Montreal-based Hybride Technologies’ major assignment this year has been the creation of 11 minutes of multilayered special f/x sequences for the high-definition sci-fi movie Habitat, a huge assignment representing some 10 months of work for Pierre Jasmin, the company’s head of r&d, and Daniel Leduc, f/x supervisor.

Billed as Quebec’s only digital editing studio based on a D/FX Composium system matched with an Abekas 8100, Hybride also handled much of the $13.2 million film’s complex compositing work using an Onyx workstation, Flame and Ultimatte software program.

According to president Pierre Raymond, the assignment is the first time a house, other than Sony, has been asked to create f/x on a major hd movie.

A Canada/Netherlands coproduction, Habitat is a Sony Digital High-Definition adventure story with a dark ecological twist. The film’s production design incorporates complex computer graphics and animated special effects including molecularized new life-form characters and a role-playing, metamorphosed house with the properties of a primordial sentient swamp.

In creating the film’s f/x, director Rene Daalder was joined by some of the top visual and computer designers in the business – Tom Brigham, inventor of the morphing technique made famous in The Abyss and Terminator 2, visual effects specialist Eric Mises Rosenfeld, concept artist John Fraser, l.a.-based Sony technical advisor John Galt, Canadian production designer Claude Pare (Rainbow), makeup effects artists Gordon J. Smith and Russell Cate, costume designer Denis Sperdouklis and cinematographer Jean Lepine (Pret a Porter).

Raymond explains the biological transformation of the film’s main characters is visualized in the form of ‘choreographed, computer-generated molecular swarm particles.’

And because director Daalder asked that the characters continue to act, be seen and heard throughout the molecular transformation scenes, Hybride was obliged to create an original f/x software program compatible with the shoot’s original live video footage.

To make the particle swarm appear authentic, Hybride staff created ‘animation paths’ using a 3D approach to ‘choreograph’ the swarm in changing forms based on the tracked-camera movement or specific camera position, says Raymond.

The Habitat assignment also called for the production of multiple mattes, clean-up elements and rotoscoped sequences.

‘For each sequence we have a traveling matte from the chroma key (the original hd tape footage is green screened) and other mattes are extracted from additional software used for different parts of the body. Then all the mattes are merged in a proprietary compositing process,’ he says.

‘When all the animation is done and we have the particle movement and actor recognition, the last step (at Hybride) is the rendering,’ says Raymond. This was handled in an especially efficient manner, he adds, using an original software designed to exploit the full power of the Onyx’s Reality Engine workstation.

The final post-production stage, the online edit, is being handled in Los Angeles by Sony.

Dome Animation & Design, Toronto, also produced effects footage for Habitat.

The compositing work on the film was done on sgi-compatible data tape, and ultimately, the final footage will be transferred back to hd, and then to 35mm film for theatrical exhibition.

In its cinema special f/x department, Hybride services include montages, illustrations, retouching, rotoscoping, color correction and erasing for 35mm film and hdtv video.

For animation, Hybride relies on a variety of software including Flame, Flint, Xaos Tools, Ultimatte, Explore, Wavefront, Softimage and Hybride softools. The hardware environment includes mega-computers such as Silicon Graphics Onyx, Indigo II Ext and the 440-VGXT, used on an Onyx platform for all software applications.

The company places special emphasis on r&d, and has a film-to-video transfer division featuring a Rank 4:2:2 digital system coupled with a DaVinci time line corrector for Digital Betacam, Sony or DCT Ampex mediums.

Hybride founders are Raymond, Sylvie Talbot and Daniel Leduc, all three from pioneer computer animation company, Groupe Andre Perry.

Transfilm president Claude Leger produced Habitat on a budget of $13.2 million in association with producer Pieter Kroonenberg and Denis Wigman of Holland’s Ecotopia. Rene Malo was the film’s executive producer. Malo’s domestic distribution company, Malofilm Distribution, is the distributor. Julie Allan and Richard S. Wright were the executives in charge of production. Gregory Cascante, president of l.a.-based August Entertainment, is Habitat’s exporter, and is a major investor in the film.