Hasta La Motion!

Japanese ADK Emotions and Toronto’s Guru Studio have signed a co-development deal to produce The Ora Chronicles. Aimed at six to 11 year olds, the new action-adventure series revolves around five middle school girls whose destiny is to defeat a great evil that resides in the Earth’s core.

According to Guru VP of creative development Rachel Marcus, the show is a unique blend of Japanese anime and western visual styles and storytelling.

This is the first time Guru has ever signed a co-development deal with a Japanese company. Guru (producer on Netflix’s True and the Rainbow Kingdom and Disney Jr.’s Pikwik) will manage the international distribution, whereas ADK Emotions (Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters and Beyblade), will be handling all the merchandising and licensing rights.

Japanese animation style has been getting popular amongst kids and streamers too, with Netflix picking up several anime titles and entire catalogue from Studio Ghibhli; Hulu partnering with Funimation to grow its anime content and also HBO Max picking up Studio Ghibli films in the US.

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Toy industry leaders Kevin Mowrer, Adrian Roche and Dave Ciganko are on a mission to ‘Change Everything because Everything has Changed’ in the launch of their new global toy company, Huge! Play. With the vision of creating game-changing new products and platforms that shift the way we play and learn with a strong focus on storytelling, Huge! Play is set to transform story-driven play and distribution models with a disruptive consumer-first approach.

Huge! Play is 100 per cent direct-to-consumer premium play products with their first offering to hit the North American market in 2021 with plans to expand globally shortly thereafter.

“Questioning and innovating everything about bringing play to today’s audiences and leaving behind the baggage of the last 30 years of the toy business, is the vision we all share in launching Huge! Play,” said Huge! Play founder and co-CEO Kevin Mowrer. “Our radically simplified B2C model leans into the dominant rise of online purchases and puts us in a relationship that answers directly to parents, kids and fans without all the middle-men in the equation today.  This means informed innovation, with relevance and heart, that will change how we create play and expand their stories.”

With over thirty years of experience creating Emmy award-winning commercial kids IP, Mowrer is excited to forge a new future at Huge! Play. As a top consultant for some of the major entertainment and toy companies, he has expanded the commercial potential for many global kids and all-family IP and Stories. Along with holding multiple toy patents, Kevin founded Hasbro’s Entertainment division and ran their R&D department.

Similarly, Huge! Play co-CEO and co-founder Adrian Roche also brings thirty years of entrepreneurial global toy experience in senior executive roles. Roche was the managing director of Fisher-Price/Kiddicraft in the UK, then spent fourteen years as VP at The First Years /RC2 both in the UK where he set up the European business and later moved to the US to head up infant/preschool and licensing. He later ran preschool, Boys Toys and licensing at Mega Brands in Canada for nine years. In 2014 he was appointed president of North America for China’s biggest toy company, Alpha Toys and was responsible for setting up their US operations.

“It’s gonna be Epic and Huge!” said Epic Story Media el presidente and founder Ken Faier,“We’re excited by the opportunity to bring something new to fans of our properties. It’s the right combination of creativity, collaboration and execution to bring great products to market and get them into the hands of the kids who will love them.”

Rounding out its esteemed executive team, Dave Ciganko is Huge! Play’s chief development officer and co-founder. Ciganko’s spent 40+ years as a creator and executive at Fisher-Price/Mattel where he created globally successful products across all categories from infant through seven plus. He also holds multiple play and product patents. Ciganko’s strengths lay in creating story-driven, innovative toys, with global appeal and his deep relationships with licensors, inventor communities, technology partners and educational experts.

Roche added, “Over the years big changes have been disrupting and challenging the toy and entertainment industry. To succeed today it’s all about focusing on passionate audiences of specific IP. Mass isn’t really mass anymore. The changes in the audience, have freed us to think differently and our shared belief in innovation and exploration made Epic Story Media the perfect choice for our first partnership.”

