In 2007, La Leyenda de la Nahuala was a huge success in Mexico’s fi lm industry, setting box offi ce records. Two years later, Animex is repeating the same formula with a new feature fi lm titled Nikté.

This time, the movie’s producer, Soco Aguilar, got UniversalPictures Corporation of Mexico to do the nationwide distribution of this new feature. Released on December 17, 2009 Nikté is be the most important Mexican release [to date] for Universal Pictures with it being shown on 500 screens.

Universal Pictures are confi dent that it will do well at the box offi ce competing with openings such as Avatar, The Princess and the Frog, Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, within the same time frame.

The animation for Nikté was made in three different studios, all of them equipped with Toon Boom Harmony.

The studios were Animex in Puebla, Es Comic in Leon, Guanajuato, and Cutting Edge in The Philippines. Both Animex and Es Comic worked together on the La Leyenda de la Nahuala project, but needed an additional studio to share the work. “Toon Boom has a great community of professional studios and they referred us to Cutting Edge which had great experience in feature fi lm production following the Dayo project” explained Soco Aguilar.

Nikté tells the story of a little girl, a poor foster child that wants to be a princess in the ancient world of the Olmecas. The story teaches that to be the greatest, fi rst you have to be the smallest. In the fi lm, Nikté is so poor she becomes arrogant and annoying, and deceives everyone around her into believing she is a princess sent by the Gods to save them from Tah´nohoch, as the prophecy said. She never imagined that she would have to fulfi ll that prophecy and depart on a journey self-discovery, where she meets a series of characters that help her fi nd herself.

Mexican IP Gets the Harmony Treatment for the Big Screen

Animex is a Mexican animation studio dedicated to producing original television, feature fi lm and video content for local channels and export. This studio is no stranger to us as they were already featured in our April 2007 newsletter. While they were producing La Leyenda de la Nahuala in 2007, they set themselves a goal to position Mexico as a reliable and solid international player for animated content creation and production, they have certainly accomplished that!

At seventy-fi ve minutes long, Nikté is a traditional feature done digitally. Being advocates of the classical animation art form, Animex have put in place a robust Harmony pipeline that enables them to effi ciently produce frame-by-frame animation while smoothly handling all digital assets created by in-house and external teams.

As the lead studio, Animex focused on the early stages of production, including character design, layouts and backgrounds, as well as the key sequences of the story. The staff includes a crew of almost 60 people among which animators, in-betweeners, background artists, CGI/SFX, audio and public relations. Once the character design and backgrounds were approved, both Es Comic and Cutting Edge received a section of the movie to take care of.

Es Comic provided animation for the action sequences and the main villains. Their team consisted basically in an animation director, and a crew of around 20 people including animators, in-betweeners as well as ink and painters.

Cutting Edge Productions, worked mainly on the animation and cleanup of a particular scene, namely a race of pre-Hispanic elves known as Chaneques.

“Harmony proved to be quite effective during all of the production phases, starting with the great freedom it gives our animators to customize their workspace and to adapt to their different needs in an interface created specially for 2D animators,” explained Paul Rodoreda.

“We really banked on Harmony’s strengths to maximize our results with a smaller crew, trying to take advantage on module tones and highlights and take them to the next level, shading characters in sections instead of traditionally animated shading,” continued Paul.

“Colour palette adjustments are easy and quick to make, allowing us to have a variety of clone palettes for different situations and manage them fast and effi ciently. We established different versions of some palettes, such as: day, night, inside the ancient ruins, etc, also, Nikté’s different wardrobes benefi ted from a well planned palette work. At some point, if we needed to adjust a colour it was as simple as opening our master fi le, change the colours there and it would take effect in the whole movie, which we did with some outline colours,” stated Paul.

“The compositing process went very smoothly, allowing us to do many things we couldn’t do with any other animation software, like moving the camera in the 3D environment for a chase or to make the Tabasco jungle as dense and rich as we wanted. Multi-plane shots were planned to make the most of this feature, having a real depth in such rich

animated shading,” continued Paul.

complex backgrounds was a simple task. Since we combined 2D and 3D elements, the compositing phase was key to their integration, since they need to interact, those scenes were planned with the network and camera features in mind,” added Paul.

“The combined modules allowed us to create s p e c i a l effects for water refl ections, characters like Canankol that appear and disappear by mimicking their environment, as well as lighting and shadows that affected the characters themselves or their surroundings, also the integration to the backgrounds on diverse weather conditions, like rain, or by situations of magical nature was simple and had great fl exibility to adjust,” continued Paul.

”The studios were equipped with Wacom tablets, from Intuos to Cintiqs, and Toon Boom’s great integration with Wacom hardware lets us make the most of the tablets’ features, such as pressure or customize clicks and buttons with Harmony commands,” explained Paul.”We’ve become a faster studio, capable of undertaking more and more complex scenes and production volumes as we continue to exploit the software different features,

we’re coming up with our on twist on how an animation production needs to get done, and we have the fl exibility to do it based on our people and resources,” concluded Paul.

Animex is working on several projects, still in an early planning

stage, letting their extensive experience and strong

desire to keep telling good stories lead the way into

more ambitious projects. Recognized for their high

p r o d u c t i o n quality, Animex is

certainly on the right path to becoming one of the most important studios in Latin America, and to play a leading role in the global animation industry. •

Key members of the team from left to right, top to bottom: Ricardo Arnaiz, Director; Soco Aguilar, Producer, and Executive Producer; Eduardo Jimenez and Paul Rodoreda, Executive Producers; Gabriel Villar, Score Composer and Audio Director; Alex Menck, Music Supervisor; Omar Mustre, script; Antonio Garci, Additional Script; Nathan Sifuentes, Director of Animation Production; and, Oscar Aragon, Director of Pre-Production.

complex backgrounds was a simple task. Since we combined 2D and 3D elements, the compositing phase was key to their integration, since they need to interact, those scenes were planned with the network and camera features in

“The combined modules allowed us to create s p e c i a l effects for water refl ections, characters like Canankol that appear and disappear by mimicking their environment, as well as lighting and shadows that affected the characters

”The studios were equipped with Wacom tablets, from Intuos to Cintiqs, and Toon Boom’s great integration with Wacom hardware lets us make the most of the tablets’ features, such as pressure or customize clicks and buttons with Harmony commands,” explained Paul.”We’ve become a faster studio, capable of undertaking more and more complex scenes and production volumes as we continue to exploit the software different features,

we’re coming up with our on twist on how an animation production needs to get done, and we have the fl exibility to do it based on our people and resources,” concluded Paul.

Animex is working on several projects, still in an early planning

stage, letting their extensive experience and strong

desire to keep telling good stories lead the way into

more ambitious projects. Recognized for their high

p r o d u c t i o n quality, Animex is

certainly on the right path to becoming one of the most important studios in

, Director of Animation Production; and, Oscar Aragon, Director of Pre-Production.

have the fl exibility to do it based on our people and resources,” concluded Paul.

Animex is working on several projects, still in an early planning

letting their extensive experience and strong

desire to keep telling good stories lead the way into

more ambitious projects. Recognized for their high

p r o d u c t i o n quality, Animex is

certainly on the right path to becoming one of the most important studios in Latin America, and to play a leading role in the global animation industry. •

have the fl exibility to do it based on our people and resources,” concluded Paul.

Animex is working on several projects, still in an early planning

letting their extensive experience and strong

desire to keep telling good stories lead the way into

more ambitious projects. Recognized for their high

p r o d u c t i o n quality, Animex is

certainly on the right path to becoming one of the most important studios in

At seventy-fi ve minutes long, Nikté is a traditional

feature done digitally.