Paris, France: A country steeped in a rich history, France has offered the world a wealth of cultural endowments, including an important film tradition. When reflecting on the French film industry, however, the immediate associations are not 3D characters and cutting-edge digital effects. Yet as the technical achievements of French production and post companies, animation houses, games developers and broadcasters bring a unique creative sensibility to commercial film and tv projects, those associations may change.

A recent technical tour de France, sponsored by actim, an agency supporting French technology, revealed a youthful yet experienced industry eager to expand its sphere of influence and attract revenue from new markets.

Most agreed that, reflecting trends in the industry as a whole, film and tv projects of all kinds are increasingly availing themselves of post and effects technology, and in the past five or six years, French directors and producers have been increasingly turning to effects facilities to help realize their visions.

But many French effects facilities face the challenge of delivering high-end technical goods within the tight constraints of French film budgets, with the added burden of onerous equipment costs and limited availability, a situation which has led many facilities to bring their own software solutions to bear on the projects they handle.

More and more, these facilities are looking toward the North American market and are seeking ways to overcome geographical disadvantage and bring their expertise across the Atlantic. Canadian partners represent the potential for not only coproduction resources but the provision of a closer link to the coveted u.s. market.

As Canada and France have a history of coproduction, it’s no surprise that there are a number of incidents of Franco-Canadian interests coming together for the development of digitally oriented projects.

Medialab, Nelvana team up

Donkey Kong Country is a coproduction of Toronto’s Nelvana and Paris-based production and effects company Medialab. The two facilities teamed up about a year ago to begin preproduction on 26 episodes of a Paris- and Toronto-produced 3D animated series based on the Nintendo video game.

Medialab, a wholly owned subsidiary of French broadcaster Canal+, is a major player in Europe in computer graphics and developing realtime animation software which provides the technical basis for the production of Donkey Kong, scheduled for completion in fall ’97.

With the desire to expand into a 3D series, Nelvana formed the partnership with Medialab based on a long-standing relationship with Canal+.

Medialab consists of three divisions: Medialab Productions, a creator of tv series; Medialab Services, which provides special effects for long-form and advertising projects; and Medialab Technologies, which works on the development of realtime cgi, concentrating its efforts on developing virtual reality, character animation and special effects.

Medialab’s proprietary performance animation software moves production into realtime, which translates into significant time and cost savings for the $10 million series.

Medialab marketing manager for industrial activities and virtual reality, Dominique Pouliquen, says producing much of the series in realtime will represent more than a 50% savings versus using key-frame animation, where ‘traditionally,’ models and animation are developed and then rendered on a frame-by-frame basis, which means a lag time of minutes to hours.

The Donkey Kong series will be created primarily with performance animation software, with about 30% of the show produced with key-frame animation.

A demonstration of performance animation in Medialab’s sleek Paris facility involves an actress performing in a wired body suit, while her movements are immediately mirrored by Medialab’s freakishly feminine tv character Cleo on monitors overhead.

The company’s proprietary software and body suit work with electromagnetic motion-capture systems by Polhemus and Ascension Technologies.

Medialab has also developed ‘datagloves’ to capture the hand and facial movements of animated characters, where the flick of a gloved finger translates into a face-consuming smile or a crest-fallen droop of ears.

Pouliquen says the use of real-time technology allows directors the flexibility to give and receive immediate feedback from performers. Medialab also packages and sells the performance animation software as Clovis pa, initially targeting broadcasters and video game producers. M. Donkey Kong and Mlle Cleo will be peddling the package at this year’s siggraph.

Medialab also runs Alias Wavefront and Softimage software as well as Discreet Logic’s Flame on a network of sgi workstations with four Onyx supercomputers, making it one of the largest entertainment-based computer graphics facilities in Europe.

Fantome

Smaller companies, like Paris-based digital production company Fantome, are also facing the costs and challenges of bringing a 3D series to the world.

Fantome has been producing the 3D series Insektors for the past two and a half years, and Fantome associate director Renato admits that a degree of lunacy, together with experience and training, is necessary for the undertaking.

The series, originally produced in 26 13-minute episodes, is currently broadcast on Canal+ and France 3 in France and distributed by Canal+ Distribution to more than 20 countries.

Insektors has also been recognized with a number of international awards, including an International Emmy in 1994 in the Children’s and Young People’s Program category.

But Fantome still struggles with putting together a 3D series that Renato says costs twice as much as a traditional animated series but is acquired by broadcasters for the same rate.

Renato says the first season of Insektors was produced for a cost of about $11 million, which included research and development costs, with subsequent seasons being produced for about $9 million. Fantome plans to bring the series to 13 half-hour episodes and is also working on a Christmas special to run in primetime this year.

The company currently has five coproduction partners on Insektors – France 3, Ellipse Programme, Club D’Investissement Media, RTBF Imagique and Medialab. Renato says additional international coproducers must be found and the Fantome team will be attending mipcom to showcase the product. He says talks are underway with a u.s. broadcaster and the company is looking at merchandising opportunities.

The show was created as a non-violent, colorful children’s program and focuses on the worlds and adventures of two philosophically disparate groups of insects, the cheerful Joyces and the dark, stump-dwelling Yuks who are led by an evil queen and a cretinous sidekick called Krabo. Extremely high-quality 3D animation captures the lush worlds where they do non-mortal battle.

The series is produced on sgi workstations using Softimage software for animation and Alias Wavefront for rendering. The show also uses motion-capture software and is looking to acquire an optical motion-capture system.

