Creating “400 Boys” For “Love, Death + Robots”

Robert Valley is an Academy Award nominee for 2016 short Pear Cider and Cigarettes, an Annie winner for Disney’s Tron: Uprising animated series and an Emmy winner for his work on popular program Love, Death + Robots. He returns to LD+R with a new short for Vol. 4 called “400 Boys”. It stars John Boyega and premiere on May 15th on Netflix. (This Animation Scoop Q&A with Valley was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: I love “Pear Cider and Cigarettes”. I saw it in a theater when it was [Oscar] nominated that year as part of the animated shorts presentation. What a vibrant film. What an interesting film that has stayed with me for a long time.

Robert Valley: That whole experience was pretty great. I think it kind of directly led, in its aftermath, to the “Love, Death + Robots” stuff. So in itself, working on a short independent film wasn’t really financially great, but it led to other things, indirectly as a result. So I think it worked out pretty well.

JM:Getting the Oscar nomination, having this short have such an impact, and then meeting up with this “Love, Death + Robots” team. You’ve directed a couple shorts in the past volumes of this. And working with Tim Miller, David Fincher, and Jennifer Yuh Nelson — that is a powerhouse team when it comes to a love of animation. And you clearly have a love of interesting, unique animation as well.

RV: Yeah, I totally do. I’m very much a product of the jobs I’ve worked on and the people I’ve worked with. Jamie Hewlett on “Gorillaz” has had a big impact stylistically on my work. And Peter Chung as well. He’s the “Aeon Flux” guy. Stylistically polar opposites. One is stylistically, graphically kind of simplified and kind of on one end of the spectrum. And on the other end of the spectrum is Peter, which is totally complex and a lot of detail and kind of Manga influenced. Both those two styles I found kind of made their way into my own style. So I’m kind of like a hybrid of those two things.

JM: You have bold storytelling, and when it comes to “400 Boys”, which is based on a short story by Mark Laidlaw, how do you look at the text and then know visually in your head… Do you know it right away? Does it take time to formulate how your vision’s gonna translate to the screen?

RV: It was tough. I read the story. Tim sent me the original story. And I knew right away that it was gonna be a big undertaking in terms of trying to pull it off. I look at the story in terms of how many characters we’re gonna need in scenes, And there were some long action sequences, which to me in my head played out like “Lord of the Rings” type confrontations, where there’s armies of people. Unfortunately we don’t have an army of animators working on our crew. Not many. There’s a core group of about six or 10 people and we expand out to about 25 or 30 people. So you kinda really have to pick and choose your battles and try to tell the story that’s needed in a way that is manageable.

Looking at the script, I could tell that it was, it was gonna be a tough story to tell. The conversations I had with Tim after… he had a very pronounced and specific vision of how much complexity we were gonna need to tell the story correctly. I had tried to sort of scale things back. “Let’s do less boys or less people fighting.” And he was like, “Nah.” (laughs) “We ought to do it in this way.” So we’re like, “Okay.” The whole job was like that. It was about trying to meet the expectations of the story. So it was a tough one. And I’ll tell you what, after we did that one, I’m not afraid of anything. That was the most terrifying undertaking we’ve ever done.

JM: Wow. Well… you create this intense post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The soundwork. The cinematography. The details are there. So which technical aspect of it specifically gave you the biggest challenge?

RV: We’re doing a 2D job, with some 3D effects — flying debris or bits of rock that sort of need some dimensionality. But for the most part, we have to draw the stuff, and that’s kind of my preferred approach to this stuff. If we get into a real tight situation, I feel like we can draw our way out of a tight situation. Sometimes with the 3D stuff, I don’t operate those tools, so I’m kind of at the mercy of other people, and I’m at the mercy of the technology. I want to be able to draw our way out of a bad situation. That’s what we did. I think what I was trying to do on “Pear Cider” was… I was taking a graphic novel, with a graphic novel sort of look, and I was trying to adapt it to animation. Not just adapt it, but I was actually animating the panels right off of my comic book Photoshop documents. So it had all the filters, all the color information. Everything just sort of translated perfectly into the animation pipeline.

Afterwards, I wanted to continue to figure out a way of maintaining that sort of graphic novel type look. Except the puzzle was how to get a crew of people on board to achieve the same look. So we had to very much come up with our own animation pipeline, which we use TV Paint for, and do it in a way that we can expand the crew out to like I said anywhere between 20 and 10 and 25 people. So the first job we did after that was “Zima Blue”. And we learned a few tricks. We added a few new wrinkles to our game. We did “Ice”. Each time we kind of look at it and we consciously think, “Okay, well how can we up the game here?” We don’t want to just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

JM: Leading the voice cast is John Boyega as Slash. You have this gang, this group of men, the “400 Boys”, and they are trying to defeat these very unique looking giants, who are so destructive. I don’t wanna give everything away. But how in working with John, do you get that voice performance across of someone in a very particular situation, a very dramatic situation. And like you said, that character is gonna go through these battles, which are very intense. How was it having John as a part of this?

RV: The voice casting goes on for months. And that’s one particular part of the production that Blur and Tim are very particular about. For good reason. We went through, without exaggerating, probably about 30 different voice casting alternatives for Slash. For the most part we were looking at trying to cast somebody in the UK. We needed someone that sounded, and this is the hard thing, like he was in charge… of this little crew, but he was supposed to sound not too old. Trying to get someone to come in and accomplish both those things is so difficult. We were spinning our wheels on that for a while, and I think it was the last voice to be cast, to be honest. So Tim said, “Look, we can get John Boyega involved.” And we were like, “Yeah, totally.” And so he came in, nailed it, and it was totally smooth. And he sort of elevated that role to what we needed. Gave us something that sounded youthful yet kind of in charge. And he was great to work with.

JM: I want to ask you about the electricity in their eyes. You see it early on and it comes back into play later. It’s a cool visual standout.

RV: We establish early on that the “Boys”, collectively, what’s left of them, have a psychic ability, which is a collective thing where the more of them that are part of this ring of psychic ability, the more powerful they are. We established that early on and then that became something that was instrumental later on when we got to the climactic sequence. Another layer of complexity with the story and the effects.

Source： Jackson Murphy/AnimationScoop

INTERVIEW: Creating “400 Boys” For “Love, Death + Robots”