THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME:
Nintendo Find What They Need at France’s la maison

Michael Abraham
Softimage Customer Stories, 2002 Volume 2 Issue 3

It’s true what they say: There really is no place like home. It’s where the heart is; it’s where you hang your hat; it’s where, no matter what you may have done, they have to take you in. Okay, okay, let’s not get crazy, but that is the essential concept behind la maison, a quite startling digital visual effects company located just outside of Paris, in Saint Cloud, France. One thing is certain: the creators of “Symphony”, a striking new commercial for Nintendo directed by Bruno Aveillan, definitely made themselves at home at la maison.

It’s little wonder. Founded in February 2001 by the team of Annie Dautane (formerly Director of VFX at Medialab, now CEO of la maison), Eve Ramboz (Digital Visual Effects Supervisor) and Luc Froehlicher (Head of CG), with help from a friendly partnership with French animation production company Millimages SA and its president, Roch Lener, la maison (literally, “the house”) is actually housed in a 4000 square meter former printing plant. After architect Olivier Rouvillois got his hands on the place, however, little of the old printing plant remained. Each of the company’s different suites has a distinctive atmosphere, with decorative touches influenced as much by the 1950’s as our current era. The overall effect is one of elegant comfort and relaxed creativity, a mix that la maison has conclusively proven to be a very strong one indeed.

“Our real goal at la maison is to provide an environment where directors and producers can develop their projects knowing they are fully supported by exceptional artistic talent and technical expertise,” says Dautane matter-of-factly. “It may sound a little corny to some, but we literally do want to make directors and producers feel entirely at home. That is when the truly great ideas come to the surface.”

In just over a year of operation, there have been a great many great ideas at la maison. Now boasting a staff of 35 strong as well as a stable of established freelancers, la maison has completed no less than 30 projects for commercials, feature films, television and music videos. Their commercial work alone has been for such noted companies as Nestlé, L’Oréal, Citroën, Peugeot, Ford, Thermasilk, Saturn Vue, Victoria’s Secret and, of course, Nintendo.

OF GORGONS AND GAME BOY

What begins as a normal night at the symphony quickly changes into a battle between good and evil in “Symphony,” Nintendo’s latest commercial for GameBoy Advance, which achieved finalist status at the AEAF (Australian Effects and Animation Festival) in February. As a beautiful female conductress begins the music, an elderly patron with the face of a skull, looks up to the elaborately decorative cornices of the concert hall. As he does so, what looks like an angel in the architecture suddenly comes to life as a hideous gorgon, descending on decrepit wings to attack the conductress. Fortunately for her, the musicians are the protective sort: violin bows sprout flames and shoot from their hands like arrows, pinning the gorgon to the wall as one of the tympani players throws a cymbal like a discus, decapitating the dreaded beast.

But this battle is far from over. No sooner has the gorgon’s head taken leave of her shoulders, than the elaborate overhead chandelier transforms into a dragon. Narrowly dodging a blast of electric flame, the conductress uses her baton to reduce the second beast to shards of glass. As the spot closes, the concert hall is returned to its original state, and we see a GameBoy Advance gripped between two hands. The effect is at once elegant and epic, refined and revolutionary.

“For the Gorgon, we had to create a perfect 3D version of the sculpture decorating the theater,” says Froehlicher, head of CG at la maison. “We knew that some of the shots would incorporate both the real caryatids and the one we created, so we wanted to get it exactly right. That was a very big challenge, especially when you consider the realistic, yet phantasmagoric nature of the character. To that end, we took a lot of photographs of the real sculptures from different angles. Using SOFTIMAGE®|XSI™, we were able to recover a lot of geometry from the photographs and extract appropriate textures from them. The wings themselves were created out of assorted dust and (wood) debris.”

As challenging as the Gorgon was, however, she was easy fare when compared with the glass dragon that poses the ultimate threat. Froehlicher continues.

“Creating an immense glass dragon was one thing, but having him explode at the end was quite another,” says Froehlicher. “It required all manner of large, medium and very close shots to accomplish successfully. After a few mapping tests, we knew that the only way we could do it was to create our own geometry. Since the dragon’s look depended on light refracting through the many crystals of glass, we knew we would have to ray trace the whole thing. We also knew that we would have to use SOFTIMAGE|XSI from beginning to end.”

That prospect was somewhat daunting in and of itself, since the la maison team had only used SOFTIMAGE|XSI sparingly, their busy schedule making them think that learning a new software would ultimately be prohibitive. Moreover, some of the freelancers on the Nintendo project had never touched SOFTIMAGE|XSI before. Would SOFTIMAGE|XSI be able to handle such an immense job in just two months?

“It did,” says la maison CG animation supervisor Mathieu Royer, with great satisfaction. “We used scripting to generate some 45000 crystal pearls on NURBS surfaces. The surfaces were then deformed and animated around the main dragon skeleton. We worked on low-resolution models and transferred the final animations onto the complete model. We rendered several layers and mattes for the graphic artists and compositors would be able to integrate the dragon into the real pictures.”

In the end, the entire elaborate production was completed in just three months, with no more than a dozen people handling modeling, tracking, animation and lighting. The results literally speak for themselves.

When asked about his favorite features in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Froehlicher and Royer don’t hesitate.

“mental ray®, the NLA and Subdivision Surfaces are definitely the top three,” he says with a smile. “Especially mental ray. To render 3D for integration into real pictures, you’ve got to have mental ray, and it is seamlessly integrated into SOFTIMAGE|XSI. That was really the main reason we decided to jump into SOFTIMAGE|XSI from version 1.5. Since then, we haven’t looked back. Different software packages have different advantages, but the ergonomics, the precision and the constructive way of working that we have found with the SOFTIMAGE|XSI animation toolset really makes it an inevitability in the world of 3D animation.”

Royer also reserves special praise for the Animation Mixer: “The Mixer allows us to do infinite variations of one animation, use the same source several times without being repetitive all while keeping different levels of modification. We also do about 99% of our modeling in SOFTIMAGE|XSI now, so those tools are also very strong.”

With the Nintendo spot at the forefront of their impressive reel, la maison is certain to prove Thomas Wolfe – author of You Can’t Go Home Again – dead wrong. On the contrary, when it comes to visual effects and animation, clients are going to be “going home” again and again in the years to come.

Click here to see the Nintendo “Symphony” commercial.