Enarmonia Masters the Toon Boom Pipeline to Grow and Deliver Quality.

Enarmonia is based in Turin, Italy and is one of the most famous animation production studios in Europe. Since it’s founding in 1999, the studio has established itself as a key player in the industry thanks to its strong international presence, dedication to high artistic quality and its highly professional staff.

Enarmonia Masters the Toon Boom Pipeline to Grow and Deliver Quality Enarmonia was one of the first companies in Europe to adopt the Toon Boom pipeline. They discovered Toon Boom as they were searching for new solutions to produce animation digitally and, as they soon found out, the match with Toon Boom was perfect. And knowing that Toon Boom was increasing its presence in Europe was just an added bonus. Stefania Raimondi, Producer, and Federica Maggio, Executive Producer, put together a team of artists who have contributed to the studio’s growth, focusing on continuous education and providing the opportunity to get training abroad with some of the world’s most famous directors. Enarmonia produces feature films, TV series, commercials, publishes illustrations, as well as creating and animating characters for cinema, TV, advertising, internet, direct video and others. To date, Enarmonia has worked on 22 movies and more than 20 television series.

The collaboration between Enarmonia and Toon Boom started in 2004. Enarmonia artists, who were specialized in traditional animation, at that time used Toon Boom’s Concerto application to produce the totally digital series Gino il Pollo (Gino the chicken) and Le avventure di Neve & Gliz (The adventures of Neve and Glitz). “At the time, we preferred Concerto over Flash, because of its wide range of tools”, explains Lisa Arioli, Head of Creative team. “In one single application, there were good drawing tools, the possibility to have a global library, a 3D camera and special effects. Since then, we have kept up with the technology, tightening our relationship with Toon Boom. Thanks to Toon Boom Support team’s great availability, the software has often been adapted to our needs with an evident advantage for both”. One of Enarmonia’s latest productions, Me, Myself and the Others, is handled by Enanimation, a sister company founded in 2003. This animated series is completely digital, from the models to the final compositing, including backgrounds and storyboards. The series includes 52 episodes of 5 minutes each and takes its inspiration from a novel by the late Andrea Pazienza, a great Italian artist. Me, Myself and the Others is an Italian-German co-production between Enanimation - Rai Fiction - Motus and MotionWorks, and was entirely produced in Europe. The international distribution of the series is trusted to Enanimation in collaboration with London-based Entertainments Rights.

To date, Me, Myself and the Others has been sold in 25 countries, with ongoing discussions in Northern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Central, Eastern and North Africa. The series first aired on Italy’s RAI 2 channel from November 20, 2008 until December 24, 2008 and obtained good viewing results with between 9% and 10% share of the viewing audience, similar results were found in Germany.

“The Toon Boom pipeline has been precious and has represented an ideal solution to communicate with the other studios.” The characters in Me, Myself and the Others are colourful animals living in a fantasy jungle. Entirely created in Enarmonia studios, both Toon Boom Harmony and Storyboard Pro were used to deliver this project. “All the artistic choices – declares Lisa, who worked on the storyboards together with Pierprincipio Di Già and Paola Solaro - were made to have a funny series: bright colours, amusing songs, simple and pretty characters painted with unreal colours and dubbed with humorous voices that it’s easy to grow fond of them!”. The team drew and coloured the characters directly in Toon Boom Harmony. Davide Pilisi, one of the artists, dealt with the rigging of the characters and the setting [up] of the library. “Colour models are broken down in pieces for the rigging to allow the cut out animation – explains Davide once finalized, models setting, colour models are put and organized into the global library so it can be used for animating or even before [that] for storyboarding. The Harmony drawing tools have allowed us to maintain the grace and the natural effect which is typical of traditional animation”. Mita Odello, Luca Fernicola and Lisa Arioli worked on the animation. “In this way - affirm the artists - we could directly experience the advantages the Toon Boom pipeline has brought from the artistic point of view. Thanks to Storyboard Pro, in fact, the transition from the storyboard to the animation stage happens in an easy and quick way. The module, moreover, has excellent drawing tools, [is] easy to use and suitable for [anyone] who, like us, has a traditional animation education. Storyboard Pro exports its data shots as separate Harmony scenes complete [with] images, sound and basic camera movements. This is one of the features we like the most: it translates into time savings, control, accuracy and no loss of data.

Once in Harmony, thanks to the batch processing render, we can easily control the progress of the project without effort or time wasted. It’s important to remember that Me, Myself and the Others results from the collaboration with the German company MotionWorks and the Italian company Motus, based in Fano, which had two directors working on the project. The Toon Boom pipeline has been precious and has represented an ideal solution to communicate with the other studios”. From the management point of view, the Toon Boom pipeline resulted in increased efficiency in several areas in particular the human resources and the production cost optimization with the consequent higher flexibility of the production department. “Another important characteristic – continues Federica Maggio, Executive Producer – is represented by the fact that the production pipeline is being modified and integrated on the basis of the project which has to be created and of the production needs. The sound organization, the modification of the production processes as well as the more and more advanced software techniques have allowed us to administrate whole productions in Europe, keeping, in this way, the quality high while remaining competitive”. “…the adaptation of the technical characteristics to the artistic goals represents for the Toon Boom users a great advantage from the point of view of the efficacy and of the production needs. The introduction of 2D/3D integration will surely help Enarmonia’s artists to create in a more dynamic and integrated way. Belonging to the Toon Boom community also helped us find potential partners in other parts of the world”. The collaboration between Enarmonia and Toon Boom is not only strong, but also represents a win-win for all involved. In the last five years, the Turin studio has devoted itself to training students to specialize in digital animation production using Harmony. The most recent training session was 600 hours long and attended by more than 20 students. In the coming months, Enarmonia will start pre-production of the second series of Me, Myself and the Others in the City, introducing new characters and setting up which could be defined as… “hi-tech” pipeline! The team wil also embark on a new multi-platform and cross-media project titled CrossWorlds. Enarmonia is certainly a very dynamic studio using the Toon Boom pipeline to the fullest and rapidly becoming a must-have partner when producing high quality animation in Europe.

Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook