Mexico City - Lo Coloco Films, a Mexico City-based production company, has signed a licensing agreement with French software developer The Bakery for the ongoing use of its 3D lighting and rendering software, Bakery Relight.
Lo Coloco, founded in 2007, generates and produces world-class animated content.
Lo Coloco's first project is the animated feature film, ANA, directed by Palme d'Or Winner Carlos Carrera. The film is being produced in stereoscopic 3D format, and is based on the script by Daniel Emil.
ANA is currently scheduled for release in mid-2013.
Bakery Relight software supports the lighters' and shaders' iterative process--progressive and interactive refinement of properties and details--with full-resolution feedback within seconds.
The agreement signed between the two companies places Lo Coloco Films at the technological forefront for computer-generated images for an animated feature, raising the production values of ANA to international standards and aiming the eventual final project firmly at global audiences.
"Our close collaboration with Lo Coloco has been extremely useful in helping us to set up a remote support system between our team based here in France, and Mexico-based users," says Erwan Maigret, Bakery co-founder and CEO, whose credits include technical lead on Shrek 2,
Madagascar, and
Shrek the Third. "Lo Coloco started beta testing Bakery Relight in the early days when there was only a Linux version of the product, and they have followed us through the whole transition to Windows, making sure that the final release of the software was reliable for multi-platform productions."
"From the very beginning, the Lo Coloco team managed to guess how to use our tools - even before documentation material existed--pushing Relight to its limits and producing really impressive CGI images in record time and with limited resources. We look forward to pushing the boundaries even further with them on their future productions," says Maigret.
"Bakery Relight is a totally new kind of software. It doesn't take long to realize that this is a solution, which has been specifically designed for lighting artists, giving flexibility at every iteration and making feedback sessions a breeze," Oscar Juárez, Lo Coloco Films technical supervisor, explains.
"Support from The Bakery is top-notch," adds Juárez. "They put a lot of time and effort into making us feel we took the right decision going with Relight, and making our pipeline complete without worrying about moving data from our animation software, which also allowed us to increase production values without compromising budget or render times. The final quality of our render puts us in the right spot regarding actual standards and even surpasses our own expectations; we were amazed with the results we were getting in such a short time, which is very important for us given that we're working on our first project. Relight is a 'must have' tool for our lighting artists. We look forward to using it on future projects and pushing the product even further."
The Bakery Team will be demonstrating Bakery Relight at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver (9-11 August 2011, stand 471).