Located in Turin, Anima Studio is a small Italian based company. Since its opening in 2004, Anima’s core business has been 3D animation and post production work.  During the winter months of 2006-2007, Anima Studios produced an amazing short film, a vibrant six minutes stereoscopic CG animated film explaining the fundamentals of sound, noise and melody called Ritmo Rumori E Melodie.

 “As a small company, having the opportunity to work on such an innovative CG short film meant a lot to us.  We needed to have a reliable and efficient technology partner by our side to push the limits of our character animations beyond what 3ds max can do alone.” explains Francesco Chirico of Anima Studios.

Having been contacted after most of the preproduction work was completed by Motus Film, Anima found itself with predetermined characters design, backgrounds, score and storyboard to work with. Although the shapes and style of the characters were excellent for modeling, the team of four quickly realized that the morphing of expressions would be difficult to handle.  The Anima team quickly turned to the Di-O-Matic family of products to speed up their work and successfully finished the project in less than 90 days.  

The animated CG short film features 4 main characters:  Macro, Micro, Sound Note and Noise Note.

Several Di-O-Matic products were integrated into Anima’s production pipeline: Morph-O-Matic, Morph ToolKit and Voice-O-Matic. “All Di-O-Matic products, especially Voice-O-Matic and Morph-O-Matic, were so easy to use and integrate into our pipeline. It saved us hours of work, if not days.” revealed Francesco. “In addition to Morph-O-Matic and Voice-O-Matic we also used Morph ToolKit. It allowed us to make complex constrains using Link-O-Matic.”

Francesco also explained that “Voice-o-matic is a unique tool for 3ds max. It really speeds up the work and facilitates the lip-sync process. Having easy to use tools helped us solve hard problems in a breeze” 

Even if the complete animated short was made in Italian that did not stop Voice-O-Matic to assist the team in the creation of high quality lip synch since it supports Italian as well as many other languages. Francesco adds that “The lip-sync process was truly speeded-up by Voice-O-Matic and we could easily tweak the results.”

Anima Studio’s passion is character animation and it shows.  Once again, Di-O-Matic technologies played a key role in making high quality character animation a reality.

Discover the website of Anima Studio : www.animastudio.it

Read more about Morph-O-Matic, Morph ToolKit and Voice-O-Matic.