed for one or two months. There are a great many plants whose movement we don’t know. There’s a kind of movement in living things that we discover thanks to this tool, since no one has done it before.
EN: Like the hatching of a tadpole egg.
Momoko Seto sélectionnant un œuf de têtard susceptible d’éclore pendant la prise de vue.
Image tirée du making of de Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
GS: I wanted to come back to the topic of minerals and plants. You said, “Unfortunately, we identify with them.” You were lamenting this kind of anthropomorphism in our perception of plants. We also discussed minerals. There’s a difference in attitude: we can admire a mineral, but we can project ourselves more onto a plant. We can’t identify with a mineral; it’s more distant. Art, in general, is anthropocentric. If the universe weren’t the biosphere—after all, the biosphere is an exception—the universe is more mineral, and it will probably continue on its own, without knowing where it comes from or how far it will go. Do you have any thoughts or comments on this polarity between mineral and plant, and what we, humans and nature, do in the face of this polarity?
Planète A (2008, Le Fresnoy)
MS: Yes. Minerals go even further, since they don’t even contain carbon. Whereas everything organic contains carbon. First, let’s take, for example, using techniques like time-lapse, where the mineral becomes almost like a plant because the minerals grow. This theoretically brings us closer to humans, since it brings them closer to plants. It brings them closer to animals, it brings them closer to humans. The technique makes this metamorphosis more visible, closer.
Second, minerals are indeed distant from us. But when reading about garden theory in Asia, in China and Japan, we see that a rock, in a Zen or Chinese garden, is considered a character. Yolaine Escande, a researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), wrote a book, Jardin de sagesse, where she explains that a rock is often represented in the garden as a spirit, as a god, as a character, sometimes heroic, or historical, like a war hero. That’s the complete opposite of what you just said: the rock is a character. Optical techniques and cinematic shooting time can make us feel that the mineral is also close.
Jardin de sagesse de Yolaine Escande (Seuil, 2013)
In this aesthetic and philosophical essay, sinologist Yolaine Escande explores the world of traditional Chinese and Japanese gardens to reveal their spiritual and practical dimensions. Far from being mere pleasure spaces or miniature reproductions of nature, these enclosed gardens are conceived as protective microcosms, conducive to contemplation and self-cultivation.
EN: Underlying this vision is that life is identified with movement, on the part of humans, whereas, in an animistic perception, what is inert is alive. Just because something is inert doesn’t mean it’s dead. In this case, in the garden, the rock has its own soul. And from a cinematic perspective, movement reveals the inner life of beings. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to call it a shift in perspective, moving towards animism, rather than trying to reduce animism to something visible?
MS: It’s not the same framework. In the context of a film, where viewers are subjected to a story for an hour and a half, we’re forced to move towards Bazouk Art.
EN: How did you conceive of the garden you’re creating, which we were discussing at the beginning of the conversation?
MS: I was actually more into Bazouk Art, setting things in motion to understand that everything is alive. I forced it with the tools. I find it admirable that, in a garden, you can spend two hours looking at a rock and thinking about a hero from a past story. It requires even more availability, more openness, than people who eat popcorn while watching a 90-minute movie. Unfortunately, it’s not the same setting, it’s not the same viewer. Each work depends on its setting and its viewer. We don’t use the same vocabulary. In Japan, in terms of animism, there are many inanimate things that have great value. After a certain age, a kind of belt is placed around a tree to signify that it has become an exceptional living being. Among Shintoists, there are several gods, and everyone can be a god. You can be a god one day, if you transcend a normal stage. The tree, having lived for 5,000 years, has transcended this stage and become a god. The girdle signifies that this part is in a divine phase, and this inspires great respect. It is a value in itself.
Festival International des Jardins – The garden the star of the show
The International Garden Festival is a world-renowned annual event held since 1992 at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (Loir-et-Cher, France). Considered a true laboratory of contemporary design and landscape architecture, it offers a unique perspective each year on the evolution of our relationship with the living world. It spans more than six months, from the end of April to the very beginning of November.
