NETWORK ANIMATION SOLUTION

Mexican Culture Animated in HarmonyAnimex is a Mexican animation studio dedi-cated to producing original content for tele-vision, feature fi lms and video, for local chan-nels and for export. Animex’ objective is to position México as a reliable and solid player internationally for animated content creation and production.

The highly creative team at Animex includes the following talents: Ricardo Arnaiz1, Director and Producer at Animex, who has been creating characters and stories for more than 20 years. He founded AniMeX in 2000 to produce original series and feature fi lms. He has created more than 15 original projects and he is developing two new movies. Jean Pierre Leleu2, Producer, has spent his life in the fi lm industry, working at United Artists, Warner Bros. and Televisa. Paul Rodoreda3, Executive Producer, is in charge of all the production design, fi nancial aspects, budget, assets, etc. He also developed all the computer systems and networks for the studio. Soco Aguilar4, Co-Producer, has been a documentary freelance producer for PBS, Discovery Channel and Partridge Films. She has collaborated with groundbreaking Chicana fi lmmaker Lourdes Portillo and more recently with director Mark Becker on a fi lm sponsored by the Sundance Institute. Nine-time Emmy Award winner Phil Roman5, Creative Advisor, has been involved with the animation world since 1959. He has produced great series like The Simpsons, Garfi eld, and Bobby’s World, to name a few. He was also the director of Tom & Jerry: The Movie, and series and TV specials about Garfi eld, Charlie Brown among others. He is considered an institution in the animation industry. The rest of the team includes Eduardo Jimenez6, On-Line Producer, Gabriel Villar7, Audio Director/Music Composer, Oscar Aragon8, Storyboard/ Keyframes, Pablo Guessi9, Audio Designer, Salvador Dominguez, Character Design, as well as Omar Mustre and Toño Garci10 who are both writers.

Scheduled for a feature release on October 31, 2007, their current project is titled La Leyenda de la Nahuala. This feature aims at promoting the rich Mexican culture with its art, litera-ture, folklore and customs. Set in 1807 in the town of Puebla

de los Ángeles, New Spain, the story revolves around Leo San Juan, a young fearful boy. On the night of November 2nd, Day of the Dead, Leo’s brother is kidnapped by La Nahuala, an ancient and malevolent spirit. Overcoming all his fears, Leo embarks on a great adventure fi lled with strange creatures to save his brother and bring him back home.

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Working with a team of 40 animators in Puebla, Leon and Mexico City, the studio has now become the largest Harmony installation in Latin America. Of particular interest in the pa-perless workfl ow Animex has implemented: animators create frame-by-frame animation digitally, all relying on the Harmony pipeline to maximize its fully integrated pipeline.

Everything starts with the scene planning. Ricardo Arnaiz draws sketches and roughs of what he wants in a particular scene, then sends these sketches to Oscar Aragon and his team in Puebla who take care of the layout and traces for the inbetweening of the fi nal animation. At the same time, they are creating all the stages according to the characters’ position. Once this is done, the scene returns to Mexico City where they put together all the layouts and key frames on a video editor with the fi nal voice track. At this point, they output small video fi les with the scene planning, key frames, voices and time code that the animators use as a reference for the animation. With all this comes a control spreadsheet that enables Ricardo Arnaiz to review the project’s progress every two days. Once the animation is approved, it goes to inking and painting. Colourists use a colour palette already defi ned and approved for each character and then to com-positing and staging. They start placing all the elements: backgrounds, over layers, special effects, camera movements, etc. Lastly, the fi nal scenes that have been approved go to au-dio, where Gabriel Villar adds and edits the music and Pablo Guessi dresses the scene with Foley and incidental sounds.

“Since we are running a paperless production, we have elimi-nated all pencil tests, clean up and scanning. That bring us a time-saving feature since each animator can review their ani-mations on the run, we don’t have to wait for the scanning for each pencil test,” stated Paul Rodoreda.

When asked about how Harmony is used in the studio envi-ronment, Paul openly shared: “For our roughs, we use brush tools, and for clean animation, we use pencils, just because of the look we want to keep. As far as ink and paint is con-cerned, most of our animation is in plain color, but we’ve used “paint texture” for some elements. Tools like “apply to

all drawings” have become very handy to speed up painting and “paint unpainted” and “repaint brush” have proved to be very fast inking our characters. The fact of having one single

colour palette for each character has been pretty useful. Be-fore Harmony, we didn’t have that tool so, when we needed to change one colour of an element we had to repaint every single frame of the animation. Now, we simply change the colour values on our palette and that changes all frames of all scenes at once.

On staging and compositing, the features we use most are tones, highlights and shadows because they allow us to have a realistic fi nish on our characters with lights and shadows projected on them, all done in a very fast way. Also the multi plane camera and “free view” have been very useful: we can create our camera and character moves very fast and easily. Combining camera moves with mathematical functions have allowed us to create special moves and complicated scenes in a few steps. Finally, lip-sync is another tool used on a daily basis. We have to mention that even in Spanish works great.

Toon Boom Harmony has proven to be a great tool for

creating, animating and compositing our movie. We would have also used Storyboard Pro but our storyboard was already done when it was released. However, we expect to work with

it in our next project. Toon Boom Harmony has given us the possibility to produce TV series and feature fi lms at low cost and highest quality. We are preparing our next movie about a girl whose befriends an elf and enter a magic world, based on a story developed by Ricardo Arnaiz. The team will be mostly the same for all the production. Also in the planning table is a spin-off from a sequence of La Leyenda de la Nahuala, about two characters who live extraordinary adventures in an old library of an old house. These characters are a crazy old Spanish ghost, Don Andres and the Alebrije, a mythological creature from Mexican folklore. Also on the works is a third season of an Animex original series Roncho the Bad Luck Dog”. With such a full slate of unique projects coming up, Animex is certainly true to its corporate and creative mission which Toon Boom is proud to be part of.