Lumenas offers a full range of services for visual effects, feature animation, and commercial work. Whether you have just a script or a few shots that need physical or digital enhancements, our skilled team of artists can capture your vision producing visually stunning content on time and within budget. With nearly 100 artists onsite, Lumenas could be a compelling solution for your project.

Making film requires coordination between multiple deparments.

Production Design

The Production Design Department is the first visual link in the film making process. The look and feel of the film starts with a 2D painting or drawing of all the characters, props, and backgrounds. The character's personality, facial expressions, items they interact with, and their environments all begin with a design from this department. After the intitial character, prop or set drawing has been approved, a layout artist creates a technical drawing displayed orthographically (front and side views) to assist both the digital modelers, shop, and puppet creators in accurately creating the asset. The magic all begins with the artwork!

Previz/Modeling Animation

The Digital Character Department covers many of the pre-production aspects for a film.

The artists here create or in digital terms "model" the characters that will be used in the film. Attention to detail is a must. The modelers rely heavily on the Production Design Team to provide them with the characters outward personality so that they can translate it into the 3D world.

We also have "pre-vis" artists creating the choreography for our action sequences, giving the director and the cameramen a pre-visualization(hence their title) of the shot. Pre-vis artists are responsible for timing, foot work and pacing just like a choreographer setting up a dance routine.

We have animators who are doing "post-vis" animations tying the video footage and the 3D characters together. These files and short movies are then brought to the visual team who then make the two mediums look like they were filmed together.

Lumenas has a motion capture system which will record the performance of a live actor. The digitized performance is then transferred to a digital 3D character who in turn mimics the human actor's movements. This technique is used as both reference for our characters animators and in some cases, final animation for secondary and background characters.

The digital team is an important aspect of the film's early days. Laying the ground work for the other digital departments.

Shop

Once the conceptual drawings and paintings have been created and a layout artist has provide orthographic perspectives (front and side views) of the artwork, a draftsman in the shop draws up a blue print which will provide a guide for the construction of props and sets for the film. In some cases a clay or foam sculpt is created to visualize what the set environment might look like. This allows the designers the ability to visualize ways of cutting up the sets into sections, thus allowing the stage crew to position cameras and lights in the positions otherwise inaccessible on single pieced sets. During set construction, a team of carpenters, seamstresses, sculptors, and fine artists work in unison, meticulously creating sets and props of varying sizes and levels of detail. In some cases, duplicate sets are created to speed up the shooting process by allowing the camera to shoot more shots in a single setting. Physical sets and props add a level of reality, texture, and detail that would be hard to duplicate on the computer.

Upon completion, the team transfers the set to the stages and performs a final dressing, adding last minute enhancements or alterations prescribed by the Director or Production Designer. Members of the Shop team take pride in creating beautiful and engaging visuals that enhance the world in which the story is told.

Digital

The Digital Department is comprised of digital paint, compositing, and digital effects. This team of highly trained artists combines all of the digital and practical elements of shot together seemlessly and provides complex visual effects which support the action in the film. These elements might include swirling snow, billowing smoke, fire balls, digital crowds, or simple footprints in the snow.

The majority of the shots require our digital artists to remove the background bluescreen (found on the stages) and replace it with a digital backdrop called a matte painting. Green or blue are usually the easiest colors to remove from an image. Matte painters create digital paintings that fill the green or blue space that exists in a raw shot, thus resulting in a seemless blend between the physical set and the background. Prior to inserting the matte painting, a tracking artist must match the movement of the real-life camera on the computer so that the digital matte painting and the visual effects will follow the movement of the real-life camera move. In some cases there will be shots where an object has to be removed or painted out. This process is called rotoscoping.

Particle and Dynmaics artists focus on creating believable digital effects such as explosions, lighting rays and pixie dust through complex computer simulations that mimic real-life physics. Often, the Visual Effects Supervisor will decide to shoot practical elements on a stage such as a real candle flame burning, clouds creating in a watertank, or a smoke from an actual fire.

In the final stage of digital, all the digital and practical elements from the shot are combined togehter and color corrected to match seemlessly toghether.

Camera & Lighting

The Camera Department includes the Director of Photography, Stage Manager, Gaffer, Grips and Motion Control Operators. This group is responsible for lighting, programming camera movement, and filming the sets.

The stop-motion style animation used in this production is achieved with high-quality digital still cameras. First, the sets are brought out and set up on the stage by the Art Department. Then, a camera move is programmed with a motion control system. A rough animation test called a 'pop through' is made in concert with the camera move. After a satisfactory camera move and pop through are completed, the set lighting is adjusted and refined to express the appropriate mood. During this phase, the art department also works on finishing touches to the set decoration.

