Animated Terminator Project in Rights Dispute

Plans for a 3D animated movie based on the hit Terminator movie series has hit a legal snag related to ownership of certain rights to the franchise. The project was announced last week in a press release from Hannover House and Red Bear Entertainment, and was immediately met with a cease and desist letter from Pacificor, which owns the rights to franchise, reports Deadline.com. Hannover House CEO Eric Parkinson told Deadline.com that he has certain proprietary rights that allow him to make the film. Those rights are related to Parkinson’s tenure at Hemdale Home Video, which once owned the much-passed-about rights to the franchise. Parkinson told the site he received animation rights to the franchise when he left the company.

He also says he intends to show Pacificor that he has backers in place to make the $70 million movie and that it will deliver a big payday to the company. Executives from the two companies have set a meeting to discuss a way to proceed with the project, Deadline says.

Disney Pixar‘s ‘Toy Story 3‘ becomes the highest grossing animated film of all time

With record-breaking box office tallies around the world, Disney Pixar‘s Toy Story 3 has become the highest-grossing animated film of all time taking in more than $920 million at the global box office to date. This weekend, the critically acclaimed Toy Story 3 is expected to become Disney‘s second film to cross the $400 million domestic threshold and currently ranks as the 4th highest grossing film in company history globally. While Buzz, Woody and the gang delight audiences in theatres around the world, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment has also announced that Toy Story 3 will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on November 2, 2010. "In 1995, the talented team at Pixar introduced a cowboy, a space ranger and their friends who have gone on to become some of the most beloved characters in the world. The success of Toy Story is due to the tremendously creative and innovative team at Pixar, led by John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, and our incredible marketing and distribution teams around the world," said Rich Ross, Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios. "In Toy Story 3, director Lee Unkrich, producer Darla Anderson and the incredible team at Pixar have given audiences a film that continued the rich storytelling and character building that have become synonymous with every Pixar release."

Toy Story 3 started its record-breaking domestic run on June 18 becoming Disney Pixar‘s highest grossing opening weekend taking in $109 million and marking the highest June opening in industry history. Toy Story 3 was the 11th Disney Pixar title to debut in the #1 position on the opening weekend of release. Toy Story 3 continues to charm audiences around the world, tallying more than $518 million to date, and is expected to become Disney‘s largest international animated release this weekend. Latin American audiences have contributed $138 million making Toy Story 3 the highest ever grossing Disney film in the region. The film has ranked as the #1 film in the UK for four consecutive weeks and is the most successful release in company history with $90 million to date. Another key driver of the film is Japan, where the film has taken in $84 million while spending five consecutive weeks as the #1 movie in the territory. Toy Story 3 is climbing the box office charts, and currently ranks as the #14 film in global box office history.

Make Bedtimes Delightful with Toy Story 3 Range

Spearmark Lighting, leading UK manufacturers of child safe lighting, has launched a range of products based on smash-hit 3d animation movie Toy Story 3.The latest instalment of one of the most successful franchises in movie history, Toy Story 3, follows the ongoing adventures of Woody, Buzz Lightyear and friends as they are mistakenly sent to a children’s nursery, where they have to fight against the sinister regime of Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear to find their way back home. Featuring voice talents such as Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Timothy Dalton the film has been showing to sell-out audiences across the UK since its July release. The new range from Spearmark features a wide variety of products that are sure to delight Toy Story fans, including a fantastic bright, energy saving LED lamp. This neat lamp, with its large user-friendly on/off button and can be powered by mains adapter or by batteries, making for an excellent portable light that can be taken anywhere and everywhere, perfect for encouraging children to do their homework or reading their favourite book!

Other products in the range include a Rise & Shine sleeptime routine trainer, which is in the shape of a space rocket, a battery operated nightlight, a bedside KOOL lamp, a colour changing mini glitter lamp plus, a number of ceiling shades and a fun 3D lenticular bin. Prices range from £3.99 to £25.00, ensuring that all sales channels are catered for, from discount to premium. “As expected, Toy Story 3 is proving to be a huge hit and we are very excited about the potential offered by our range. All the products look great on-shelf and are competitively priced too so, we are confident that they will perform extremely well at retail,” says Alex Bloom, commercial director at Spearmark.

The Foundry introduces two new tools for Adobe After Effects

The Foundry‘s new camera tracker analyses source sequences to extract the original camera‘s lens and motion parameters, allowing you to composite 2D or 3D correctly with reference to the camera used to film the shot. You can now match camera moves within the Adobe After Effects 2.5D environment, opening up new, robust options for the placement of composite elements. Create Fringe/Heroes style ‘in scene‘ titles, extend virtual sets, integrate motion graphics elements into a scene, and much more. This technology was previously only available in NukeX, The Foundry‘s high-end film compositing tool but you can now do all this in Adobe After Effects without exiting your application. "It‘s amazing having this ability right in the After Effects environment that so many artists are used to. Thank you The Foundry!" said Danny Princz - Motion Graphics-VFX artist and Prof at FXPHD.

"These new 64-bit plug-ins from The Foundry will help artists who use Adobe After Effects CS5 to create high-impact motion graphics and handle the trickiest compositing tasks more easily," said Michael Coleman, senior product manager for Adobe After Effects at Adobe. Kronos 5.0 is a new accelerated retimer and motion blur plug-in set based on The Foundry‘s Academy Award Winning Furnace algorithms. Kronos 5.0 is the first product to be accelerated by The Foundry‘s new ‘Blink‘ technology, dramatically speeding up render times and taking retiming to a whole new level. BlinkTM runs our software on CPUs and supported NVidia CUDA GPUs allowing the extraction of peak performance from your hardware.
Kronos 5.0 produces far superior results by creating brand new frames using optical flow information. This avoids the poor quality output usually encountered when repeating frames such as blurring and stuttering, and is much faster than other pixel flow based techniques. Clever maths is employed to look at every pixel on each frame, and see where it moves to on the next. By comparing the two it can make a very good guess at what would come in-between allowing the creation of additional frames and a super smooth slow motion result. "The results are very impressive. I slowed down a car and the result was very close to real slow motion. Nice!" said Michael Auerswald, AE User. Jack Binks, Plug-ins‘ Product Manager at The Foundry, commented "We are really excited to bring these new tools to the After Effects platform and can‘t wait to see how artists employ their power and flexibility. We look forward to seeing the results."