Jun 19, 2018

French studio TeamTO has built new animation software for its hyperrealistic slapstick series Mighty Mike.

At Annecy 2018, French CG studio TeamTO previewed its "ultra-realistic" animated animal series Mighty Mike. The show is being marketed as a cross between Tom and Jerry and pet home videos.

Mike achieved this hyper-realistic state thanks to TeamTO's reliance on custom animation software and the use of physics-based rendering for the furry characters.

Cartoon Brew was in Annecy for a sneak preview of "Mike," for which Cartoon Network has acquired worldwide rights (except in the U.S.) TeamTO President and CEO Guillaume Helouin first saw "Mike" in the Canadian studio It was a proof-of-concept animation produced by Digital Dimension. The concept featured pugs performing various slapstick acts, and Herouin came up with the idea of turning it into a series. Digital Dimension did this test for a feature film, and that became the idea for the show. So we basically created a concept for the show and started developing it from scratch."

TeamTO did not adopt Digital Dimension's GPU rendering approach, but began developing custom in-house software to assist in the creation and animation of Mighty Mike's characters. The first software was developed to assist in production management and is called Overmind; Rumba is a joint project between TeamTO, Mercenaries Engineering (which also produces the rendering software Guerilla Render), and the French public research institute Inria and is a joint project with the French public research institute Inria.

"It is animation software that helps you create animations in a 'sort of' live way," explains Patricia de Wilde, Director of Marketing and New Business at TeamTO. 'Imagine, for example, that you are creating an animation. It's great because it makes animation production much more efficient. But at the same time it's hard because it's the first time we've actually used it in a large-scale production. So there is the problem of trial and error with new software. But when this is all worked out in the end, it will be great because it will be a good benchmark to see what can be done with this software."

"We developed this software because, deep down, we produce 100% of our microphones in France, which is more expensive than many other countries. This means we need more efficient production so that we can compete on cost"

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Although the characters are often furry creatures, Hellein states that this was not actually the biggest challenge. He said, "We've seen it in feature films and high-budget feature films, but no one has ever done it in a TV series. So the biggest challenge was to create an environment with all the sets, props, everything. It's like another live-action feature film."

Above: a demonstration of the Roomba.

TeamTO utilized Renderman's new physically plausible rendering architecture, RIS, to handle the rendering of the characters, while at the same time not necessarily lighting every shot, but instead the entire show Efforts were made to provide a lighting workflow that would apply the lighting setup throughout.

The development of these software programs was, of course, done during production after the show was sold to and picked up by the French Cartoon Network. The original incarnation was known as Take It Easy Mike and later became Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch. Today they are known as Mighty Mike.

One of the challenges of the initial pitch was that although a proof of concept for the digital dimension existed, TeamTO needed to show that other animals could do it too, such as turtles, kittens, and raccoons. They pitched using real-world photos and then reverse-engineered the animation.

Another unusual challenge for the show's creators was to ensure that the slapstick nature of the characters' actions did not exceed the rules acceptable in a children's show. Says de Wilde, "It's a challenge to produce slapstick at its core." 'Characters get hurt, they fall off cliffs, amazing things happen. There's a danger of losing the intensity and surprise of the humor."

"The first season of the show was a great success," says de Wilde.

The first season was directed primarily by Franz Kirchner (Angelo Rules, Rabbids Invasion), with Arnaud Bronn and Jeremy Gounod also directing. The budget is 9 million euros and consists of 78 seven-minute episodes. Digital Dimension is the Canadian co-producer and Chinese entertainment company UYoung is the Chinese partner. Distribution is by Cake Entertainment.

The adventurous show has seen a significant increase in the number of TeamTOs, bringing the total number of employees to over 400 between the studios' Paris and Bourg-les-Vallances locations. The first episodes are nearing completion, and according to TeamTO, the series will likely begin airing in early 2019. De Wilde sees Mike's point of difference as being in both the slapstick humor and the photo-realistic aspects of the work.

"The photorealistic characters enhance the humor. The mind adapts, realistic... Not realistic... Not real... It becomes. That's definitely an element of humor.

(Note: This article has been updated. It originally included a video related to Mighty Mike, which was incorrectly described as a proof-of-concept test. This video has been replaced with a new video showing the first composite image of the series, and the description of that original video has been removed)