Two things to note...

These days, where I have little time for blogging, I do feel the need to note a few things.

First, yesterday was, of course, the 87th anniversary of the Disney Company, the official starting date being coined as the day Walt got a green light from Margaret Winkler to start a series of Alice films, October 16th 1923.

Secondly, blog reader Steven Hartley has made a wonderful and useful mosaic from my Pecos Bill draft. Hoorah! The more, the merrier, and Steven's first attempt is certainly a keeper! Let this be a lesson to all of you out there who do NOT make mosaics!

More to follow real soon! Promise!

Another Opening of Another Show!

This morning, our latest film "The Olsen Gang Gets Polished" premiered in Imperial Bio in Copenhagen, Denmark. This marks our tenth own animated feature (depending a little on how you count co-productions). It is a CG film based on a series of live-action movies from the late 60's-early 70's, and personally having put quite a lot of time in it lately, I am pretty darn proud of it, especially when I think of the fact that it cost something like two minutes of Toy Story 3.
It is also Denmark's first 3-D animated film, another first for us!

< The original Olsen Gang...     More on YouTube!

We have tried to get as close to the original in feeling as we could, and I believe we managed quite well. The director, our Jørgen Lerdam has, of couse, been instrumental in this.

Audience response was nice, pretty much the same response as the original series drew, with laughs in all the right places. The official release is October 14th, so we are all looking forward to the reviews that will come the evening before.

For those interested in production detail, the characters (and blendshapes) were modelled in 3D Studio Max, then animated in Maya, rendered using MentalRay, and finally composited using eyeon Digital Fusion. The 3-D, having been an afterthought really, was basically made with a team of five people through some four months, where the setups at first were largely scripted to have two cameras, then re-output and composited. I prepared the final output (the frame stacks) and did a lot of what one could call quality control, finding render mistakes etc. and then we tried to fix as much as there was time and budget for.As in all our productions, also the post-production was fully pro-fessionally done, in this case at Nordisk Film's facilities ShortCut (the image side: the DCP's) and Nordisk film Audio for the 5.1 tracks. We also produced a 3-D version of the Nordisk Film intro, the growling polar bear. It was exciting to see everything come together on the big screen, and Imperial Bio is the biggest screen in Scandinavia!