I saw the screening of her works and the following day I went to the “Breakfast with the artists” session, a very good opportunity the festival offers to the audience to sit near the animators and listen to their experiences first hand.
She talked about her short films: “Hammam” (1991), “Schéhérazade” (1995), “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs” (2002), “Au premier dimanche d’août” (2004) and “Conte de quartier” (2006).
She pointed out that when she starts working on an animation she has a quite clear idea of its original structure and once she moves on the process turns into a kind of jazz’s jam session. Some of these improvisations are finally deleted from the resulting film: usually a 5% of them, though it was between a 15 and 20% in “Hammam”.
She used digital composing with After Effects for the first time in “Conte de quartier” so she could work with 2 or 3 image levels. She usually works in pastels, though she added oils and sand to “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs”. In “Conte de quartier” she created 4 layers in After Effects: one for the mechanical elements, one for the ads posters, which were real ones she had traced over, one for the secondary characters and another for the main ones. A big advantage she underlined was that she could see the results immediately, something impossible to do when she would film in 35 mm and had to wait for about a month to see the resulting images.
When asked about the noticeable prominence of women in her films and their recurrent nakedness and sensuality, she admitted giving men a limited role in her films, which are easily identifiable as made by a woman since she creates them based on what a woman knows, her own sensuality. She argued that Pavlátová’s films show sensuality from a masculine point of view and admitted that it’s not easy to show this subject. Sensuality should be seen as something natural, a non-forced eroticism and never as something dirty or reprehensible. The pleasure of touching the materials is also transmitted into the film reinforcing this sensuality. Florence explained that actually she’d made some erotic films as an order. She also remarked that animation can soften some things. For instance, Schéhérazade’s massacre and sex scenes would look too macabre in live-action.
She explained to the audience that she did her first 3 films on her own, but required an assistant to create “Au premier dimanche d’août” and “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs” and 3 to work on her last film. She admitted feeling that, while gaining in some aspects, she also lost something in others, such as the desired sensuality.