A journey through time with a graphic novel look

Director of Photography in an animated film - that doesn't make too much sense at first. After all, animated films are mostly made on computers. But anyone who watches the cinema filmAnother Day of Life you can't shake off the feeling that somehow a different approach was taken here. The sometimes slightly shaky camera is too organic and guided, immersing the viewer in the civil war-torn Angola of the 1970s. The Wüste Film production had already wowed audiences in Cannes with its strong story and fascinating graphic novel look. A look that was co-created in Hamburg. A 25-strong team of animation specialists is based in Ottensen, not far from the Elbchaussee, covering a broad portfolio from cinema films to TV series and advertising. Under the direction of Jörn Radel, the "Animationsfabrik" has produced films such asThe little polar bear,Captain Bluebear - or evenAnother Day of Life co-created.

An international co-production

The team at Animationsfabrik worked intensively on the film by Directors Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow for around a year and a half - or in figures: 30 sets and 49 characters toAnother Day of Life have been created on the Elbe. The team had to be expanded to 35 people and two external companies for the complex work. The film is a four-country production, with Spain (Kanaki Films) and Poland (Platige Film) as the main production countries and Belgium (Walking the Dog) as co-producer in addition to Germany.

Animationsfabrik joined the project in 2012 via Wüste Film CEO Stefan Schubert. "When Stefan came to us with the idea, we immediately agreed, as it is an artistically and technically very demanding animation project - which is not exactly commonplace for a European production on this scale," says Radel. The two Directors had split their work in advance. While de la Fuente was responsible for the real documentary part, Nenow took on the animation part and was therefore in constant dialogue with the animation factory.

Motion capturing or "How to build a scene"

Before the elaborate work began in 2012, a meeting was held with the other Executive Producers to clarify responsibilities. The animation work was split between various studios - the first cut was made for Animationsfabrik in 2014, where a large part of the pre-visualisation was designed: The team pre-modelled 3D sets and backgrounds for various scenes on the computer and placed the different characters in the environment, which were created with the help of motion capturing: "We have a system specifically for this that records the actors and transfers their movements to the virtual characters on the computer in real time. So you can see immediately on the virtual set how it will look in the animated film," says Jörn Radel. The actors act in an empty room. If someone steps on something, for example, there is simply a placeholder that is later modelled over on the computer. The actors' faces are also recorded and then placed on the faces of the 3D models. Of course, this is not yet the final look, but it is a good reference for the animators who will later take over the animation of the facial expressions.

Virtual camera

Once a scene with an actor has been shot, you can loop it and then record the next character for the scene. In this way, a scene is created piece by piece, but the background always remains the same - only the number of characters increases, as mass scenes are usually made up of many individual elements. Some parts of this work process were supplied by animation studios from Poland.