‘Trash’ Student Directors Discuss the Making of Their SIGGRAPH Prize-Winning Short

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When ESMA (France’s École Spéciale de Mécanique et d’Electricité) students Maxime Crançon and Matteo Durand set out to make their graduation project in the summer of 2023, they decided to tell the story of a rat and a pigeon which are desperately fighting for crumbs. “We started building our own references and put a lot of ourselves and the moods we like in the movie,” says Durand. “We quickly agreed as a group that we wanted to address the movie to a teen/adult audience mainly because it’s what we consume ourselves, and we felt more in touch with this kind of storytelling.”

Durand says their team of eight students, a composer and an intern had to think about the story in relation to the background and how believable it needed to be. “Generally the ideas came up pretty easily because we knew from the start what we wanted, and all the constraints helped us feed the story and find interesting ways to make it work,” he notes.

The project, which took about a year to finish, was made using a mix of Maya and Houdini for production, RenderMan for rendering and DaVinci and Nuke for post and compositing.

Crançon says he had a lot of fun in the pre-production stage, figuring out the characters and buildings and trying to think of the smallest detail that would make the story feel organic. “Animating the fights was also a lot of fun; I loved thinking of how I could make it more nervous and impactful,” he says. “But in the end, starting to see the shots you worked on fully rendered and comped was the best. You see all the sweat, blood and tears you put into it. That’s the real reward!”

For Durand, imagining the story, the staging, and the overall art direction of the film was also quite rewarding. “Working on the cinematography was truly exciting — thinking about the colors, responding to the intentions behind each scene, and so on,” he says. “On a more technical level, designing the shaders and modeling was a lot of fun. Exploring how to break the often overly polished look of 3D was a particularly enjoyable and rewarding challenge.”

The co-directors admit that the film’s overall art direction provided to be the most challenging aspect of the project. “Optimizing our scenes was a real puzzle,” says Durand. “But in the end, those constraints actually helped shape our storytelling. They forced us to find creative, tailored solutions, and that’s ultimately what allowed the story to take the form it has today.”

The duo studied at ESMA for four years, with the last year focused entirely on the production of their graduation film, and one preparatory year. “We’ve been in the school and known each other for around five years,” says Crançon. “The school gave us the structure and tools we needed to bring Trash to life, while letting us shape the project in our own way. We also had regular feedback from teachers and professionals, which helped us stay on track and grow as a team.”

Both Durand and Crançon count 2D classics such as Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers and Michael Arias’ Tekkonkinkreet as two of their biggest inspirations. “Many of our other shared references actually come from live-action cinema,” they point out. “For example, movies like Hereditary and Delicatessen were key influences, especially in terms of cinematography, color grading and atmosphere.”

When asked about the ultimate goal for their short, the directors say they wanted to explore themes of survival, inequality, and human excess through the lens of two animals fighting over scraps. “The rat and the pigeon, often seen as vermin, mirror the desperation and instinct we try to ignore in our own societies,” comments Crançon. “Beneath the absurdity of their chase, there’s a reflection of human behavior in the face of scarcity, neglect, and decay. That said, we also believe in letting go of full control over meaning. The film isn’t a lecture, and we don’t want it to be. It’s open to interpretation, and we hope viewers can project their own thoughts, emotions, or even contradictions onto it!”

Find out more at trash-esmamovie.com and instagram.com/trash_esma.