As part of a series celebrating The Wreck's first anniversary, here's an interview with Peggy, the game's animator and cinematic artist.
Who are you and what was your role on The Wreck?
Hey ! I'm Peggy, An animator and graphic designer from Brest, France. My pronouns are they/them and I enjoy mashups and rabbits. When I joined the team on The Wreck, my role was first and foremost to handle character animation. I ended up extending my stay, and did a variety of tasks, from cinematics, framing most of the game's camera shots, to doing a bunch of cool visual effects. For instance, whenever you see a text hovering in the air,it's me who did the font did the font !! it was hand written in with an ink brush then scanned ! I then did some shader magic to animate it in a variety of ways.
What was your favourite moment/thing to do during the production of the game, and what was the one you liked the least?
I don't want to spoil the story too much, but there is a scene on a rooftop with Junon and another character that's very emotional. I got a lot of freedom at animating and directing the scene, and I'm very proud of the end result. It looks vibrant, dynamic, intimate, and I'm happy I was able to stay true to the vision that both Alex and Florent had for that scene. Whenever I replay the game this sequence always gives me the chills.
As for my least favourite moment, I distinctly remember spilling my soda and breaking my laptop in the middle of the production ToT. I had to build a new computer in emergency, and I worked on a temporary setup in the meantime. It was so stressful, and I lost a lot of precious time. Hopefully, the old laptop is doing fine nowadays. It regularly glitches, but it's good enough to watch tv shows in my room.
What was a thing you learned about your craft making the game that you'd like to share with other animators out there?
I think my biggest takeaway is that it's good that we didn't go for realistic animations. By distancing ourselves from industry standards, we made a statement that what we were trying to achieve was different, more intimate. I think players got what we were going for, and agreed to see our game for what it was instead of projecting their expectations onto it. Allowing ourselves to look for inspiration outside of video games played a great part in this decision. I personally fell in love with Makoto Shinkai's feature film "5 centimeters per second", which is a masterclass in limited animation, and helped so much in defining how to animate, frame and edit the cinematics. If I had to redo a project like this I would probably spend even more time looking for references and carefully documenting them.