Synopsis
Clément receives a telephone call from Tessa. It’s been a long time since they last spoke. As nightfall approaches, he gets lost in the city.

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Between the Gaps (Original French title: Entre les jours) is an animated short film nominated for the Student Film Competition at Animafest Zagreb 2025. For approximately three minutes, we witness the protagonist walking through the city while talking to a friend on the phone. The animated footage, with only sound effects and no background music, makes it feel realistic and lifelike. Meanwhile, we are soon gradually led into a visual world where we can engage with the protagonist’s inner world through the impressive visual presentation. We interviewed Martin Bonnin, the film’s creator, on the story behind Between the Gaps.

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Interview with Martin Bonnin

Hideki Nagaishi (HN): I would like to ask you about your motivation for making this film. What did you most want to deliver to the audience through this film?

Martin Bonnin: With this film, I wanted to talk about the importance of human connection and how those bonds can guide us through moments of vulnerability and self-doubt.

Grief is definitely a theme throughout the film, but I didn’t want to focus too much on the trauma of loss. Instead, I wanted to offer a perspective that’s more about life and what comes after.

HN: Where did the initial idea of the film’s story come from? And what was your main reason for deciding to develop the film?

Martin Bonnin: It all started from a conversation I had with a taxi driver who had just found out that day that his ex-girlfriend had passed away. He was clearly shaken, even though he told me he was now married and had kids. That moment really stuck with me and gave me the idea to build a story around past friendships and relationships, and how they sometimes resurface in our lives unexpectedly.

One of the reasons I wanted to make this film is that I’d been wanting for a while to work with dialogue. I thought the setting at La Poudrière and the support it offered was the perfect opportunity to finally give it a shot—to make a film with characters who actually talk to each other and go through strong emotions.

HN: What aspects did you focus on and pay particular attention to while developing the film’s entire story from the initial idea?

Martin Bonnin: In my previous work, the characters often felt like they were kind of floating in the middle of the scenery, which tended to take up all the space. It wasn’t always easy to really understand them.

So, for this film, I decided to focus on the characters; I wanted the audience to really be with them, to feel what they’re feeling. For me, it was something that had to come through the dialogue, so I took time to write it to make it as honest and real as possible.

HN: The film features several impressive visuals, particularly the projections and reflections on the background art, and the camera work. How did you conceptualize and develop the visual vision for each scene in the film?

Martin Bonnin: I wanted the phone conversation to be the backbone of the story, and for the visuals to come in afterward to fill in the silences and the things left unsaid.

My idea was that you should be able to understand the film just by listening to it, and then the visuals would bring in another layer, something more sensitive, and highlight what the characters are saying.

It was all about finding the right balance between what’s told through the dialogue and what’s shown through the images. To do that, making sketches and simple storyboard frames while writing the dialogue really helped me. Recording the dialogue also gave me a better sense of the film’s length (it had to stay under four minutes).

Working from the sound helped me structure the different moments of the story and the characters’ movements.

HN: Were there any difficulties or challenges in the overall visual expression of this film? If so, could you please explain them, including their technical aspects?

Martin Bonnin: Yes, it wasn’t easy because I spent a lot of time on the scriptwriting, which left me with less time for the visual and technical research. So, a lot of choices ended up being made directly while I was working on the shots, which isn’t always ideal.

Animating the main character’s acting was something I found pretty intimidating. I had to come up with ways to help myself; for example, I made the character’s head out of papier-mâché and filmed myself moving it around like a puppet. I then used those videos as a base to draw the animation, which is kind of a mix between 2D and rotoscoping.

At first, I wasn’t sure if this method would actually save time, but as I got further into making the film, it really proved to be useful. And just having a quick, clear idea of how the movement should look, thanks to the videos, saved me from spending too much time figuring out how the characters should move and how to draw it.