1. NETWORK ANIMATION SOLUTION
Mexican Culture
Animated in
Harmony
Animex is a Mexican animation studio dedi-
cated to producing original content for tele-
vision, feature films and video, for local chan-
nels and for export. Animex’ objective is to
position México as a reliable and solid player
internationally for animated content creation
and production.
The highly creative team at Animex includes the following
talents: Ricardo Arnaiz1
, Director and Producer at Animex,
who has been creating characters and stories for more than
20 years. He founded AniMeX in 2000 to produce original
series and feature films. He has created more than 15 original
projects and he is developing two new movies. Jean Pierre
Leleu2
, Producer, has spent his life in the film industry, working
at United Artists, Warner Bros. and Televisa. Paul Rodoreda3
,
Executive Producer, is in charge of all the production design,
financial aspects, budget, assets, etc. He also developed all the
computer systems and networks for the studio. Soco Aguilar4
,
Co-Producer, has been a documentary freelance producer
for PBS, Discovery Channel and Partridge Films. She has
collaborated with groundbreaking Chicana filmmaker Lourdes
Portillo and more recently with director Mark Becker on a film
sponsored by the Sundance Institute. Nine-time Emmy Award
winner Phil Roman5
, Creative Advisor, has been involved with
the animation world since 1959. He has produced great series
like The Simpsons, Garfield, and Bobby’s World, to name a
few. He was also the director of Tom & Jerry: The Movie, and
series and TV specials about Garfield, Charlie Brown among
others. He is considered an institution in the animation
industry. The rest of the team includes Eduardo Jimenez6
, On-
Line Producer, Gabriel Villar7
, Audio Director/Music Composer,
Oscar Aragon8
, Storyboard/ Keyframes, Pablo Guessi9
, Audio
Designer, Salvador Dominguez, Character Design, as well as
Omar Mustre and Toño Garci10
who are both writers.
Scheduled for a feature release on October 31, 2007, their
current project is titled La Leyenda de la Nahuala. This feature
aims at promoting the rich Mexican culture with its art, litera-
ture, folklore and customs. Set in 1807 in the town of Puebla
de los Ángeles, New Spain, the story revolves around Leo San
Juan, a young fearful boy. On the night of November 2nd, Day of
the Dead, Leo’s brother is kidnapped by La Nahuala, an ancient
and malevolent spirit. Overcoming all his fears, Leo embarks on
a great adventure filled with strange creatures to save his brother
and bring him back home.
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Working with a team of 40 animators in Puebla, Leon and
Mexico City, the studio has now become the largest Harmony
installation in Latin America. Of particular interest in the pa-
perless workflow Animex has implemented: animators create
frame-by-frame animation digitally, all relying on the Harmony
pipeline to maximize its fully integrated pipeline.
Everything starts with the scene planning. Ricardo Arnaiz
draws sketches and roughs of what he wants in a particular
scene, then sends these sketches to Oscar Aragon and his
team in Puebla who take care of the layout and traces for
the inbetweening of the final animation. At the same time,
they are creating all the stages according to the characters’
position. Once this is done, the scene returns to Mexico City
where they put together all the layouts and key frames on
a video editor with the final voice track. At this point, they
output small video files with the scene planning, key frames,
voices and time code that the animators use as a reference
for the animation. With all this comes a control spreadsheet
that enables Ricardo Arnaiz to review the project’s progress
every two days. Once the animation is approved, it goes to
inking and painting. Colourists use a colour palette already
defined and approved for each character and then to com-
positing and staging. They start placing all the elements:
backgrounds, over layers, special effects, camera movements,
etc. Lastly, the final scenes that have been approved go to au-
dio, where Gabriel Villar adds and edits the music and Pablo
Guessi dresses the scene with Foley and incidental sounds.
“Since we are running a paperless production, we have elimi-
nated all pencil tests, clean up and scanning. That bring us a
time-saving feature since each animator can review their ani-
mations on the run, we don’t have to wait for the scanning for
each pencil test,” stated Paul Rodoreda.
When asked about how Harmony is used in the studio envi-
ronment, Paul openly shared: “For our roughs, we use brush
tools, and for clean animation, we use pencils, just because
of the look we want to keep. As far as ink and paint is con-
cerned, most of our animation is in plain color, but we’ve
used “paint texture” for some elements. Tools like “apply to
all drawings” have become very handy to speed up painting
and “paint unpainted” and “repaint brush” have proved to be
very fast inking our characters. The fact of having one single
colour palette for each character has been pretty useful. Be-
fore Harmony, we didn’t have that tool so,
when we needed to change one colour of
an element we had to repaint every single
frame of the animation. Now, we simply
change the colour values on our palette
and that changes all frames of all scenes
at once.
On staging and compositing, the features we use most are
tones, highlights and shadows because they allow us to have
a realistic finish on our characters with lights and shadows
projected on them, all done in a very fast way. Also the multi
plane camera and “free view” have been very useful: we can
create our camera and character moves very fast and easily.
Combining camera moves with mathematical functions have
allowed us to create special moves and complicated scenes
in a few steps. Finally, lip-sync is another tool used on a daily
basis. We have to mention that even in Spanish works great.
Toon Boom Harmony has proven to be a great tool for
creating, animating and compositing our movie. We would
have also used Storyboard Pro but our storyboard was already
done when it was released. However, we expect to work with
it in our next project. Toon Boom Harmony has
given us the possibility to produce TV
series and feature films at low cost and
highest quality. We are preparing our next movie
about a girl whose befriends an elf and enter a magic world,
based on a story developed by Ricardo Arnaiz. The team
will be mostly the same for all the production. Also in the
planning table is a spin-off from a sequence of La Leyenda
de la Nahuala, about two characters who live extraordinary
adventures in an old library of an old house. These characters
are a crazy old Spanish ghost, Don Andres and the Alebrije,
a mythological creature from Mexican folklore. Also on the
works is a third season of an Animex original series Roncho
the Bad Luck Dog”. With such a full slate of unique projects
coming up, Animex is certainly true to its corporate and
creative mission which Toon Boom is proud to be part of.