Manou the Swift and Forest Pack

Read our interview with LUXX Studios' Christian Haas, creators of the new trailer for Manou the Swift

In our latest case study, we talk to Christian Haas from LUXX Studios about their remarkable full length animated feature Manou the Swift.

LUXX Studios was founded in 2006 by Andrea Block and Christian Haas and started life a VFX vendor for television and European movies. Later they were able to extend their work to huge Hollywood projects like Roland Emmerich’s White House Down and Independence Day 2 as well as Wes Anderson´s Grand Budapest Hotel. Their main focus at that time was realistic Full CG Environments, animated vehicles and crowds, set extensions with Matte Paintings and fire-water effects and destructions. Over time they decided to extend their expertise into the character animation sector and began to develop their own stories. The result is feature animation movie Manou the Swift, the first project they developed entirely in-house from the very first spark of an idea, to the script, design and through to full production.

Read on to learn more about this impressive achievement.

iToo:Before we get technical, tell us a little about Manou the Swift

Christian: Manou is a dynamic adventure and heart-warming drama for the whole family. It tells the story of Manou the Swift who grows up with seagulls. He strives to fish, swim and fly like them to fulfil the high expectations of his strict father. When a tragedy happens, they blame him as the outsider and send him to exile. Now he discovers his origins as a swift and finds new friends. When seagulls and swifts get into big trouble, Manou and his friends save them bridging the enmity between them with his special blend of inventive swift and courageous seagull.

iToo: I understand that this is your first animated feature What inspired you to move from producing VFX for others and create your own?

Christian: Some years ago, we visited our friend Saschka Unseld at Pixar and were very impressed by their creative spirit. So we started dreaming about not only designing our clients visions, but also bringing our own ideas to screen and spicing it up with our know-how in creating realistic environments and effects. We spent years of development on content and story, pipeline and tools, optimizing our software development for a better workflow until finally, we felt it would be good enough to handle a full CG movie. We wanted to combine the accumulated experience of Hollywood productions and the power of VFX to tell unique stories and create powerful worlds to bring original content to the big screen and entertain the audience. VFX and Animation still is the core of our business, only we extended it by creating IP for especially those movies with high need of VFX and animation. Working with great directors is very inspiring for us and we enjoy it every time. While generating our own stories and vision is also rewarding and one more base to grow in the future.

iToo: Did other animations, films art etc. influence this production?

Christian:Sure. We love animation movies and visionary science fiction and dramatic adventure movies. For animation, of course Pixar did some of the best. One of our favourites is still Ratatouille because we feel it has the right combination of humour, depth and family entertainment for all ages - kids and adults alike. The lovable animation and intricate sets still look great today. It’s the benchmark of animation art for us and we would be happy to get somewhere near it. Which is quite difficult, because you can´t compare our budget and team size in any way with a Pixar production.

iToo:Every film is different with its own achievements and challenges. What makes this project unique from our industry's point of view?

Christian:On international film Markets we get the feedback that Manou is looking really great, and we are quite happy that we get recognized for the visual style and dramatic content. There are so many great independent projects out there and it is very hard to compete with a limited budget. In our region, it is uncommon for a company to create an international style movie from scratch to final and as a service provider for VFX and animation. This includes developing and writing of an original script, raising all the money for it, doing storyboards, art direction, developing the whole pipeline and in-house tools, editing, modelling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, compositing. We share and owe these promising results with our talented team, whose efforts over many years will show at the successful start in theatres around the world. The movie and its looks were only possible through some smart approaches, a smart and lean software department which is improving our internal workflow continuously during production and a strong, collaborative team effort.

iToo: That sounds like a tremendous amount of work! How long have you been working on this project and what constraints and limitations did you discover along the way?

Christian:The very first seed of the story idea emerged in 2007. But we put it in the drawer for a long time and retrieved it in 2011. We founded a second company LUXX Film for production and engaged scriptwriter Axel Melzener and Andrea Block to work on the first draft which was followed by many versions until ready to shoot. After that, we designed a two minutes concept teaser and convinced our World sales agency Sola Media to jump on board and sell the movie all over the world. From that point on we continuously worked on design, characters and sets with a few artists and used inbetween the time of our big vendor projects to draw storyboards and edit the animatic. Later we edited the rough cut, modelled and rigged the first characters and did animation tests. Whenever a task for vendor project was done, we moved our people to Manou and so we filled up the breaks in between projects. A big milestone was the attachment and recording of our English Cast, including Kate Winslet and Willem Dafoe. That raised our project to another level on international markets.

The constraints are mostly set by a limited budget. Today you are technically capable of bringing nearly every vision to screen, it is just a matter of cost. With a tight budget, we sometimes have to rethink creative decisions or just accept the fact that the result is not perfect, but good enough to convey the story. During such a long period of production, there are always things in storytelling, design decisions, editing or animation you would do differently if you would start again. That is a great benefit of high budgets, to redo things again and again, until it feels best. But then, you never know if the movie would really be conceivably better if we were to change decisions more often. It stays a constant learning process and eventually there will be always only one version on screen.

iToo: Increasingly (and sadly) people don’t think of 3ds Max as a tool for feature animation. What influenced your choice to continue with Max on this film. What about Max do you like and where do you feel improvements are required.

Christian: The main reason to work with 3ds Max was our experience with it. Over the years you learn to live with the good and the bad things, you know how to solve issues and work around bugs. Also, we had good support and interest from the development crew in Montreal, led by Ed who even visited our studio once. We exchanged troubleshoots and scenes to find out the traps and pitfalls for animation and feel it has improved a lot. Also, you have this huge pool of great plugins like Forest Pack Pro or RailClone, which allows you to raise the bar of creating convincing VFX. In the past, many people were impressed by our results for big Hollywood productions done by a team of our size, comparable in quality with way bigger vendors. This is a result of our talented and effective team, but also the right choice and combination of tools, which helps us do the tasks very fast and efficiently. Thus we felt confident to manage the scope of a full CG animated film with all environments in our pipeline, too. The animation department was the newest task and yes, we had some issues at the beginning. We started with a small animator team knowing 3ds Max and ramped up with Maya animators. From them, we learned what they missed on 3ds Max and our TD Martin Wellstein wrote endless tools for them to fill the feature gap and go beyond limits. Now some tools are even better in our 3ds Max pipeline than on Maya. Meanwhile, all the animators including the Lead Animator Thilo Kienle switched from Maya to 3ds Max and the learning time for animators to switch to 3ds Max went down to a few days. We also got some great support for animation from our friends and very experienced Animation team at “Ambient Entertainment” in Hannover. They did many animation features on Maya before and we could port our system to them. After only a few days they delivered great work with 3ds Max back to us.

iToo: Of course, we were delighted to hear that Forest Pack and RailClone were used in the production. Would you mind describing a few of the most interesting areas that you worked on in this film, and how did Forest Pack and RailClone help with their execution?

Christian:Forest Pack and RailClone have been our “secret weapon” tools for a long time. We use them in all our environments for each project. Usually for distribution of objects, but sometimes we use it in ways the developers didn't intend. For example, for “Independence Day 2” we used Forest Pack and Kinect captured people to generate the huge crowds of up to 500,000 people on the president’s speech. Forest allowed us in this show, to handle so many characters, including endless variations in geometry, animation and colours. Still we had the chance to control the crowd for special actions like standing up in time or starting to clap. The bleachers with thousands of chairs were constructed with Railclone, based on a built-in preset which we altered for our purposes and design requests.