Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver VFX Breakdown
Mackevision’s Adventures in Mandala
The legendary kingdom of Mandala from “Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver” is not as far away as you may think. You don’t have to take a plane and fly to China to get there. Instead, just take a look behind the scenes of Mackevision.
Not that we invented the city, of course. That was master storyteller Michael Ende in his first Jim Button story. Now, 58 years after the book was originally published, a team of film makers have dared to bring the story to life using real-life actors. And we were involved to bring the beautiful city of Mandala to life.
Breathing life into a fantasy kingdom
It was an ambitious and above all complex project. The Morrowland sequences was recreated at Filmpark Babelsberg, the desert shots were filmed in Cape Town, while the scenes in Mandala were captured in a hall against a green backdrop or ‘green screen’, as it’s known in the trade. The rest was digitally created.
For more than a year, a team of almost 20 people at Mackevision worked on the project. Most of them had read the book at some point. And everyone had their own mental image of Mandala, a place of which only a single illustration exists.
The splendid houses with their colorful flags and lanterns, the palace and even the tiny great-grandchildren. “It was a labor of love for every one of us,” says Jan Burda, VFX Lead Compositor.
Real-time camera tracking with nCam
The challenge was to breathe life into a fantasy kingdom. And we found ourselves facing a problem: Designing every house separately would have taken up too much time. So we came up with a modular system including everything you need to build a house: pillars, balconies, roofs.
But creating animated sequences on a computer screen is one thing. Blending in the actors is quite another. In the past, they would film a scene against the backdrop of a green screen, insert it into the animation, then hurry round to the nearest church and pray that it would somehow fit.
Today we can skip this final step, thanks to our partnership with nCam Technologies. Armed with an nCam, directors can merge the virtual world with the scene being filmed in real time on set. This way they can see at a glance how the actors need to move and behave.
Then came the refinements, those little details that make the film so adorable: the mini ear-cleaners, for example; the homes of the great-grandchildren; the imaginative inscriptions above the entrance to the store; the pair of turtle doves on the roof – or the impressive ornamental dragon in the window.
True, these little things are not always easy to spot. But it’s well worth trying.
Mackevision’s Adventures in Mandala
The legendary kingdom of Mandala from “Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver” is not as far away as you may think. You don’t have to take a plane and fly to China to get there. Instead, just take a look behind the scenes of Mackevision.
Not that we invented the city, of course. That was master storyteller Michael Ende in his first Jim Button story. Now, 58 years after the book was originally published, a team of film makers have dared to bring the story to life using real-life actors. And we were involved to bring the beautiful city of Mandala to life.
Breathing life into a fantasy kingdom
It was an ambitious and above all complex project. The Morrowland sequences was recreated at Filmpark Babelsberg, the desert shots were filmed in Cape Town, while the scenes in Mandala were captured in a hall against a green backdrop or ‘green screen’, as it’s known in the trade. The rest was digitally created.
For more than a year, a team of almost 20 people at Mackevision worked on the project. Most of them had read the book at some point. And everyone had their own mental image of Mandala, a place of which only a single illustration exists.
The splendid houses with their colorful flags and lanterns, the palace and even the tiny great-grandchildren. “It was a labor of love for every one of us,” says Jan Burda, VFX Lead Compositor.
Real-time camera tracking with nCam
The challenge was to breathe life into a fantasy kingdom. And we found ourselves facing a problem: Designing every house separately would have taken up too much time. So we came up with a modular system including everything you need to build a house: pillars, balconies, roofs.
But creating animated sequences on a computer screen is one thing. Blending in the actors is quite another. In the past, they would film a scene against the backdrop of a green screen, insert it into the animation, then hurry round to the nearest church and pray that it would somehow fit.
Today we can skip this final step, thanks to our partnership with nCam Technologies. Armed with an nCam, directors can merge the virtual world with the scene being filmed in real time on set. This way they can see at a glance how the actors need to move and behave.
Then came the refinements, those little details that make the film so adorable: the mini ear-cleaners, for example; the homes of the great-grandchildren; the imaginative inscriptions above the entrance to the store; the pair of turtle doves on the roof – or the impressive ornamental dragon in the window.
True, these little things are not always easy to spot. But it’s well worth trying.