3DVF : Thomas, how did you come to Chris Delaporte and the Kaena project ?

Thomas Marqué : End of the year 1996, I was working for a small video games company called IN VIVO. I was working on the a real time sets of a terrific project called Athanor, never to be released, like many other projects at the time· Then came two cool young guys (Chris Delaporte and Patrick Daher) who were going from a company to another, looking for contacts for their game project : Gaïna. They were looking for a real time sets artist and seemed really enthusiastic about my own work. We talked about Gaïna and, two month later, I was joining Chaman, a really young company based in Neuilly (suburbs of Paris, France).

In February 1997, I started working on the real time sets of the game Gaïna. After a year, we had a fully playable demo, and at the same time, Chris, Patrick and a small talented team were assembling the first cinematic of the game, shown to many producers, including Canal + (French private TV group) . All the different producers were attracted by the universe settled in the game and proposed turning it into a movie !

Then started the adventure. I thought, at the time, that all this was quite crazy. One day, Denis Friedman (Chaman Boss) told me : ·Do you want to deal with the sfx on the movie?· Of course, I accepted the offer ! Then I started working on the R&D because the sfx of the movie had to be numerous and varied.

3DVF : How was made the decision to work with 3ds max 3 ?

Thomas Marqué : In 1997, we had started working on the real time set with 3ds4 : a fast, stable and flexible software, unbeatable at the time. In fact, we were all working on the DOS version of 3ds. The work on Kaena started on Max 2. Choosing 3ds max 3 seemed logical to us, even if a lot of people told us it was not going to work and that max on only good for video games (urban legend if you believe me·). Next, we updated to max 3.1 without thinking about it and we ·forced· ourselves to finish the movie on this version for plugins and files compatibility reasons.

For the special effects, I tested different plugins, all for max : Realflow/Realwave, Simcloth, clothreyes, Afterburn. Elrik joined me to specialize in fluid dynamics. We opted for Realflow. Everything was leading us to a 100 p.cent max production.