TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

For Persepolis, the decors were then taken up by Zaza, the production designer, to give them texture – no longer on paper, but rather by computer, using image processing software. Marjane Satrapi explains:

Not all of the decors could be done in black and white either; viewers cannot last an hour and a half without having an epileptic seizure, because the eye requires shades of grey in the material. We thus worked with designers who proposed material in black and white with shades of grey. It was an ongoing discussion.^[4]

This process of giving material form to the decor began in the preparatory phase, to find the right aesthetic and means of proceeding, and was then put into practice in the production phase by Zaza and her team, made up of Patricia Guilmard and Thierry Million. This is undoubtedly one of the most distinct aspects of the work of the production designer on an animated film compared to their work on a live action film, because it is like a form of lighting, closer in a sense to the approach of a director of photography deciding on the source of light. The technique used to create texture in the film is singular. Reading the credits, we see the name Cizo, another regular collaborator of Winshluss, credited with seeking out supplementary decors, even though he did not really work on this film. He did, on the other hand, share with Zaza the grey background technique which he used on Raging Blues, a short film co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. The backgrounds are a bit peculiar. These are photographed skies found in old newspapers. These backgrounds were superimposed using Photoshop, to which Zaza added matter such as pencil lead. Once the basic decors were built, they were adjusted frame by frame by the decor team, to whom were delegated all the necessary textures. Most of these were designed by Zaza, but some motifs may even have been drawn by Marjane Satrapi.