VARIETY reports that the Indian government will form the National Center of Excellence in Animation, Gaming and Visual Effects in Mumbai, announced by Ambika Soni, the minister of information and broadcasting. The government will invest 520 million Rupees ($11.4 million) into the venture.
Additionally, she announced the creation of the National Heritage Mission with the goal of preserving Indian cinema. The Mission will open in 2013 in Mumbai. The investment is $145.1 million.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Oscar Shorts Program Grosses $1 Million at U.S. Box Office
Press Release from Shorts International
NEW YORK, US, April 2nd 2010 -Today "The Oscar Nominated Shorts Films of 2010" crossed the $1 Million mark at the Box Office. Released annually by Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures, the program was created 5 years ago to give audiences a chance to see all 10 Animated and Live Action Oscar Nominated Shorts in theaters nationally prior to the Academy Awards.
"The short film has gone from the occasional feature film accessory, to the main theatrical event," said Carter Pilcher, Chief Executive of Shorts International. "Audiences for the Oscar nominated shorts jumped by 52% in the short space of a year and more than 1000% in 5 years...and this is just the beginning. For the first time ever these films are also currently available on cable systems through Movies On Demand."
"It's an incredible achievement on so many levels," said Tom Quinn, SVP of Magnolia. "On average, less than 50 specialized films a year cross the $1M mark, so to see our little program blossom into a big contender is a testament to the quality of these films. It's even more astounding considering that the marketing budget for the program has been the exact same year in and year out."
"I'm thrilled that so many people have discovered these fantastic short films, and seeing them with an audience on the big screen surpasses any other viewing experience," said Bill Kroyer, Governor and Chair of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Short Film and Feature Animation Branch
The program is entering its seventh weekend in selected cinemas across the US. To find a theater near you, visitwww.shortshd.com/theoscarshorts.
It is also available through iN DEMAND to US cable audiences via Movies On Demand (MOD). This year's program includes all the nominees as well as the Academy Award winners for best Live Action short, "New Tenants", and best Animated short, "Logorama".
ABOUT SHORTS INTERNATIONAL
Shorts International is the world's leading short movie entertainment company with the largest movie catalogue devoted to short movies. ShortsHD(TM)is the first high definition channel dedicated to short movies and is available on AT&T U-verse (Channel 1789). Shorts International also operates ShortsTV(TM)UK, a pay TV channel available in the United Kingdom on BSkyB (Channel 342), ShortsTV(TM)France available in France, Belgium, Luxembourg on Numericable (Channels 134 and 52). ShortsTV is also available on TTNET in Turkey. Shorts(TM)is the short movie on-demand service available on iTunes movie stores in the US, UK, Canada and Germany. Further information can be found at www.shortshd.com and www.shortstv.com. The company is headquartered in London, England with additional offices in Paris, New York and Los Angeles led by Carter Pilcher, Chief Executive. Shorts International is owned by Shorts Entertainment Holdings and Liberty Global Ventures.
ABOUT MAGNOLIA PICTURES
Magnolia Pictures (www.magpictures.com) is the theatrical and home entertainment distribution arm of the Wagner/Cuban Companies, a vertically-integrated group of media properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban that also includes the Landmark Theatres chain, the production company 2929 Productions, and the high definition cable network HDNet. Magnolia's recent releases include such critically acclaimed films as the Oscar nominated documentary Food, Inc, Oscar winner Man on Wire, James Gray's Two Lovers, Stephen Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Expereince, Bong Joon-Ho's Mother, and Conor McPherson's The Eclipse. Upcoming releases include Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, Bob Pulcini and Shari Berman's The Extra Man, Oscar-winner Alex Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Neil Jordan's Ondine, Dagur Kari's The Good Heart, the hard hitting nuclear weapons documentary Countdown to Zero, and many more.
Catmull on Technology and Storytelling
Ed Catmull discusses the upcoming VES Awards, his pioneering spirit and the way VFX are now evaluated
Ed Catmull, the esteemed, visionary president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, who will receive the 2010 Georges Melies Award Sunday at the 8th annual VES Awards, discusses his career and the previous year's achievements.
Bill Desowitz: It's been a great year for animation and visual effects.
Ed Catmull: Well, you know, I was looking at the voting for the VES Awards this year, and as I was going through, I couldn't help being struck by the general quality of the work. Usually you see one or two at the top, but uniformly it was high all over the place.
BD: That's what people were saying at the bakeoff. And pretty soon we won't even be discussing the effects or the technology but just the visual storytelling.
