About that Meatloaf!…

All families gather around the table for Christmas but no other family has Auntie Loulou’s meatloaf! Our story follows the strange recipe through the years and all the family efforts to have a pleasant Christmas gathering, even if the meal isn’t.
A tale of celebrating Christmas and remembering our dear ones.

Quick – Auntie Loulou’s not looking!

Being a story about people (and a meal!) acting was of the utmost importance throughout the film. Getting all these characters to act in a fun, touching and memorable way was the goal from the get go, conveying everyone’s love for Auntie Loulou in all of their smiles and trickery.

We also took it upon us to develop lighting for several of these shots. From several outdoor scenes to that warm Christmas feeling around the table, our lighting artists really took the spotlight and set the the mood for each of these shots.

Animation Production – Problem solving, 24/7

Being an international, remote and multi studio project, establishing a robust and efficient pipeline throughout the whole production was key.

Not only seting up and managing our internal team and tools, but also making sure the rest of the production with other teams involved was smooth.

An alembic based pipeline was implemented so we could use a wider array of softwares, from rigging, animation and hair in Maya, to model, shade and light in Cinema4D. This allowed for easy transfer of assets but also led to huge file sizes (a single alembic for Leon’s fur could be over 20gb!).

In order to tackle this and not waste time managing instead of doing creative work, we managed to implement a cloud based solution mixed with carefully filtered automatic file syncing that would make sure every artist/team had only the needed assets at all times for each task as well as take care of duplicate assets.

– “Behind The Scenes” and Extras –