Planets, Momoko Seto’s garden as part of the International Garden Festival – The garden the star of the show (photos: Éric Sander – source: Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire)
On the island where I filmed, Yakushima, there are 8,000-year-old cedar trees from the Jōmon period. Travelers come to this island and walk for 10 hours to, and I quote, “meet the tree.” They are not allowed to touch it, and therefore cannot hug it, but this encounter with the tree, which has survived in a superhuman timescale, moves them. It’s clear that it’s not the physical exertion that captivates us, but the transcendence. Because it’s God. It’s no longer within the human realm, but it still touches us. So, it’s interesting because it ties into Georges’s concern with empathy. I said earlier that it has to be human to move us, but it can be God, to move us even more, but God is the human who created.
Jomon Sugi in Yakushima (photo: Chris 73 – source :Wikipedia)
GS: The word “transcendence” evokes transcendence, as we say in the vocabulary of philosophy. But it’s a human concept. It doesn’t concern minerals, it doesn’t concern the cosmos, which is outside of us. It’s a process of bringing them down to earth, of creating an emotion, because we do like to see ourselves in a mirror, we like things that resemble us.
MS: Yes. I’m going to add another layer to your reflection on empathy: it’s truly about emotion. If you don’t feel empathy, you don’t feel humanity, you don’t feel emotion.
GS: What kind of emotion?
MS: All sorts of emotions affect us: anger, sadness, wonder… you may not know a person you see on screen, but it triggers an emotion and reminds you of an event in your life. In the millions of films we watch, what we remember is the emotion, and we often forget the story itself. We remember an actor’s face or an emotion that resonated with us.
While making this feature film, I was constantly attentive to the emotional intensity. What we feel, what perhaps transcends the human figure.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
GS: It’s what the figure, the image, and what the image contains evoke.
MS: Not necessarily. Yes, it evokes emotion. I like your example of the 2-meter line you drew on the wall. The line is straight, then it trembles, it goes beyond it, you can feel that it’s been erased, then redrawn: there’s a story there.
GS: I’ll give a more concrete example. You were talking earlier about different types of animation. At Disney, they often add arms and eyes to make it look human. But there are other types of animation. I’m thinking of John Lasseter’s film, for example, with the two lamps.
Z: Luxo Jr.
Luxo Jr, John Lasseter (Pixar, 1986)
GS: That’s it. In the way they position themselves and thanks to the rhythm of the movement, we understand and feel the feelings. Looking at the making of Planètes, we see that the animation goes in this direction of evocation through the postures of dandelion seeds, flowers, achenes. When the achene curves, it gives us an understanding, it evokes the feelings it may have. It’s not literally reported. He lets us deduce the character’s feelings through attitudes, and not through symbols or signs plastered on them.
MS: Yes, obviously, it’s evocation.
GS: Was it a choice?
MS: It’s definitely a choice. And it’s more of an artistic challenge, because we have to communicate our message with fewer tools.
Planètes (2025, Miyu Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CNRS Images)
The main characters of Planètes: Dendelion, Baraban, Taraxa, and Leonto, who are dandelion achenes, form the 300 seeds of the dandelion ball at the end of its development. Each character is characterized by a unique way of moving, a distinct personality, and a unique behavior.
The different stages of compositing, colorimetry and integration of characters in post-production (images taken from the conference Meeting the Cinema of Momoko Seto given by Élie Levé (director of photography) and Mathieu Cayrou (assistant cameraman) during the Festival Chefs Op’ en Lumière in Chalon-sur-Saône.
Nicolas Becker, our sound engineer, added breath to the achenes—human breaths, which, for me, are the most sensitive vehicle of emotion that humans can emit. Just a breath is enough to understand if a person is happy, sad, or angry. It’s very subtle. We don’t know if the breath Nicolas added is the wind or the achene’s body. It’s also evocative; nothing is explicitly stated. We understand not through signifiers, but through the senses in a more visceral way.
