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A decade ago, we interviewed a young studio: Image In Work. The company has since undergone major evolutions, including changes in direction, strategy, and even name.
Which is why, at the start of 2024, we wanted to interview IIW and LUX and their latest projects, from the B.R.I. series to The Three Musketeers, and even music videos! We asked the team about strategy, collaboration between studios, tools, ecological transition, and apprenticeships.
Laurent Fumeron (the studio head and his team opened their doors to us. Here is IIW’s showreel, followed by the interview.
3DVF: Hello IIW Studio/ LUX! The studio has changed a lot in recent years: a new name, an image lab, new people in the team… Can you walk us through this process?
Laurent Fumeron: The company was created in 2012 under the name Image In Work by Philippe Gonzalez and Romain Bourzeix, two graphic designers who met at BUF studio. The studio was particularly focused on advertising, short films.
I came across them in 2014 while I was producing Entity, a short film with a lot of CG elements. I needed a VFX studio to support us on the project. We got along very well, and since I had my own film production company, I bought shares in the studio, with the idea of being involved in its development.
Romain eventually left to set up The Seed and Spline (offering various services: motion control, studios, vfx on set..).
Then in 2019, Philippe wanted to fully dedicate himself to graphic design once again, and he has since moved to Canada: I took over the studio’s management.
3DVF: And you decided to change the overall strategy of the company.
IIW: Yes, the idea was to give a new dynamic: to enrich the post-production offering by integrating an image lab into the VFX Studio: LUX. To focus more on fiction.
We took advantage of the strange pause linked to the pandemic to restructure, raise funds, recruit talents and in 2021 we moved into our new premises (located in the center of Paris, at Etienne Marcel), resumed our VFX activity and launched our lab division.
We now have two labels:
- IIW STUDIO, for the VFX part, managed by Paul Gaulier. For the record, he started with us, through an internship as part of his studies at French digital arts school ISART and he then evolved within the entity. It’s always nice to see profiles develop over the years and grow with them.
- And LUX, the image lab, set up around Fabien Pascal our colorist and artistic director, and Nicolas Chalons, our technical director.
In practice, clients can hire IIW STUDIO or LUX, or both. The advantage for projects relying on both labels being the physical proximity (The two entities share the same premises): the director can easily interact with the teams, communication and feedback are fluid, hand over to the colorist if what is asked of the VFX artists is too close to a color grading work, and vice versa, exchange regularly to enrich the offer we provide to creators.
3DVF: What markets are you targeting?
Historically, Image In Work was centered on advertising, with a bit of work on fiction. Now our positioning allows us to work on much more fiction, it’s about 75% of the work we do (cinema, series, TV movies combined).
We keep working on ads on the side, especially with long-term clients like Mutt Agency with whom we have been working for a very long time.
In addition to our presence on French projects, we are also orienting our exchanges towards more and more international projects. French talent, know-how, and the increase in CNC tax credits are undeniable assets for hosting these projects. [Editor’s note: the CNC is a French, publicly owned establishment, aimed at supporting the production and promotion of French cinema and andiovisual arts]
The international aspect is interesting for two reasons: it’s in our DNA, and it allows us to meet new people, other ways of working. It’s also an opportunity to work with other studios for post-production, in Europe and elsewhere.
3DVF: What are your recent or ongoing projects?
On the VFX side, we are currently finishing several feature films, French TV movies and series. 2023 was a very good year for ambitious projects: we have just been nominated for the technical Cesar Awards [Editor’s note: the French equivalent of the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards in the US] for our work in VFX and image lab.
On the project side, we can mention The Three Musketeers. BUF was in charge of the overall VFX supervision, and where we managed more than a hundred shots per film: in particular, we had to hide anachronisms on one of the central sets of the film for the 1st part, and on the second part, a lot of invisible effects, which may seem trivial when you see the final sequence but often require a lot of effort and finesse.
The B.R.I. series for Canal+ was also one of the beautiful projects we worked on in 2023. We had the chance to work with director Jérémie Guez on both the lab and VFX sides. He could move from one room to another, everything was very fluid: adding a blood stain, a detail, is simply done by going directly to the supervisors during a break in the color grading, rather than going through an endless chain of emails.
As well as the series Thicker Than Water by Nawell Madani for Netflix where we managed all the VFX (nearly 400 shots). We worked on very diverse vfx: simulations, a lot of fire, green screen for car shots, etc.
