This year, Fortiche Production, one of animation studios who is most highly regarded and gathering attention among global animation creators and, of course, animation fans around the world, came to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Mifa with two official programmes: “Studio Focus Fortiche” and “Making of Arcane“.

Fortiche has been developing many high-quality animation works including Arcane, the globally-acclaimed animation series with innovative visuals, and they are currently developing an exciting original feature, Penelope of Sparta, with a diverse team of over 450 talented professionals, including artists, animators, writers, and producers in their headquarters in Paris, France and additional studios in Montpellier, France and Las Palmas, Spain.

At the studio focus session in Mifa, the two co-founders of the studio, Hervé Dupont, Jérôme Combe, Annelyse Vieilledent (head of development at Fortiche), and Amanda Overton, the scriptwriter of Arcane, talked about the studio’s successful history from humble beginnings to the current huge success. For the people who couldn’t be there, we would like to give you the insightful words from Jérôme Combe (Co-founder of Fortiche),Hervé Dupont (Deputy CEO of Fortiche), and Amanda Overton (Writer of Arcane) on the history of Fortiche Production. It is one of our two special interviews with them in Annecy.

Interview with Jérôme Combe, Hervé Dupont, and Amanda Overton

Animationweek (AW): What were your goals in establishing Fortiche Production in 2009?

Jérôme Combe: We started in 2009 because I met Pascal Charrue and Arnaud Delord, and we were working in a different company. I was alone, doing stuff, music videos, and so on. But at one moment, we say that we need to create a company, because when you are alone, it’s to sing, write, but if you want to do animation, big stuff, you need to create a company. So, we created a company in 2009, to have the ambition to tell stories.

I met Arnaud in a nightclub, and Pascal in a video game company. He said, “I need to work with this guy,” and one day, we say, “Okay, let’s create a company,” and we were very complementary, so we started doing a video with Hervé, with five people, and so it’s short movie; a music video.

Hervé Dupont: I think you always have the goal of eventually making movies. Like, I’ve always hear you trying to find the path from advertising and music videos to movies and series.

Jérôme Combe: Yes. At the beginning, we thought doing music videos and commercials will send us to cinema or to a show, but no, because when you are a director or a company who are doing music video or commercial, you stay in it. And when we started working with Riot Games, doing teasers or music videos, but for a game company, it starts to be different because we got more freedom than a commercial for beer or pizza. And we said, “Okay, we can tell a story in three minutes, in a music video.” So, we said, “Okay, cool. Perhaps it’s a good way to make a new step to go to where we want to go: TV show and cinema.” But since the beginning, the goal was to go to cinema and to do stuff like Arcane; a big TV show. I like pizza, but I don’t want to do a commercial for pizza all my life!

AW: What do you think are the uniqueness and strengths of Fortiche Production, and how did the studio achieve them?

Hervé Dupont: I’ve been in other studios, and what is very specific about Fortiche is that the co-founders are creatives, so it’s a creative-led studio. It’s a simple sentence, but it changes a lot of things in the way you’re doing things, what is the priority of the company, and how much your talents feel supported at Fortiche, because the founders are artists. So, it’s a company founded by artists for artists, and talent is really valued at Fortiche. On my side, the job is to try to protect this as much as I can, and it’s to create the right structure to support this philosophy and make it valuable and profitable.

AW: How did your studio encounter Riot Games, and how has the studio been creating and managing a good relationship with Riot Games? What do you think is the turning point that resulted in enabling the studio to create Arcane with Riot Games?

Hervé Dupont: In 2012, Fortiche did Gorillaz with Passion Pictures. It granted Fortiche with its name in the industry. And then, at the same time, there was La Gaviota. For a very small French band, La Gaviota is having the first aspect of the Fortiche style.

Riot Games were a young company as well. They wanted to do something different, to sell their games differently, so they wanted to have a new approach. So, they were going to launch the Jinx character, which was very powerful. And they didn’t want to have the usual traditional schematics. And Christian Linke, already at the time, was having the idea of doing a music video to launch a character, a video game character, which was really new at the time. And they wanted to have a special look for this music video.

So, they were looking at the latest, new studios, and they found the Fortiche name. They looked at La Gaviota, and they were like, “Wow, that’s something very different.” So, it was like a bet done by Riot Games on Fortiche. And then the bet was worth doing, because at the end it was millions of views on YouTube, a huge impact on the game, on the community, and Jinx. Since then, Jinx became an iconic character, she’s at the center of Arcane. And then there has been other videos following up, and always the Fortiche videos that were the most viewed on the YouTube channels of League of Legends. So, it led Christian to naturally think about the TV series and Arcane, and supported by Riot Games.

AW: What were your key decisions as the executives of the studio that led the studio to create the very successful Arcane series together with Riot Games?

