Smurf Aniversary Film

This year is the 50th aniversary of the smurfs and October 23, 2008 is their ‘Happy Smurfday!’
As well as an extensive range of events, competitions and a European Tour, the Smurfs will be producing a film (there are even rumours of a Triology)

Herbert Ratner III is writing the screenplay based on the origional characters by Peyo. The film will be distributed by Nickelodeon Movies / Paramount Pictures and produced by Kerner Entertainment who also produced Charlotes Web in 2006.

More Movie Info

MovieWeb, Movie-List, BlueBuddies.

Related News Reports

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Do you want to become a Smurf builder?

IMPS is advertising for a 3D modeller to create, texture and shade models. Rigging of characters is a bonus. The advert does not indicate if this is a permenant position so best check with them.

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Brothers Quay in HD on Sky Arts

The Brothers Quay dark and moody, stop motion films can been seen on Sky Arts and Sky Arts HD over the next few months. For those without the relavent channels, these films can be purchased on VHS from the British Film Institute Shop.

http://www.skyarts.co.uk/SkyArts/SearchResults.aspx?search=brothers%20quay

Thanks to a chap called Meph on MySpace for telling me about this.

Flea Film Preview

The PSTOIC Christmas dinner at the Rembrant was a success. The buffet was good and plentyful and as usual I had too much red wine.

Folliwing the meal two EEE PCs were produced and 2 memory sticks with copies of the flea film latest draft were shown to the STOIC Alumni. The response was good but some of the techies seemed more interested in the hardware than the film.



In my rush to complete the presentation I'd put some simple placeholders where there would be more animation next time I showed the film. These were so popular I've actually decided to keep them in the film to introduce each of the acts. The other popular inclusion was the "out take" of Olivier impersonating a traffic warden, I've included it here for your amusement.

Rendering and video editing

Following some helpful feedback from the people at Renderosity, I've produced a new version of the introduction to the Flea Circus Film. The depth of field options have been turned on in quick mode (rather than fully raytraced) which unfortunately loses the anti-aliasing on the edges of the case/backdrop but means that each frame renders in approx 4s rather than 3 minutes per frame required for fully raytraced depth of field. The current rendering stats are approx 2 hours to generate 50s of animation which in uncompressed AVI is about 1GB.
The film is in a new size format, it was suggested in 3D world (for the Tin Man film?) to render at 740x405 to get a 16:9 aspect ratio that could be displayed on most screens. I did this but then found that my video editing and conversion tools complained that this was a non standard size. As I was rendering out to uncompressed AVI files and then converting to WMV's for the editing, my solution was to then use the video convertor's letter box feature to resize to 720x576 by adding black bars top and bottom. This allows Premiere elements to be happy when outputting the results whilst also displaying well on my friends' EEE PC which will be used to show off the film at tomorrow's dinner.
There will be some frantic editing tomorrow morning, this intro will be followed by some draft version of the other three acts and hopefully some out-takes will be shown tomorrow evening at the PSTOIC Christmas dinner in South Kensington. Thanks to Youtube, the default picture for this clip is a lovely pink colour.

London Short Film Night 15th Jan

There is a short film night called "Short and Sweet" at the AKA venue. The next session is on 15th Jan 2008. Doors open 18:00, films run from 19:00, entrance for free. Apparently you can buy pizzas to be delivered to your table but I have yet to confirm pizza quality.

AKA is based in Bloomsbury, right in the heart of London's West End, next door to their sister club The End. If you work in the City or East End then there is also a Monday night session on Brick Lane.