To further strengthen the business, Huge! Play has assembled a disruptive talent pool and an advisory board of experts who share the passion to rethink and reinvent every aspect of story-driven play.

In addition to the Huge! Play launch, the team is also very excited to announce a new partnership with Epic Story Media. The long-term partnership will create and produce innovative, direct-to-consumer premium toys for key IP’s from Epic’s slate. Each IP will be mutually selected on a case-by-case basis and the toys will be created, produced, and distributed by Huge! Play.

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After the success of The Witcher, Netflix is now eyeing more gaming properties as potential source material for original content. As per  an earlier Deadline report, an adaptation of the zombie-horror game Resident Evil series has been in development at the streaming powerhouse. 

The Resident Evil franchise is currently grabbing eyeballs with new games like Resident Evil 3: Nemesis taking fans back to the roots of the iconic horror survival gaming franchise. New report suggests that production on the new Resident Evil series is reportedly to begin this summer, in June.

Though none of this has been officially confirmed, a couple of reports suggest that the series will have a first season consisting primarily of eight episodes. Shooting will be going on floors in April possibly in South Africa. Fans are still awaiting official confirmation, the series would be produced by Constantin Film and Netflix.

According to Redanian Intelligence, the Resident Evil Netflix show will consist of eight 60-minute episodes. This will be a departure from the feature-length films based on the franchise we’ve seen before, the brainchild of German film studio Constantin Films and Paul W. S. Anderson, who served as writer, director, and producer over the course of the six-film series.

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To commemorate  the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev ji, the ministry of culture and IGNCA commissioned an immersive show to be screened at Sultanpur Lodi. Delhi-based Charuvi Design Labs created the one of its kind show, which offered an incredible experience for the viewers.

This was curated by IGNCA and was inaugurated in the presence of Government of India minister of food processing industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal and minister of State ministry of railways Sh Suresh Channabasappa Angadi.

The film, directed by Charuvi Design Labs founder and director Charuvi Agrawal showcases the life and teachings of Guru Nanak Dev ji in a sophisticated and delicate manner, and encapsulates scenes from his early life, travels (Udasis) and life teachings at Kartarpur.

“I was thrilled and a tad intimidated at the same time on receiving this interesting project.The idea of directing a film to commemorate Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary was very exciting but I knew it would be a very different kind of project. There was a bit of trepidation on how to approach the making of the film with the restrictions that would come from the Sikh faith on animating the Guru.But the challenges themselves turned out to be a blessing,” mentioned Agrawal.

The 13-minute animated film, which is created for a panoramic viewing was made in a short span of three weeks, with a team of artists including Aniruddh Kapruwan, Anush Singh, Chaman Kumar, Gaurav Gohsain, Furbu, Kanika Thakur, Maanya Dhar, Naveen Kumar, Pankaj Swani, Pranav Mahendra, Shubham Bairagi, Subham Sharma and Surender Singh. Design Habit’s Amardeep Behl worked as the principle designer for the animated film, with line producer Supreet Singh; production manager Snigdha Bhardwaj and technical director Vikram Kumar Verma.

Keeping in mind the short time-span in hand, the team started off by ensuring a well-planned and organised schedule from day one. “With absolute creative control over the content, keeping intact the sensitivity in mind, we made decisions faster and kept progressing ahead,”  said Agrawal.

The team at CDL received substantial material from the experts for the research of the film.  A rich library in connection to the key events in the life of GuruNanak Dev ji was provided to the team, to keep the representation of various scenes as close as possible.

The pre-production played a very crucial role in setting the base panels and overall compositions for the film. The team simultaneously experimented with few visual styles and cracked the same in 3D in order to give a distant look and feel to the film. For speeding the rendering process, the creative team embraced Unreal Engine in their production pipeline.

The film was showcased to a repeat audience of 250 in an interval of 20 mins and is appreciated all over, with praising motivation from minister of tourism Prahlad Singh Patel.

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