Supamonks | STASH MAGAZINE

Best of Stash 2014 Preview #4: “Supermoine Holypop”

The cover of Stash 104 featured this jaw-dropper of a promo from Parisian character specialists Supamonks for a soft drink brewed by Catholic monks called Holypop. Hang on to your frock.

Supamonks: “In the south of France, close to the Bourget Lake, stands a friary called ‘Les Frères de la Sainte Famille’. For more than a century the brothers have been making beverages.

“Now, Kario Company is in charge of marketing their products. They wanted Supermoine, the hero of our student short film released in 2005, to represent their new organic fizzy drink called Holypop.

“They had a tough budget, just enough to make a commercial with one character on white background. But we couldn’t let go an opportunity to breathe life back into Supermoine. So we chose to self produce the project and convince the friary and Kario to believe in us.

“We had carte blanche on the film, and they were not disappointed. The film has the energy that they were expecting!

“A more realistic and aggressive style was chosen while keeping the cartoon code of the first opus. We wanted to refine our characters and give them more charisma with a new design.

“The main technical challenge was to blend a cartoon animation with the VFX. It is very hard for a TD FX to work with a cartoon animation because of the speed mostly. He has to work outside the physical rules and make the special effects move in a cartoon way. Plus, even if the animation was cartoon the special effect still had to look realistic.

“The production schedule really was a challenge. Given that Supermoine Holypop is nearly self­-produced we couldn’t afford to make it a priority. So we had to manage our time around other productions. The hardest part of making Supermoine was to find when we could spend time on it. Since many artists had taken turns on the same parts we had to adapt our workflow.

“For a long time we’ve had greater ambitions for our hero in other and longer formats. This new short will enable us to estimate the public interest for him and help us to decide if we should go further. For the moment, it seems to be going in the right direction.

“We used eight workstations with i7 processors, simple graphic cards, and 16 to 32 GB of RAM. Our production pipeline is built on Photoshop, Maya, Shave and a Haircut, V-Ray, mental ray, Nuke and After Effects. All bound together by our internal project manager.

“Black Bunny did a great job on the original end credits. This time we had the honor to let our friends from the Box Team work on it, with the same brief: carve an end credit sequence in the video game style.

“We’re glad to see people getting into our hero. Some artists we admire are sending us fan art. It’s awesome. Who knows, maybe some day Supermoine will be part of the post­pop culture.”

For Kario Company
Commissioner: J­P PELLET

For Supamonks
Team: Julien “Kast” Bagnol, Sébastien “Zwib” Ho, Florian “lan12” Landouzy, Pierre “Peyo” De Cabissole, Lam Le Thanh, Damien “See” Coureau, Nicolas “Pink” Perraguin, Maxime “Max” Caron, Manon Ih, Antony Voisin, Sébastien Buisson, Loïc Bramoulle, Quentin Retif, Louis Manjarres, Sébastien Corne, Simon Reynaud, Eleonore Arnaud, Samir Necib, Niels Prayer, David Marmor, Kévin Lemoigne, Laurianne Proud’hon, Jean­Marc Ky, Medhi Leffad, François­Maxence Desplanques, Dorian Lopez, Samuel Wambre, Yohan Clement
Sfx: Olivier Michelot

Music by Ace­out: “We’re Right”
8-bit credits by Quentin Tavernier
End credit by Box Team Sephy & Fafah Sfx: Etienne Marque

Toolkit
Photoshop, Maya, V-Ray, mental ray, Nuke, After Effects

Immediate Byte