Hasta La Motion!

Been to so many film screenings recently, mainly big, big Hollywood films. This para James Cameron wrote for Masters of FX foreword always sticks in my mind.

When paranormal entities rampage the New York City, the team of four ladies, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon get into action to put a stop to the turmoil. This was the basic story of the new Ghostbusters movie.

While the comic-entertainment movie managed to earn quite humble reviews from critics and viewers alike, it seems the game inspired by the feature, which was developed in only eight months, did not hit the right spot with the consumers.

As reported by Kotaku, just three days after the game’s release, FireForge Games, the developers of the movie-based game filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Also, the company is involved in at least two lawsuits before its closing. The website of the company now leads to 403 error which means the denial of access.

FireForge had initiated two MOBA-like projects and halted them since the studio was established in 2011. One code-named Zeus in collaboration with the famed PC hardware company Razer and another code-named Atlas, which was funded by the Chinese digital giant Tencent, who happens to be the distributor for League of Legends in China. According to Kotaku, the company owes a hefty amount of around $11.3 million to Tencent.

There is a law suit against the company by Singapore-based Min Production which is owned by Razer, CEO, Min-Liang Tan, as he alleges that the funding provided to FireForge by Razer was being used in Tencent’s joint project, Atlas. However, the studio says that they only began working on Atlas after the payment for Zeus was ceased. The studio also faced a lawsuit against them in 2015 by Richard Land who accused them of breaching a $3.7 million deal regarding the licensing of 38 Studios’ social media platform, Helios.

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Indian digital cinema distribution network and in-cinema advertising platform, UFO Moviez (UFO) reported a 9.5 per cent year-over-year (y-o-y) growth in advertising revenue for the quarter ended 30 June 2016 (Q1-17, current quarter). The company reported advertising revenue of Rs 39.7 crore in Q1-17 as compared to Rs 36.4 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year (Q1-16). Average advertisement minutes sold per show per screen increased to 3.97 (Q1-16 – 3.81) minutes during Q1-17.

Theatrical and In-Cinema advertisement (consolidated excluding new businesses) revenues grew by 3.2 per cent y-o-y to Rs 133.2 crore (Q1-16 – Rs 129 crore). Consolidated revenues improved by 3.1 per cent y-o-y in Q1-17 to Rs 134.6 crore (Q1-16 – Rs 130.6 crore).

Let us look at the other numbers reported by UFO Moviez

Total Expense in Q1-17 increased 9.1 per cent y-o-y to Rs 98.2 crore from Rs 90.0 crore in Q1-16. Ad revenue share (expense) in Q1-17 increased 5.4 per cent y-o-y to Rs 12.08 crore from Rs 11.47 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year. Visual Print sharing expense in Q1-17 increased 19.8 per cent y-o-y to Rs 19.44 crore from Rs 16.23 crore in Q1-16.

The company’s expense towards purchase of digital cinema equipment and lamps in the current quarter declined 13.7 per cent y-o-y to Rs 13.77 crore as compared to Rs 15.96 crore in Q1-16.

EBIDTA in the current quarter declined 10.3 per cent y-o-y to Rs 36.4 crore from Rs 40.6 crore in Q1-16. Profit after tax (PAT) in Q1-17 declined 30.1 per cent y-o-y to Rs 9 crore from Rs 12.8 crore in the corresponding year ago quarter. PAT, profit from associates and minority interest in Q1-17 declined 25.9 per cent y-o-y to Rs 9.8 crore from Rs 13.3 crore in Q1-16.

Company speak

“In the first quarter of fiscal 2017, UFO’s consolidated revenues stood at Rs 1,346 million. Advertisement revenues grew by 9.5 per cent over the higher base of last year, and our annual guidance of 30 per cent growth remains unchanged,” said UFO Moviez, joint managing director, Kapil Agarwal. “Profitability was negatively impacted due to planned losses in Caravan Talkies. Efforts to improve Caravan revenues have further intensified, which we believe should lead to cash breakeven in H2FY17.”

“We continue to make progress towards achieving our strategic objectives,” said UFO Movies, founder and managing director, Sanjay Gaikwad. “Our hyperlocal advertising initiative – UFO Framez has been well received by direct sales associates and advertisers and has started yielding results. To sustain the current direction, we continue to appoint dynamic and self-motivated direct sales associates across our advertisement network. Recently, we also announced the merger between UFO and its wholly owned subsidiaries, which on completion would result in significant synergies, cost saving and operating efficiencies.”

Note: The unit of currency in this report is the Indian rupee – Rs (also conventionally represented by INR). The Indian numbering system or the Vedic numbering system has been used to denote money values. The basic conversion to the international norm would be:

(a) 100,00,000 = 100 lakh = 10,000,000 = 10 million = 1 crore.

(b) 10,000 lakh = 100 crore = 1 arab = 1 billion.