Or the beautiful feature film Through the Night by Delphine Girard, a Belgian film co-produced between Canada, France, Belgium.
Our work for television is also enriching through increasingly ambitious effects where the timings are nevertheless tighter than on a classic feature film.
These exchanges push us to find alternative solutions, develop internal tools, be proactive in advancing, together, the quality of TV programs in France!
Lately, we have worked a lot on beauty effects with approaches like AI, CopyCat, smart vector, a small pipeline that we have set up. It’s less energy-consuming than classic 3D, and by training an AI per sequence, we were able to process a good number of shots, focusing more on the artistic work related to this type of effect.
Whether it is upstream with the different heads of departments, in supervision on set and in our daily work, the goal is to be a source of solutions, to help, sometimes from the writing stage, to achieve the best possible result while staying within budget constraints.
3DVF: You discussed earlier collaboration between studios, which has not always been the trend in France…
Yes, historically it was difficult, there was this feeling that one studio was going to “steal” the work of another, but now it is happening more and more, and we talk about it a lot. We meet between studios, we create bridges and we respect the qualities of each other that allow us to enrich the projects!
We are also pleased to be a member of France VFX [Editor’s note: an association gathering several French visual effects studios] to further promote these collaborations and exchange between studios through our professions and their constraints, and to work together on projects.
3DVF: And this is perhaps more “healthy,” shall we say, than the practice of subcontracting part of the work to a third party studio, while sometimes also hiding the fact that they were involved in the project…
It’s important to bring a certain ethic, healthier exchanges, indeed. We all do the same job and it’s through these collaborations that we can welcome large-scale international projects in France. This is all the more true on this kind of project, bidding alone would make no sense. Not to mention that some studios are going to be very good at specific types of effects, not combining skills would be absurd.
The interest is double and enriching both for the studios and for the projects, on our side we push this collaboration internationally by working with French but also European companies.
3DVF: Obviously, the latest tools make it easier to exchange data and assets between studios, and are therefore helpful to further this type of cooperation. Do you use USD, by the way?
We are transitioning, we are learning! For small-scale projects it might seem like overkill, but we know that the system, the logic will be useful for all types of projects in the future. So we are working on it indeed.
3DVF: We noticed that you have also worked on a few music videos recently, for artists such as Vitaa, Julien Clerc. A few words on this topic?
We don’t do many projects like these. We did a lot before, now less. We have been working with some directors for a long time and naturally we are delighted to also work with them on their music video projects.
It’s a very good laboratory to experiment, even though the budgets, the deadlines are very tight. It’s quite difficult to make it work with our movie/series schedule, which does not have the same constraints, so we really do it for specific directors, or if the project speaks to us artistically. With Julien Clerc for example, the Mon Refuge music video had a tight budget but a really interesting concept, with a walk through the world.
We also worked on Evident, a music video for Tessae with a big challenge: 7 or 8 days to do everything, we used Unreal, motion capture with few resources, that was very interesting in terms of R&D.
3DVF: Can you tell us about the software you use?
Mainly Nuke, Houdini quite intensely at times, we always have a bit of Maya, to stay compatible with studios that use it, but we mainly use Blender. It meets our needs and is fast, with a strong community that greatly facilitates the work. In a way, it’s a bit like NUKE, with its rich community.
We also use the Kitsu platform from CGWire, here again open source corresponds to our values and needs. We also rely on a PRISM pipeline. For rendering, we use Cycles, or Redshift for projects with more advanced needs. Or Arnold, for specific needs.
We have also recently adopted Projectal, which integrates with Kitsu and allows us to manage our projects well.
3DVF: A major issue for studios currently is the ecological transition. How is the IIW Studio/LUX team progressing on this topic?
Absolutely, we have joined the Ecoprod association with the aim of pushing ourselves to think about our impact on the environment and the constant work that falls onto us in order to reduce our energy consumption. Specifically, we mainly use a system of virtual machines, with servers located in a single air-conditioned server room. We switched the last handful of traditional physical workstations to virtual machines in early 2024.
We are clearly not a virtuous industry by nature, we all do rendering, which is very energy-consuming. But it is important to improve our efficiency, not to mention that it also has a strong financial impact, with the rise in energy costs. We work in this direction a little more each day, the virtuous approach in terms of energy remains essential, and it allows us to gradually, step by step, change things.
Let’s focus on an example, file formats. We work a lot with Dolby on the Dolby Vision part. The idea is to move towards a single master instead of 6 or 7 at the end of the project, and this single master can be used for various use cases thanks to metadata.
