The animated film, Nitkà©, released in Mexican theaters last month, is about a little girl that wants to be a princess among the Ancient civilization, the Olmecas. One of the most striking aspects of the film is its rich color scheme, which seems to readily conjure an ancient world.

Taking on such a complex project required a technology upgrade. ANIMEX installed HP DreamColor displays and a new render farm in order to handle the larger scale required: more than 15,000 frames per day. The DreamColors provided a more accurate way to preview colors, which were so integral to the lush look of the film. The render farm made possible the most time-intensive creation of the film, the villain, Tah ´nohoch, a huge hive of locusts made up of approximately 50 million textured and shaded particles creating a humanoid form.

Paul Rodoreda, executive producer at ANIMEX, talked to Studio/Direct about the project and what’s up ahead.

What made your team decide to go with HP DreamColor Displays?
Our main concern was, when you made your film and transferred it to 35mm celluloid, you have very poor quality in your colors. But, for digital cinema and DVDs and Blu-ray, you need to have very accurate colors. So we had to be very precise and very picky with color scheme of the whole production. The DreamColor monitors became the bread and butter of the whole production because we could see colors   and not wondering that…maybe the display is telling me what I want, but maybe it’s not?
 
What were your inspirations for the color palette of the film?
We referenced all the scenes with real things where we could. We tried to be very respectful for the history of the Olmecas. The pyramid was based on the actual pyramid in La Venta. Of course we would try to give things a cartoon look and some of our own details. You can see the leaves of the trees have grecas, designs inside the leaves as if they were hand-painted. We tried to reference it to the real world without converting our movie into a documentary. And we have some fantastic original characters like Tah ´nohoch.
 
Where did the inspiration for Tah ´nohoch, the monster made of locusts, come from?
It came from the imagination of our director, Ricardo Arnaiz. We tried to give a message in all our movies. The main plot is that to be the greatest person you have to first learn to be the smallest. Tah ´nohoch was a monster created by the greed of the civilization that, he destroyed the forest and natural environment-he created this monster. The gods and mother nature decided to make this hive of locusts to pay it back to mankind.

What was the biggest challenge in the film?
In Nitkà© the biggest challenges were the construction and 3D modeling of the whole city of Yocan and the Chaneke Island and Tah ´nohoch, the locus monster.

Creating Yocan was very complex because there are no houses; there are shags built of branches and it requires a lot of modeling and of course the pyramids and the ball game, actually this is a very interesting pyramid because is the only pyramid in Mexico built not of rock but earth and covered with grass.

What projects do you have upcoming?

We are now in the preproduction stage of our next movie: La revolucion de Juan Escopeta (Jan Escopeta’s Revolution). We plan to release it in November 2010.


What kind of color scheme did you aim for in Juan Escopeta?  
Juan Escopeta is a more “realistic” movie without leaving the animation realm, and it happens more in the desert than in other places so the color challenge in this new movie is more a “tone” challenge.

Nitkà© was pretty much colorful and the challenge was to have all kind of colors, the new film is more a brownish movie which is going to be very hard to maintain.

What are the future release plans for Nitkà©?

The film has been released and we hope it will remain in theaters for at least two to three more weeks. We plan to release it on rental DVD in March.