Nicolas Becker (photo: Arte Radio)
Nicolas Becker has worked on films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine, Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. He received an Oscar for his work on Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal at the 2021 Academy Awards ceremony.
Below: some images of the sound design for Planètes, taken from the conference Meeting the Cinema of Momoko Seto, given by Élie Levé (director of photography) and Mathieu Cayrou (camera assistant) at the Chefs Op’ en Lumière Festival in Chalon-sur-Saône. The composer of the music, Quentin Sirjacq, is also featured. Unusual instruments were incorporated into the score, including the crystal baschet, Indonesian gamelan (for the squid scene, for example), Ondes Martenot, Japanese taiko drum, marimbas, xylophone, and the Shakuashi, Eddie Ruscha’s electronic instruments, all blended with compositions written for the Brussels Film Orchestra and recorded at Studio Dada in Brussels.
Quentin Sirjacq is a French composer and pianist, renowned for his compositions that blend contemporary classical music, jazz, and minimalist influences. He has composed numerous film scores and regularly collaborates with directors such as Benoît Jacquot and Emmanuel Mouret.
Z: I would draw a parallel with Len Lye, especially with Tusalava. It’s a black and white film where organic, almost visceral forms move like primitive organisms. The graphic style evokes Aboriginal art, but what’s most striking is this very strong, almost animistic presence: you get the impression that the forms breathe, that they are permeated by an inner energy.
And in Free Radicals, it’s even more evident: the lines drawn, scratched directly onto the film, convey kinesthetic sensations, rhythms, jolts, like so many manifestations of the body. With McLaren, we always remain very close to the human. His rhythms and metamorphoses retain something of gesture, of breath, of emotion.
Tusalava, Len Lye (The Film Society, 1929)
GS : I saw that, in Planètes, Guionne Leroy was animator, an excellent animator, and Nicolas Becker was the sound effects artist, an excellent sound effects artist. How did they get involved in the production?
Guionne Leroy.
Image taken from the making-of of Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Guionne Leroy is a Belgian film director and animator. She directed the short films La Traviata (1993) and Arthur (1997). She worked as an animator on John Lasseter’s Toy Story, Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach, Nick Park and Peter Lord’s Chicken Run, Samuel and Frédéric Guillaume’s Max & Co, and Henry Selick’s Coraline.
MS :A dream casting! I contacted Nicolas Becker via the editor, Michel Klochendler, who had known him since he was 20. He is someone who researches, he has a researcher’s, experimental approach, he does a lot of field recording, recording in Antarctica for example. When I contacted him, he was recording the sound of mold at the École Normale Supérieure. I told him: “I film mold and you record it!” » I spoke to him about the film, saying that there was no direct sound recording, he said to me: “But it’s a dream, you have to invent everything. It’s a blank page that you’re offering me! »
And Guyonne Leroy came thanks to the Belgian co-production, Umedia. She worked at Pixar and on Chicken Run, she’s excellent and she has a lot of sensitivity. She said to me: “You’re asking me to create emotion with a rod! » For an animator, this is a challenge. There are no eyes, or body, there is only movement.
I met and discovered a whole series of people thanks to the project, with whom I really formed friendships. I hope we will work together again.
The animation team.
Image taken from the making-of video by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Compositing at Reepost in Paris.
Image taken from the making-of video by Mathieu Cayrou (CNRS / Miyu)
Two compositing steps.
William Henne: Aside from the garden project, are there any other projects?
MS: Yes. I’m currently writing a series.
I’ve also curated an exhibition on insects, which is touring Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
And I’m continuing to make short films for the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research).
To explore further:
Conference: À la rencontre du cinéma de Momoko Seto, given by Élie Levé (Director of Photography) and Mathieu Cayrou (Assistant Camera Operator) at the Chefs Op’ en Lumière Festival in Chalon-sur-Saône (Moderators: Pascal Mieszala and Nicolas Bouillard).
Making Planètes, l’art de façonner des mondes, a film by Mathieu Cayrou produced by Miyu Productions.