The same master will be usable for example for HDR and SDR display.
It’s a bit like Atmos on the sound side: we mix in Atmos and it’s possible to do a direct downmix, in 7.1, 5.1, stereo.
We have also thought about storage, using IMF for the TV/streaming series master, which has the advantage of being much more compact than a DPX or TIFF export. Basically, the idea will still be to deliver a project to the client in the requested formats, like DPX, but we will then only store data using IMF on our end, to avoid wasting storage unnecessarily and to limit the amount of data stored on hard disk or LTO [Editor’s note: magnetic tape storage, used for long-term archiving because it is reliable and durable].
3DVF: Some studios are experimenting with remote work, like Supamonks which has also done studies on the ecological aspect of the practice. Are you working on these topics at IIW Studio/LUX?
Absolutely, we are also experimenting on this subject, and we opted for the French solution Reemo for remote work.
Technically it also allows us to control the shutdown of workstations, thus reducing energy consumption. We regularly work with graphic designers who are not in Paris: remote work clearly makes sense for these situations. It requires more organization but is clearly not impossible to achieve in our industry, whether on the ecological aspect or on the question of the well-being of the artists which is also a real topic of a virtuous circle to work on, develop.
3DVF: This is indeed an issue that also needs to be addressed: deadlines, schedules that are often too tight.
The race against time is always one of our constraints. The pressure it can generate should not be the norm. It’s up to us, as with the ecological question, to work on our schedules, our solutions to lessen this constraint, not to let it overwhelm our artists.
3DVF: What about virtual production, LED screens? Do you use these technologies?
It’s a beautiful technology, which can have real added value. But it all depends on the project, the experience: recently, we did tests with LED screens on a project, in the end, more traditional methods were adopted because they better matched the constraints.
Each project needs a tailored solution: sometimes the LED wall, sometimes older solutions.
When it comes to recent techniques, we use previsualization, VR to visualize sets captured in photogrammetry: this allows the director to test his cut on complex sequences (especially for action films, where editing & cuts create everything) and above all to save a huge amount of time.
Both for the director and for the VFX studio who have a very clear idea of where to intervene and how to guide.
Ideally, we like to take projects very early on, this allows us to avoid teams wasting money, to keep the budget where it will count, to accompany them in finding solutions, to help from the writing stage to clarify questions!
A concrete example, on a feature film that we are accompanying, the director had many questions, hesitated to write certain sequences that he did not see how to do within his budget and in the end 5 minutes and a coffee were enough to reassure him about the feasibility of VFX elements and let him get back, reassured, in his story.
We are above all there to serve the vision of a creative, to help realize it.
3DVF: Which confirms that you really work on very diverse projects in terms of budget.
Yes, between The Three Musketeers and an independent film, we will have both a large budget and a much tighter one, but again we appreciate being able to work on varied projects. We like this balance, we want to be able to juggle projects that are financially strong or fragile, but providing the same quality of work. And it’s also good for the teams, it gives more variety, different effects, it avoids routine.
And this fits with our desire to remain generalists.
3DVF: You have young talents in apprenticeship in your team: a few words about this?
Yes, we work with French digital arts school ISART on this. And we trust these young talents, who do both 3D, compositing, sometimes rigging… They are enriched by the structure, are in contact with people who have 20 years of experience and can help them.
They stay for 2 years, which gives plenty of time for a deep dive, to teach them the pipeline, it’s more practical than an internship. Upon leaving, they have been able to touch on many specialties, they really are able to know what they want to do or not.
By the way, ISART has made a lot of progress in its training, the profiles that arrive with us have already touched on the tools that interest us, we can easily integrate them into the teams, the school listens to our feedback. We have a lot of former interns and apprentices from the school who have stayed on the team.
3DVF: One last question: did the strikes in the USA last year (actors, writers) have an impact on IIW/Lux?
Yes, like everyone, American projects often call on France when the film has a connection to our country, for example for John Wick and its shootings in Paris. With the strikes, it changed, we had studios interested because they sourced talent outside their territory. And France is full of talents, it goes beyond the strike, there is really the idea in the industry to go and seek skills wherever they are.
3DVF: Thank you to the whole team for this update on your projects and your philosophy! We will obviously have the opportunity to follow upcoming IIW/LUX projects in the future.
More information about IIW Studio and LUX
- IIW Studio in our CG/VFX/Animation/Videogame studios list
- Official websites: IIW Studio & LUX.
