Saturday, November 27, 2010

Tangled' is Disney's 50th animated feature film

For Walt Disney's 50th animated feature, "Tangled," the company went to the well: a Grimm fairy tale. They've long been in Disney's wheelhouse, and here, "Rapunzel" gets the modernization treatment, complete with 3-D rendering, digital animation and a slacker rogue in place of the traditional knight. Most of the dependable Disney trappings are here: crisp animation by Glen Keane, songs by Alan Menken, celebrity voice work. Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) and her flip savior Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) are flat, but as the manipulative, passive-aggressive Mother Gothel, who locks Rapunzel and her 70 feet of blonde hair away in a tower, Broadway veteran Donna Murphy is excellent.

Dan Fogelman's script gets the story out of the tower and on the road, where the wide-eyed Rapunzel takes in the world, include a tavern full of theatrical thugs and moments of budding romance. Gamely toting around her long trail of hair, she uses it inventively, like an Indiana Jones with a built-in whip. It's all an overt, sometimes grating attempt for "Disney magic." But while it's not in the league of Disney's best, it's still a sturdy, pleasant execution by the animation machine, which proves resilient yet again. The movie is rated PG and is 104 minutes long.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Gaming, animation to boost growth of Indian media

India currently gets only 10 per cent of the global animation and gaming contracts and the Indian Animation and Gaming industry, with an annual growth rate of 32 percent, stands at $739 million, according to a research report by Deloitte. MUMBAI, INDIA: The Indian media industry is likely to get a huge boost from the gaming, broadcasting and animation industry in the country, which is expecting a substantial increase in revenue in coming years from increased thrust on global outsourcing of content.India currently gets only 10 per cent of the global animation and gaming contracts and the Indian Animation and Gaming industry, with an annual growth rate of 32 percent, stands at $739 million, according to a research report by Deloitte.

The Indian Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry stood at $12.9 billion in 2009, and over the next five years is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent at $24.04 billion by 2014. Additionally, the gaming segment is expected to be the fastest growing sector with a CAGR of 32 percent to reach $705.2 million by 2014, while the animation segment is expected to record a CAGR of 18.7 percent in the next five years, the report said. The industry will also benefit from an increased thrust within India on increasing budgets, superior quality movies and animation content, it added. The onset of third-generation wireless technology will help promote the gaming industry while increased digitisation will benefit the broadcasting sector, the report stated

Monday, November 22, 2010

Hydraulx Builds Innovative DI Workflow for Skyline

Digital Vision, the leading supplier of color grading, finishing, mastering and restoration solutions for the broadcast, film and commercial industries, has announced that its award winning OpenEXR/HDR work was an essential component in the innovative workflow developed at Hydraulx. Hydraulx is the uniquely designed, award-winning post-production facility based in Santa Monica, California, operated by Greg and Colin Strause, The Brothers Strause. Their innovative company has built an extensive list of blockbuster visual effects credits including Iron Man 2, Avatar and Wolverine. The Hydraulx team set out to create an end-to-end DI workflow that mimicked the image quality of a visual effects pipeline. Hydraulx relied upon Digital Vision's Nucoda Film Master throughout the post-production process for their highly anticipated Sci Fi thriller, Skyline.
To facilitate high-quality manipulation of images, the Nucoda Film Master was used in 32bit floating point processing mode, utilizing the OpenEXR "float" file format. This innovative "Half Float" pipeline, as used by the likes of Pixar, allows the intended quality envisioned by the creators to be retained and delivered. Hydraulx has built a meticulous quality control process for the pipeline they've designed by implementing custom, proprietary software that completely automates the process of tracking visual effects shots. "Our tools and process push our accuracy past our competitors and support a powerful workflow for thousands of VFX shots," explained Greg Strause