EC: I think we've kind of reached that point now. If you look at the quality of the effect itself, I find it pretty hard to distinguish values in a technical sense between them. If I look at how well they integrate to tell a good story, then, of course, it gets mixed in with the quality of the story. But at some point, how do you disentangle them? These effects were part of a merging of this whole, and you evaluate in a somewhat different way.
EC: I buy the worlds. They sold me.
BD: Was Avatar what you expected?
EC: It was. First of all, I really enjoyed the movie -- it was what I expected. Cameron does know how to tell a good story -- there's no question about that. Incidentally, with Star Trek, I had to see it twice. It turns out, the first time I had to recalibrate my head about what I was seeing with the alterations and the fact that they were younger. But the second time I really enjoyed it. And I hardly ever do that. But by the second viewing, I was saying, "I really like this! This is a very good film!"
BD: They really conveyed outer space more believably in a Star Trek film.
EC: Yes.
BD: Again, you buy the world. And you certainly buy the world of Up, which is another milestone for you.
EC: Well, we're very happy about it -- it doesn't fit into anybody's categories. It's different and Pete's a phenomenal director and has a strong personal vision.
BD: In looking back at your career, did you ever think it would end up like this?
EC: No, the goal of making the animated feature was a goal that lasted 20 years. And in the process of getting together people who shared a similar goal, then there was something beside the movie that was created, which was a style and a way of thinking, and people who were always wanting to create something that was new and challenging and different. And it was only after Toy Story that I could think about it in different terms, and in terms of that creative culture. And the goal was different: How do you make a sustainable culture? Something that is dynamic and unstable? The thing is, I believe strongly, that successful groups are inherently unstable. And so you can't think of it in terms of: "I'm going to grab on to what I've got and hang on to it for dear life." Rather, if we're going to keep changing, how do we adapt and modify and bring people in and help people grow and let people do great things, but don't let us get stuck in the past by always heading off in an exciting direction?
BD: And how did your background in computer graphics guide you?
EC: Well, for me, the start was when I was at the University of Utah, and the field of computer graphics was completely brand new, so the people coming in were exploring and looking for the new. And so the mindset at the very beginning was: How do you discover? How do you let things happen? How do you move blocks from people? And the principles coming out of that environment apply to any creative environment, and the blocks that can get in the way, can happen in any creative environment. For me, at each one of these places, going from the University of Utah to New York Tech to Lucasfilm to Pixar, it was learning from things that worked and learning from things that didn't work. And thinking about what the difference is.
BD: Any interesting epiphanies as of late?
EC: Actually, there have been many. And they have to do with the changes that we go through here [at Pixar] and the other is dealing with a different group of creative people [at Disney], and the legacies that they have and the legacies that they're trying to make on their own. And because they're different people, you can start to tease apart those things which are ways to operate vs. the unique characteristics that the individual people bring.
BD: Do you find it an interesting irony in taking over Disney?
EC: Yes, and for a while I thought of it in terms of irony. But then I realized that I actually had to step away from thinking of it that way because, to some extent, the legacy of the past can also get in the way of the future. And it's a difficult thing because a legacy is something that you build on that you're proud of, but at the same time you can't define where you're going, so I don't want to think about that group in terms of what was there in the past. Rather, what can these new people do to make great films and tell good stories?
BD: Would you give us a sneak peek of Toy Story 3 and Tangled?
EC: Toy Story 3 is largely done at this point. We're extremely excited: this is a film that is funny and emotional. And it's got it all.
BD: A perfect example of being part of a legacy but not wanting to be tied down.
EC: Yes, and you'll feel it in this film. With Tangled, this is where I would say Disney is coming into full flower of what they can do. It's got some very different elements to it and it's smart and I think people are really, really going to enjoy this film when it comes out.
BD: And technically?
EC: The fact is, they have to make a lot of technical changes with each one in terms of simulation and there's a fair amount of simulation work to be done in the future. But we've reached a point where people are going to look at it and judge it on whether or not we've delivered a consistent artistic vision that supports the story. And that's how it will be measured.
Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.
Go behind the VFX scene of the new World War II miniseries on HBO exec produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg
More ambitious than the celebrated Band of Brothers HBO miniseries from 2001, The Pacific (which began airing March 14 on HBO from 9:00-10:00 pm and continues through May 16) is intended to create a different but no less believable sense of combat peril. The 10-part miniseries follows the 1st Marine Division through battles on Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, Cape Gloucester and Iwo Jima.
