Axyz is making a canine character talk for producer Carsey-Werner-Mandabach and ABC on the pilot for a live-action series tentatively titled Speak. The program follows a nerdy career student who, along with his roommate brother, buys a dog that turns out to have the gift of the gab, which inevitably alters their lives. Think of it as Frasier with a talking Eddy.

The job represents a branching out toward long form for the Toronto editing and effects house whose emphasis in its six years has been on commercials, with a couple of handfuls of Bessie, Mobius, New York Film Festival and Bob Mann awards to show for it.

Axyz senior animator TV, Mario Marengo, led a production team of 12 in the completion of 152 effects shots. Andres Kirejew headed the compositing team and Neil Durie produced the pilot for Axyz.

Marengo has been with Axyz for two-and-a-half years, following three years at now-defunct Waveform Digital Productions. Marengo had done some freelance work for Axyz, so the transition to full time was easy for both sides.

The same Carsey-Werner-Mandabach team that produces sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun approached Axyz for Speak based on work the shop had done on a Kellogg’s spot with a talking baby. Although one might expect the technique of animating a talking infant to be the same, Marengo insists dealing with animals involves a substantially different process. The senior animator conducted two to three weeks of R&D to figure out the production method.

Axyz had to solve not only how to achieve the required results, but how to do so in a span of less than four weeks. Marengo says the shop had to ready itself for the show’s intense workload.

‘It’s not a matter of more people or more machines, which are easy to get,’ he explains. ‘It [comes down to] the system being flexible enough to take a huge beating. That was part of the initial effort – to find a group of tools and [design] a lot of proprietary stuff and put it all together in a way that would survive a lot of mishandling, which happens when you have so little time to do so much.’

Marengo says the biggest strain was on the compositing side of the operation, although everything was manageable with the freelancers Axyz brought in, and with the Inferno artists pitching in on the 2D work. It was important to the studio that this foray into TV (it’s Axyz’s second series pilot) did not interfere with its ongoing spot work, which remains its bread and butter.

Although the show’s producers are trying to maintain a sense of realism in Speak’s overall look, Marengo says an exaggerated touch is inevitable when your plot line involves a mouthy mutt.

‘Animator Peter Hudecki has been pushing the lip synch slightly so that it’s not totally mundane,’ Marengo says. ‘It’s slightly cartoony. We decided to take a few licences and have fun with it.’

The L.A. production shot the scenes with the dogs (the owners’ pet and its friends) with 6-10 paper dots on their heads, allowing Axyz to track movement using 3D-Equalizer software from German manufacturer Science.D.Visions. Axyz then took the footage into Houdini (Side Effects Software’s 3D animation tool), to light and shade and set up all the muscles in the animals’ heads to move their lips. Animators then sent the footage to Pixar’s RenderMan, to do what Marengo calls ‘all the funky, magical rendering stuff that makes surfaces look real.’ Compositing was done in Montreal-headquartered Discreet’s Flame and Inferno systems.

Sauced up with HP

Axyz had several representatives at the recent NAB trade show in Las Vegas, but the company has not added anything to the Speak technology pipeline, which would be disruptive in mid-production. But it did switch from SGI workstations, which it had been using previously, to Hewlett-Packard machines running the Linux operating system.

‘That was a huge change, because typically these things would be done on SGIs running IRIX,’ says Marengo. ‘But now, because there’s an option – and we’ve been trying it in-house – we’ve shifted everything to HPs and Linux, which is a lot cheaper. It has actually turned out to be incredibly solid in this kind of production, and I couldn’t think of anything more demanding to put the equipment through.’

Axyz had a representative on set at all times to make sure the tracking dots were correctly placed and that the shop would have reference images of all the different pooches. Marengo says the software is so advanced now that not only are camera lock-offs not required, but Axyz could also cover some less-than-stellar performances from the animal cast.

‘Open mouths, hanging tongues and dogs that were tired and panting – we were able to remove all that and make them talk anyway,’ Marengo says.

Axyz is thankful Carsey-Werner-Mandabach adopted a hands-off approach to the collaboration.

‘They sent the locked picture and audio and we slotted the shots in and sent it back,’ Marengo says. ‘We did three blocks and after we sent them the first block, you could almost hear the [sigh of relief].’

At press time, Axyz said Carsey-Werner-Mandabach was awaiting word on the pilot’s future from ABC. *

-www.axyzfx.com