Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 6, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The project "Mr Hubolt" was the 2013 animago winner in the "Best Character Animation" category and won the Oscar this year in the "Best Short Film" category.
The viewer is led into the computer-generated setting of a futuristic city and onward into Mr Hublot’s apartment. When a companion enters his life, his lonely everyday routine changes. The stereoscopic short film by Luxembourg studio Zeilt Productions was made in co-production with Arte France.
The world of Mr Hublot is the universe of Belgian sculptor Stéphane Halleux. He sees his Hublot as a reference to France’s cinema legend Jacques Tati and his film character Monsieur Hulot. The animated film hero also lives in an absurd world. “There are characters there who are patched together, sewn together, with mechanical parts, who drive enormous vehicles. It is a world where mechanics are excessive and predetermined recycling dominates everything,” Halleux says of the film’s world. In it, the film hero Hublot, like all people, wears all kinds of technology on his body and head. It is an only almost “beautiful” new parallel world. Because things are quite loud and dirty and not everything seems to work. Hublot suffers from this and chooses a self-selected tranquil solitude in his attic apartment. Then: a little robot dog is threatened by the shredder! Hublot takes in the mechanical animal and from then on, both their worlds are in order. However, the dog seems to be quite voracious. And grows and grows and grows. Eventually the apartment becomes too small. Then Hublot reaches for the cordless screwdriver …
Staging a Universe
For Laurent Witz, it all began with the idea of bringing his friend Stéphane Halleux’s universe to the big screen or monitor. “It was important to create backgrounds and a literary aspect in order to give the characters their lives.” Financing took a year and was completed after Arte came aboard as co-producer and with funding from Luxembourg and France. "Mr Hublot" exists in both 2D and a stereoscopic version. “The production in 3D stereoscopy, entirely as CGI and with a high level of detail, was an enormous challenge. Therefore, it took a little longer than planned until the film was finished in May 2013.” Forty artists and co-director Alexandre Espigares were involved. Mickael Coedel, who works at ILM, supported the production from the USA via Skype as animation supervisor. Jamaal Bradley from Dreamworks helped with one shot.
Render Power from the Far East
The small studio in Luxembourg, which was producing a stereoscopic film for the first time, would have failed technically—especially due to computing times—without outside help. “We needed a lot more computers than we had available in the studio. We would have needed ten times the computing power to achieve a computing time of two hours per image.” Help in need was found in the Far East and in the cloud: “Fortunately, we received support from Fox Render Farm, which sponsored the film and processed our material free of charge. We took control of their computers and thus processed a large number of shots and images from our studio. That was a huge help.” For reasons of time and budget, there was no possibility of correcting errors; individual shots could not be repeated. “That made us all the more careful in pre-production. We tested colors and lighting extensively. Then we created very detailed 2D illustrations for every shot. As soon as they were approved by the director, we worked on the 3Dlighting.” In this way, the team was ideally prepared to enter the main phase of production. The stereoscopy also required fundamental decisions about the production process. To avoid errors such as different textures on individual objects in the two “eyes”, the decision was made to initially produce one of the film’s stereoscopic partial images in full. Corrections requested by the directors therefore only had to be made in one partial image. Only after approval of the finished film was the stereoscopic process carried out at Level S3D in Paris using SGO’s Mistika. “The challenge and complexity of the project did not cause us to be overwhelmed by the technical aspects. When problems arose, we worked on them and found a solution. But ultimately we maintained our view of the artistic aspects.” And so Laurent Witz draws his conclusion: “‘Mr Hublot’ was a great adventure for three years.” One that was rewarded, among other things, with the Grand Prix of the 2013 “Dimension 3D” festival for stereocopic films in Paris.
Here is the traile for Mr Hublot
You can find all further information about the animago AWARD & CONFERENCE here: www.animago.com