Hervé Dupont: So, the key decision was to say “yes” to Riot Games, when you know that it’s going to be a huge storm! I’m always talking about Arcane like a rollercoaster. I think Fortiche said, “Yes, let’s do this.” And then we started the rollercoaster for three years for the season one.

Jérôme Combe: Yes, I remember Jane Chang on the phone, saying “Can we have the pilot in two months for Christmas?” Say, “Yes!”

Hervé Dupont: Arcane was a big bet, and inside Arcane, there were small bets, all the time. Like delivering the pilot, and relaunch probably the series in summer 2018. With two companies that has never done that before. A video game company, and a small advertising company, going into a massive series. Believing in us!

AW: Could we hear about any new projects or plans in the near future that the studio is working on besides the second season of “Arcane“, if possible?

Hervé Dupont: Globally, we have a line-up with Riot Games. We’re developing a line-up of projects with Riot Games, where we’re exploring all kinds of formats. Shorts, series, and others.

On our side, we are discussing with other partners. We have other IPs that they would like to “Fortichize” as we say. Some people come to us to “Fortichize” their IP. And the last and the really heart of what we want to do is going into original production. An original Fortiche IP. And so, we developed Penelope. Jérôme developed Penelope of Sparta.

And so, that kind of puts them on opposite ends of the spectrum. Penelope is meant to be the queen of her country. She has all the expectations on her for her family. Whereas, Odysseus has none. He’s not meant to inherit anything. So, he gets to be the problem child. And how does their relationship create that hero of legend that we know to be the famous Odysseus that is the king of Ithaca? And how does that turn Penelope into such a loyal partner to him in The Odyssey?

AW: I’m curious about the goal of the new film project. It seemed to have emerged from natural daily conversations in the three of you. Or did someone come up with the idea of the film project?

Jérôme Combe: We want to do movie. We like to work together. We are a very, very good team. With animators and technical aspects. And we got today a good pipeline. So, we can do a full movie.

Hervé Dupont: I remember Jérôme coming one day to the office and saying, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, and it’s huge. Greek mythology.” And it started with that. It appears that there’s a big void in the young adult and adult audience that we want to reach about Greek mythology. It was the start of the brainstorming.

AW: Why and how you came up with that initial idea?

Jérôme Combe: I started with a friend, Barbara Israel. She’s a book writer. We got another project we will develop. We were brainstorming, and she said, “Why not to do something with Odysseus? Because I have an apartment in Athens, in Greece.” I said, “Yes, it’s an old story. It’s cool. It’s very old. Everyone knows it.” So, it’s a good starting point to write something around that. Instead of starting from nowhere.

Amanda Overton: But you had been working on it for like a year, right? Before they came to me.

Jérôme Combe: Yes, we want to do a new world. But sometimes it’s not so easy. And The Odyssey is something overdone by a lot of people. And I think they’ve read entire The Odyssey with Barbara. And so, they were like, “Hey, what about this character?” And they were digging into the back stories of characters. And at some point, they were like, “Hey, Odysseus and Penelope, how did they meet? What about their youth?” And so, it started with Odysseus as a teenage and Penelope. And then going a bit deeper, we thought, “Hey, what about Penelope? Could Penelope be the main character?” And it’s really interesting. As Amanda was mentioning, how did she end up waiting for a man for 20 years? What is the backstory of that? And backing off all the other guys knocking at the door. Where did that relationship come from? So, that’s really interesting.

Amanda Overton: They developed the story for about a year on their own. Then we’re looking for a writer and came to me and pitched me the idea of Penelope of Sparta. And I said, “Ooh, what if we did this take on it where Odysseus is the second child? He’s not meant to inherit the throne. What if we make it about familial expectation?” Because that’s something when you ask someone, “Hey, who could you be if nothing is expected of you? Who would you be if everything is expected to you?” That’s something that can resonate with everyone. You’re either one or the other and so that’s kind of the universal theme that we all were interested in. And then from there, we’ve just been working together to kind of build a story out from there, both in visual sequences and emotional characters.

AW: As this is your first time writing for a feature, is there something you especially take care of for a feature film project, compared to a TV series?

Amanda Overton: I think the way we approached Arcane was the way we did three episodes, then three episodes, etc. So, it was like a beginning-middle-end, a beginning-middle-end, and so on. So, it felt like each three episodes was like a feature film.

It made me realize that Penelope of Sparta is like an act of Arcane. it’s kind of the same approach. You want a beginning, a middle and an end.

Jérôme Combe: We want to do a series of movies, so this movie will be the first movie, perhaps.

Hervé Dupont: It’s like the first act of Arcane, but it’s maybe the first act of something else.

Jérôme Combe: We can plant some things that would reveal after another movie.