With 1,285 vfx shots, supervised by John Sullivan (Next, Red Eye, Collateral, Bulletproof Monk), the goal was to "lend a tremendous sense of reality to what we're doing, to make something that is accurate to what the true war in the Pacific was."
To that end, Sullivan had his own visual effects camera unit shooting elements in Australia, where the miniseries was filmed (clouds, ocean and boats) and utilized several vendors: Iloura from Australia, Flash Film Works, DigiScope, Digital Dream, Crazy Horse, Pixel Magic, BaseFX, Pixel Magic, Imageworks India and Lowry Digital.
Sullivan, who was on the project two -and-a-half years, says, "This was about the uniqueness of the Pacific theater: the supply lines coming in and getting stuck on islands. The big landing scene [on Guadalcanal] starts off episode one: the guys have been emotionally built up and trained that they're going to combat and they get to the beach and the Japanese are totally gone. The whole area where we had the Alligator Creek where the night battle takes place and we see all the dead bodies the next day was really difficult for [to shoot] because everything had to be isolated and controlled so we didn't pollute. For us, visual effects wise, we extended it out to give everything more scale. We added bodies, of course. For the night battle, we added all the tracer fire and augmented the special effects explosions with CG, making it all more dramatic and building up the experience of what it was like to be in battle. It was pretty easy because the explosions that they set off [under the supervision of Joss Williams] made it feel like a war zone.
"For the landing, we didn't have a fleet out there so the fleet's computer-generated. When we're going through the landing itself, we had four operational Higgins boats. I had to make a creative and financial choice. How do I put these boats in? We photographed the boats from different angles to give ourselves a library of live-action elements that we could composite into the shots rather than creating everything in CG. It actually turned out well: It gave us a sense of reality. We had to fight a little bit with lighting, but I think it gave us a natural sense of depth."
For the landing at Guadalcanal, the major fleet shots leading up to the landing sequence was done by Iloura; the hand off of the boats going toward the beach was done by Flash Film Works. Most of the Iloura work was CG, including the fleet of Higgins boats. "We shot the practical foreground elements on set," Sullivan continues. "We have a lot of hand offs between companies within the context of a scene. But it worked out nicely; we didn't have problems with integration."
The next big battle is Peleliu in episode five. "For Peleliu, we wanted to have that impending sense of driving into Hades," Sullivan suggests, "a very frightening experience and we worked very hard to build that intensity to go toward the beach."
The sequence focuses on Sledge (Joe Mazzello) getting his first taste of combat as the division meets fierce Japanese resistance when landing on the intricate and heavily defended coral island. Flash Film Works did the majority of the landing sequence and Digital Dream provided augmentation. "This required both computer-generated elements as well as photographed elements of landing ships on water that were rotoscoped and integrated into the plates," Sullivan explains. We executed what we called the stitch shot, combining five sections to create a single shot, creating a 1 minute/49 second intense experience of Sledge getting from the landing craft over to the beach and into a tank trap. There were more than 300 distinct visual effects for the stitch shot and it's one of the most complex of my career."
Meanwhile, Iwo Jima in episode eight was an interesting one for Sullivan because they chose to shoot it in a gravel pit in Melbourne and it was all rotoscoped by Digital Dream. "They put the fleet into the background and used a lot of smoke," Sullivan continues. "It lent to the emotion of the whole thing and masked what we didn't want to see. We were using it both as a storytelling tool and a way to set parameters. And so I made the choice -- and everybody agreed that it worked -- to tell the story of the combat on the beach. Interestingly enough, when I looked at the DI, they were able to crush it down and bring a little bit more of the fleet back in. It has a very different feel than Peleliu and has you grinding your teeth a bit."
One of Sullivan's "play things" is a train sequence in episode 10: the coming home episode. "We shot bluescreen of the train with all the action and we were going to shoot background plates in Australia as well, but everything we looked at was too much like Australia, so we decided to shoot plates back here, and we shot all the exterior plates with the new Canon 5D Mark II in video mode and it worked out well when compositing. Iloura created the digital train and the bluescreen composite train exteriors in windows.
"It's one of the few technologically shifted things we did on the project. From a technical point of view, it was interesting because it was a skewed negative in terms of color (Australia has an inherently blue light and they wanted a different look), so it was difficult to match what was in the telecine when they did the HD transfer. And it was hard for us to know if we were in the right spot as we were doing standard film compositing techniques until we took it to the DI bay."
Courtesy : AWN
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