The animation process is achieved by shooting one frame at a time—hence the term stop-motion animation. This is a very time-consuming process because for stop motion animation ,the animator must move the puppet one position for every frame. This means twenty-four discrete movements for every second of screen time!

After a shot is complete, the images are downloaded to a server system where they can be accessed by editorial and CGI departments for further work to achieve a finished image.

Wardrobe

Wardrobe not only creates the costuming for the puppets used in the making of the movie but also the props and set dressings made of fabric, lace, ribbon, leather and trim. Wardrobe, working from the drawing of the Costume Designer, selects or creates fabrics and trim to reflect the costume design, developing a texture and color palette for each Puppet. Patterns are drafted and test clothing is sewn to be sure of accurate fit. Any part of the costume that moves during animation must be foiled, wired, or rigged. We are working in quarter scale so miniature detail is vital, as the Puppets will end up on the big screen. Some Puppets are needed on multiple stages and several identical Puppets must be made. The wear and tear on Puppets during production requires repair or redressing.

Wardrobe is also capable of going virtual. We are working with the Digital Department to photograph actual fabrics, trim and details to assist in the creation of Digital Costuming.

Paint

Colors play a major roll in the development of characters. The artists must be able to visually recognize how colors interact on each puppet individually, with other puppets and with the surrounding background scenes. The artists need to have ample experience painting maquettes and puppets as well as an understanding for three-dimensional forms.

The paint department is part of the digital design & engineering mechanics department, working with specialized armature engineering, modelers, hair specialists, seaming and costume design.

Using mediums including pastels, cell vinyl paint, acrylic water base paint, foam latex and silicone. These methods are used to create lights, shadows and textures. Techniques  such as airbrushing (for water base paint) and air gun (for lacquer paint) are also used.

Paint works closely with the art director and character design to establish colors and textures that capture the vision of the director.

3d Lighting & Rendering

Lighting, Shading, and Rendering are some of the last steps in the CGI Pipeline. It is at this stage of the production where all of the visual effects, character animation, and digital background mattes are combined together within the film plate to create a final rendered image which will then be edited into the film.

A critical part of this process involves integrating a digital character into the footage shot on the stages. This requires artists to create realistic fabrics and skin tones which will then be wrapped around the digital character through techniques called Texturing and Shading. A Shading Artist looks at a physical reference puppet and translates all of the color and texture associated with the materials into the computer so that the 3d character mimics the look and feel of the original, real puppet.

In the digital lighting process, the Lighting Technical Director, in partnership with the Director of Photography, evaluates the original footage shot on stage and determines the technique used for lighting the digital character in each shot. Lighting evokes the mood for each scene, accentuating peace, security, and happiness through warm radiant light or a sense of urgency and danger through dark tonal lighting. It is the responsibility of the Lighting team to determine what type of mood the animator and director envisions. The Lighting team must also be able to capture the mood and ambiance of an animation, always remembering that the CG characters must blend seamlessly into the background elements. If this is done properly, the audience should not be able to differentiate between what is 3D and what is real in the shot.

Digital Design & Engineering Mechanics Department

This department is responsible for the design and engineering of puppet armatures, intricate stop motion mechanics, digital modeling in solids and surfaces, rapid prototyping, character sculpting, and high resolution scanning. While these individuals bring a collective wealth of film experience and will play a leading role in helping to create brilliant Lumenas films, the tools and skills in the department also add to the studio's ability to garner additional revenue in television advertisements and various other production work.

Editorial

The Editorial team compiles together animated story boards, 3D animatics, and shots in progress to achieve an ongoing edit which will eventually dictate the final pacing and structure of the film. In pre-production, the Story Department delivers sequenced panels of storyboards to editorial. Editorial records temporary dialogue from in-house acting talent and synchs up the dialogue with the storyboards in a video editing program.

During this refining process sound effects, temporary music, revised dialog, new storyboards, partially completed shots, and even approved shots are added into the edit. With the combination of dialogue and storyboards, the editorial team evaluates the sequences, experimenting with shot ordering and timing to create a rough video edit. Editorial acts as a hub, providing a central location for departments to 1) review the overall progress of each shot, 2) better understand how their department’s contribution fits into the final film, and 3) determine what adjustments need to be made in order to complete their shots at the expected quality within the allotted timeframe.

The Director's Involvement in Editorial
Each day the Director 1) reviews the rough cuts of the film in Editorial and determines whether shots should be added or deleted, 2) provides feedback on dramatic timing and shot continuity, and 3) continues to flesh out the overall tone of the movie. In the last stage of the editing process, the final sound effect mix, dialogue, color correction, and completed score will be integrated together to produce the completed film which will then be approved by the Director. Upon receiving the final edit, the film is present to the producer, distributers, and investors for their final sign-off. After years of ongoing editing  and the contribution of over 100 people, the final film is printed or delivered digitally to theaters across the world.