Director Veit Helmer shot live-action animals, then animated them talking using an innovative photorealistic VFX pipeline that included Maya, Nuke, Arnold, Unreal Engine and LiveFX, on his new feature about the fantastical adventures of a young monkey who escapes from a zoo to reunite with his family.
Computer graphics and visual effects tools, techniques, and workflows used to animate photorealistic talking animals have come a long way since the 90s, when house pets Shadow, Chance and Sassy braved the outside world in Homeward Bound.
But what about when just the animal mouths are animated on live-action animals? Pushing these animation and VFX boundaries is German director Veit Helmer, known for creating astonishing love stories like Gondola and epic adventures like Fiddlesticks. Helmer expertly combines CG tools and facial animation tech with his talents for fantastical storytelling in his first animal-centric film, Akiko, the Flying Monkey.
“When showing my first kids' film Fiddlesticks, I noticed how much children loved to watch the scenes with animals,” says Helmer, recalling Akiko’s origins. “But less than 10 percent of Fiddlesticks included scenes like that. Seeing children so fascinated by animals inspired me to write a screenplay where all the main roles were given to animals.”
Akiko, the Flying Monkey (or Akiko, der fliegende Affe) follows the adventurous journey of Akiko, a young monkey who escapes from the zoo to reunite with his family and free other captive animals. Along the way, he befriends an eagle, a raccoon, a meerkat, a ferret, and a chameleon, each bringing their unique charm to the story. A Veit Helmer production, the film was an official selection of last month’s Locarno Film Festival and is supported by the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (KjdF), the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF), the Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA), Medienboard Berlin- Brandenburg, and Filmförderung Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The film was produced in close collaboration with NDR, BR, SWR, HR, SR, and RBB. Farbfilm Verleih will release the film in German cinemas, and LOCO Films Paris is handling world sales.
The film, already sold in 46 countries, invites viewers into a world that, at first glance, seems familiar. Yet, upon closer inspection, it reveals a fantastic parallel universe, where many different animals live hidden very close to us—in letterboxes, used glass containers, and traffic lights—using many familiar everyday objects for other fun. And, in this world, the animals talk.
“When it came to planning production, I knew I wanted to shoot with real animals on real sets regardless of the pros and cons that come with that,” says Helmer. “The requirement for the VFX department was to animate the mouths of the animals to match the dialogues and I would record with the actors before the live-action shooting.”
In total, Akiko contains roughly 800 VFX shots.
“When writing the screenplay, I consulted VFX supervisor Rudolf Germann, who worked on my previous four feature films,” notes Helmer. “I asked him if such a massive amount of VFX work could be done in my budget range. Independent filmmakers often assume VFX work needs a huge budget. But I was lucky, as VFX technology has progressed tremendously in recent years, and Rudolph confirmed the feasibility of the project.”
The biggest challenge for Helmer and his team – in addition to conducting individual live-action shoots with a dozen animals that would later have to be stitched together – was to keep the animal faces looking real, even though their mouths and facial movements would be animated.
“Rudolf took over the main VFX work with parts of the animation made by Animationsfabrik,” notes Helmer. “Rudolf worked more than two years on the project. In the beginning, there was a team of 6 people working, preparing the footage, doing retimes and tracking. But Rudolf is a one-man show and, for most of the shots, he did the animation himself.”
Helmer believes that one of the most important precautions a filmmaker can take when trying not to go over budget is planning “precise production preparation.” The precision helped Helmer and the team streamline the VFX workflow.
“We started with adding metadata, like lens distortion and camera type, into the EXR image files using SCRATCH,” he explains, referring to a GPU-based grading system that offers color tools, compositing, VFX-review and more. “We did this for all shots throughout the whole movie and ended up with shots that were already denoised and undistorted. We used a similar program, LiveFX, later on for our animation pipeline, which also worked within a heavily scripted environment.”
Using real-time facial data from Epic Game’s Live Link Face, the Akiko crew streamed facial animation from Unreal Engine, that then went back into their animation script in Nuke. Most of the character heads were handled using projection mapping, with lips and mouths rendered in Maya and Arnold.
“This way we could do different takes of animation in a very simple real-time environment,” says Helmer, who notes there was plenty of tech experimentation and improvisation on set seeing that their starring characters could be rather unreliable. At one point, the film’s eagle escaped, and his trainer found the animal two streets away.
“Monty, the monkey who was cast for Akiko, is very talented, but also very hyperactive,” says Helmer. “Sometimes there were just a few images of him to run with, where he was in the right position and looking in the right direction. These moments had to be extended. In contrast, when it came to filming the chameleon, the whole film team had to slow down, because every movement took over a minute. Those shots often had to be sped up.”
Looking back, despite his insistence on using as many live-action shots as possible, Helmer admits one of his favorite scenes mixes real onset footage with puppeteered shots and greenscreen backdrops.
“It’s one of the highlights of the movie, where Akiko drives a toy racecar and escapes from the police.” shares the director. “For that scene, we intercut real footage of a monkey puppet in a remote-controlled racing car with the real monkey in the toy car shot in front of a greenscreen. I think it turned out pretty good.”
For all the work that went into making these talking animals and chaotic scenes believable, at the end of the day, Helmer says he wanted to make a film that celebrated the magic of imagination and admiration for the wild world humans and animals inhabit alongside each other.
“I think you have to set the tone of a film in the first minute and, if the audience accepts that animals can talk, then they will also accept that a small monkey can drive a car or fly a plane,” says Helmer. “Akiko was about crafting a narrative that resonates with anyone who retains a sense of wonder about the world. The film uses playful antics and challenges Akiko and his friends to explore themes of freedom and the hidden magic that surrounds us every day.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