Renato says software costs and availability can provide additional barriers. He says Fantome wanted to acquire Flock of Birds motion-capture from Ascension Technologies in the u.s., but the software has only one distributor in France, making the software difficult to come by.

Fantome was founded in 1985, and in 1990 began producing Les Fables Geometrique, claimed to be the first 3D animated series based on a group of geometric figures and broadcast in France and across Europe.

The company is currently producing 260 two-minute episodes of Spaceship Earth, an edutainment property based on celestial happenings and cranked out at a grueling rate of five episodes per week.

Duboi

A number of other French companies of mixed disciplines are looking at ways to increase their involvement in the North American market. They are mainly small to medium in size, with an array of primarily sgi hardware, proprietary software solutions, and reels full of innovative commercial, tv and film work.

Post-production and effects company Duboi has worked on effects for about 50 films since it was officially founded in 1991. Members of Duboi, spun from France’s Duran, worked on Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen in 1989 when digital effects ‘didn’t exist’ in the country, according to Duboi special effects director Antoine Simkine. Since then, he says, while the u.s. ‘effects movie’ has exploded in bigger and bigger ways, French films have directed post companies more into the area of transparent effects, where applications like rig removal and digital sets enhance the finished product and provide increased options for filmmakers.

Simkine says Duboi has gone from about $200,000 worth of work in its first year to about $4 million now for film work, or about $10 million including the company’s advertising projects.

But French film budgets are still comparatively low, making the u.s. production colossus a prime target.

Simkine says co-opting of French directors like Jean-Pierre Jeunet for u.s. features could provide a significant gateway to the market. Jeunet, along with Marc Caro, directed The City of Lost Children, which played at Cannes in 1995 and will direct Alien 4, currently in preproduction.

Duboi completed 144 digital effects shots for 17 minutes of film for City of Lost Children, at the time the most effects-intensive feature to have ever been made in France.

Duboi has developed a proprietary non-linear editing and compositing software system called Dutruc, which allows work in multiple resolutions, that it is looking to market. The company has also worked on a number of Canadian projects.

Mac Guff

Ten-year-old Paris-based digital effects and animation studio Mac Guff Ligne has expanded its services into European and Asian markets over the past three years,and is also eyeing North America as a market for its creative and technological innovations.

The 15-person facility has focused its efforts largely in the advertising world, which accounts for about 70% of its activity, as well as being one of the early developers of virtual set technology. The company is recognized for its morphing wizardry for which it has developed its own software based on triangles rather than four-sided polygons.

Mac Guff proprietary software is designed to complement the capabilities of Alias Wavefront Explore, which it runs on its network of 26 sgi workstations. Its Symbor software provides an integrated framework for modeling and animation.

The company’s Trukor software provides ‘Flame-like’ capabilities. It allows work in multiple formats and resolutions and combines the capabilities of a number of standard software products.

Mac Guff constructed a virtual set for Canal+ to facilitate the broadcaster’s Olympic coverage. The set, which features multiple ‘video screens’ and can accommodate three camera configurations, was designed to be ported to Discreet Logic’s Vapour virtual set software and is running on site with the assistance of four SGI Onyx processors.

Mac Guff’s Nicholas Trout says French facilities must plan their growth exceedingly wisely, carefully avoiding over-extension.

‘There are 15 Flames in Paris,’ he says, ‘and there aren’t enough jobs for them all.’ Mac Guff concentrates on providing effects the ‘European way,’ he says, using tailor-made solutions and creating high-quality effects on smaller machines.

Ex Machina Computer Graphics and Digital Visual Effects has penetrated North American, European and Asian markets with about half of its work coming from special-venue films shown around the world.

The Paris-based facility has completed several projects for Iwerks and imax theaters, including Iwerks’ Dino Island, and also works in commercials and features.

Ex Machina

Recently the company used proprietary software to create a spectacular 3D film for Japan’s Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic and its agency Dentsu. Krakken: Adventure of Future Ocean uses 3D technology to create a picture of life under the sea in the future.

Krakken’s creatures were animated with Ex Machina’s Appia software, which employs interpolation and articulation to animate characters and allows the creation of skeletons with rigid and supple sections as well as skinning.

To facilitate the movements of fish schools, Ad Hoc, the company’s own ‘behavioral animation’ software, was used. Ad Hoc provided the cohesion of groups of fish as well as accounting for responses, like the school reacting to obstacles. To create the stereoscopic film, two images were recorded to correspond left and right images to the appropriate eye, and with glasses added, the results seem to actually leap from the screen.

Ex Machina director Jerzy Kular says effects budgets for French films are low and the key to accessing the u.s. market with French films is distribution.

INA

Supporting the digital effects industry in France is the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. The hybrid public and private body maintains French audiovisual and radio archives and a library of audiovisual production as well as undertaking program production, vocational training and conducting research.

ina has helped develop a number of software products and is currently developing Televirtuality, a cloning and realtime animation system which allows 3D reconstruction and movement of faces without using motion capture.

ina also organizes Imagina, a yearly forum in Monaco dealing with computer graphics, virtual reality, special effects, networks and games.

Imagina organizer, ina’s Pierre Henon, says there are about 30-40 companies working in the computer graphics and effects industry in France. He acknowledges ‘it’s not an easy living,’ citing the lack of proximity to major markets as a hurdle.

Henon says the industry must also deal with issues of new talent. While a number of French schools turn out engineers and other tech-wise guys, Henon, like many in the industry, says the challenge is to find and foster artistic talent.