An interview with Tsugi's Nicolas Fournel

Written by A. H. on 14 Aug 2014

We all find ourselves looking towards Japan with a mixture of joy and fascination, but what's it like to live and work in an area of the country that has proved so influential in the creation of some of the manga and anime we love? We spoke with the founder of Tsugi, Nicolas Fournel, who looked to Niigata as the home for their software development studio, about moving to Japan to work and the highlights of his current location.

UK Anime: Nicolas, first of all many thanks for taking some time to speak to us. To start with, can you briefly fill in our readers about Tsugi, who they are and what they do?

Nicolas Fournel: Thanks a lot for having me on the the UK Anime Network. Tsugi provides research and development services to the creative industries: video game, music, animation etc. We are trying to improve the workflow of creative people through technology, by building software tools that make them more productive and offering them more creative options. As such, we are sometimes doing some R&D for big studios such as Sony Computer Entertainment or Skywalker Sound, but we are also publishing our own line of software tools for smaller studios, freelance professionals and hobbyists. Our first products have been focusing on audio creation for games and animation, but we are equally comfortable with image processing, procedural generation of game levels etc. For example, we recently developed an interactive manga engine.

UK Anime: What drove you to found the company initially?

Nicolas Fournel: I had been working in the game industry for a while (and before that in the audio software industry), and I was struck by the lack of high-level tools.  By high-level, I mean something that lets you really start from your idea and refine it, without having to setup all the nitty-gritty and usually very technical details first. A top-down approach seems more logical to me from a creator's standpoint, as it follows the way the creative process works - from a broad idea, a main goal you want to achieve, to the last minute touches.

Moreover, the number of assets (drawings, 3D models, sounds...) required to produce games or anime is growing exponentially, calling for better and more productive workflows. Therefore our main mission is to create “smart” or “content-aware” tools. We use techniques such as digital signal processing, artificial intelligence or procedural generation to develop creative tools that understand the data they manipulate, can visualize it in the most effective way, and offer the best editing options. Let’s say that you have a sound editing tool in which you load two sound files: one is a musical excerpt and the other is a sword hit. For the first one, you may want to see the tempo, modify it, apply a fade-in etc, while for the second you will likely be more interested in changing the resonance of sword or its tone when it is hit.    

So to come back to your question, the company has been created from the necessity to have better, smarter tools for creative people, whatever their discipline (audio, game design, animation). Although the methods to achieve this may sound a bit technical, the end result is a suite of tools which are indeed very easy to use and more artist-oriented.

UK Anime: The company is based in Niigata in Japan, but clearly you're not native to the area or the country - where do you originally hail from, and what led you to move to Japan?

Nicolas Fournel: I’m originally from the Champagne region in France but, being in game development, I moved around the world quite a bit. Game development teams are often very international and at some point in my career I ended up at Konami in Hawaii. The studio was mainly composed of Japanese developers and I had a really great experience there and made many good friends. Although at first I was not especially a huge fan of manga and anime, martial arts, or J-Pop etc, I just felt at home each time I visited Japan over the years both for business and for leisure. I also have to admit that I just love Japanese food. I think Japanese people share with the French their love for food and nice presentation! On the company side, Japan was an interesting market too as it is the cradle of video games of course, but also many teams didn’t make the switch to new production pipelines and middleware yet like in the West, and were facing workflow issues: therefore we could pitch our “smart tools”.

UK Anime: Was there any particular reason that you chose Niigata as your base of operations?

Nicolas Fournel: I had visited a friend in Niigata so that’s how I knew about the city and prefecture, which is usually not one of the first tourist destinations in Japan! But from a business point of view it had several advantages. Although it seems far from Tokyo because it is located on the coast of the Sea of Japan, it is very fast and easy to go to the capital. A former prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei, was from Niigata and he made sure a Shinkansen (bullet train) line was built. Therefore you can now go from the center of Niigata where our office is located to the center of Tokyo in one hour and forty minutes, with the legendary punctuality of the Japanese trains. Being “inaka” (i.e. in a rural area) also means that things like renting an office and various services are much cheaper than in Tokyo. Niigata also has several universities and a large network of vocational schools such as the NCC (Niigata Computer College) where they teach game development and which is literally 200 meters from our company, as well as JAM (Japanese Anime and Manga College) from which we got interns and employees. So it did make a lot of sense. Besides that, the place is just beautiful with the sea, the mountains and lots of rice fields, the prefecture being known for the best rice and the best sake in Japan!