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A student project short film ‘The Squonk’ which is the brainchild of Jannis Funk (co-writer and producer) and Mike Bothe (co-writer and director), is based on a 19th century American folktale about the eponymous woodland monster. The project has turned into a passion for Berlin-based Funk who has gone out to recruit over 300 remote visual effects artists since principal photography in 2012 to donate their time and expertise to the film. And throughout the whole process, from initial planning through production tracking and review, Shotgun has played a key role.

‘The Squonk’ began in 2011 as Funk’s thesis project at Film University Babelsberg. Funk adopted Shotgun during the early planning stages, using it as a database to plan each shot and associated tasks. The entire film was storyboarded, previsualised, and loaded into Shotgun before principal photography even began. VFX supervisor Timor Kardum of OMSTUDIOS also used Shotgun to note how long each task would take and how difficult it would be, which helped Funk during the artist recruiting process as he was able to give potential artists an accurate idea of the tasks, and assign tasks that they would realistically be able to fulfill.

Funk shared, “We’ve been lucky enough to get volunteers from Framestore, Double Negative, Digital Domain, Scanline, Weta; lots of people who already work in these top facilities pulling long days and then they’re nice enough to go home and work on ‘The Squonk.’ Shotgun has been the backbone for our project – it has made it possible to realise a production at this scale and with this environment of international artists working remotely.”

Principal photography began in 2012 and included a 150 square foot life size set against a blue screen. Following the shoot, the crew constructed various miniature sets, and 900 individual elements – mostly miniature trees – to use as the basis for background replacements. Each tree was photographed at different angles and in different lighting situations, then added to a “tree library” in Shotgun. Artists could then easily sort by lighting situation and choose which element would work best on a shot-by-shot basis.

“When you work remotely and you can’t get together with your team and look at the same screen and point at what’s in front of you, the Shotgun Review system is really helpful to immediately make notes right in the browser,” explained Funk. “Our director of photography lives in Switzerland now, our director is in Hawaii, Timor and I are in Berlin, and we can all comment on the same version as soon as it’s uploaded. I don’t know how that would be possible without Shotgun.”

Shotgun is also the center of Funk’s review process. The project’s VFX phase is now 89 per cent complete, and the film is on track to be completed this year. With 220 total shots, 153 of those VFX shots, an efficient review process for the dispersed team is the key to success.

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Pantosaurus, the latest instalment of the NSPCC’s ‘Pants’ campaign, is a two-minute short designed to encourage parents to talk to their children about sexual abuse. Created by Aardman, the film enlists the help of animated dinosaurs to explain to children how to stay safe from abuse. Aimed at four to eight-year-olds, Adelphoi Music wrote lyrics and music for Pantosaurus, who delivers his message through song. The NSPCC Pantosaurus campaign, hosted online at nspcc.org.uk, includes conversation resources for parents, children, foster carers and teachers. Children are able to take a short quiz engaging with the content of the NSPCC Pantosaurus video. The PANTS campaign, launched three years ago, explores the Underwear Rule: “Privates are private. Always remember your body belongs to you. No means no. Talk about secrets that upset you. Speak up, someone can help.”

Music for the NSPCC Pantosaurus commercial was written by one of Adelphoi’s in-house composing team, Ashley Bates, who produced, recorded and sang the song with his children at Adelphoi’s studios. The campaign tackles a potentially dark and difficult subject for a target audience that is younger than NSPCC’s traditional market. Bates explains: “Ultimately, the key goal was to make it fun, despite the importance of the message. The animation and song itself are intended to be inviting as well as a starting point for adults, parents and guardians to communicate with their children about the subject, so the focus wasn’t to convey the entire message, rather to draw in audiences and lead to them reading more about the guidelines on the NSPCC website. It isn’t an easy subject to address because it might be opening doors to something the children have never considered and they might be too young to be exposed to that concern, but it’s also important to address these in the interests of keeping them safe.”

Heather Wright, executive producer at Aardman, creators of Pantosaurus and much-loved characters like Morph, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, comments: “Humour, animation and music are a great way of making it less awkward for parents and young children to talk about this very difficult subject. The song has definite ‘earworm’ potential and I’m sure children will find it funny and memorable which will in turn give them the language they need to use to protect themselves.”

Pantosaurus will be appearing in cinemas across the UK with OMD UK striking a deal with AOL to distribute the video, targeting parents on premium platforms.

NSPCC Pantosaurus Credits

The NSPCC Pantosaurus campaign was developed at Aardman by director/designer and Flash animator Lucy Izzard, producer Jason Fletcher-Bartholomew, production manager Danny Gallagher, storyboard artist/animatic Rob Richards, designer Magda Osinska, Flash animators Charlie Miller and Andrew Fossey, compositors Jon Biggins and Bram Ttwheam. Editor was Dan Hembery.

Music was produced at Adelphoi by composer Ashley Bates and producer Max De Lucia.