• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

The Six-Million Dollar Indie

Jan 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman

Frank Foster calls Thru the Moebius Strip "a textbook experiment" to see if independent filmmakers could produce a CG-animated feature film for $6 million. Foster, a former VP at Sony Pictures Imageworks, is the coproducer and director of Moebius, a sci-fi/fantasy adventure based on a story and drawings from French comic-book legend, Jean "Moebius" Giraud.

We raised money for this film ourselves, and that allowed us to keep creative control, but it also meant we needed to streamline the project," says Foster. "For us, it was a chance to test theories we had all been talking about for years. This kind of movie would normally cost $50-$60 million at a big studio. We had to ask ourselves: Could we bring it in for $6 million?"

The film is currently in production in China, and Foster expects it will be finished in under two years. Only then, he says, can the Moebius method be judged. That method includes four, basic strategies: using cheap labor in China, relying exclusively on PC-based hardware and mainly off-shelf software, developing a proprietary toon shader that reduces render time, and creating an HD master of the animated film.

The film's financing entity, the Digital Content Development Corporation of Hong Kong, has set up an animation training center near Hong Kong and hired Chinese animators, under the supervision of a visual effects supervisor, industry veteran Michael Tigar. Foster says this arrangement is making the project affordable, while also insuring that the animation quality won't be compromised.

Filmmakers have stocked the Chinese facility with PC-based hardware running animation tools like 3D Studio MAX, Softimage, Maya, and various render tools. "I ran the PC department at [Sony] Imageworks, and we had a mandate to develop methods of accomplishing high-quality animation in cost-effective ways," says Foster. "So we used that philosophy here."

"We wanted to do most renders in one pass," Foster continues. "There are different toon shaders out there, and they all have pluses and minuses, but we wanted one that would could give us not only the outline and width of the characters, but atmospheric characteristics and effects, as well. Our goal was to develop a plug-in in concert with a major manufacturer, and we are now working with Discreet through their 3D Studio MAX people to create a toon shader that will let us process images in one pass. For now, we're calling it the `Moebius Shader,' and we're in the final stages of developing it right now [as of press time]."

Foster believes that creating an HD master is one of the film's key money-saving techniques. "HD impacted us in several ways," says Foster. "For one thing, we are using a system from DPS [Toronto] - their Velocity nonlinear editing platform and their Reality card for rendering - to create digital dailies and move our story reel from the animatic stage, just storyboards, to eventually, the finished film. We are able to substitute original drawings with test scenes, temp shots, pre-viz, layout, and final shots, and view them each step of the way, all on a PC platform. Because we are going with the HD approach, we can compress the images and render them to the PC drive and view the images at lower resolution for dailies and editing, but with no lab fees for going back to film later. So we'll master in the compressed HDCAM format and easily have digital dailies along the way that give us a good idea what our final images will look like. This is a cheaper approach for lots of reasons. We can edit and do effects in PAL, at lower resolutions and then render at HD resolution. And the lab-fee savings are significant."

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.