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Monday, February 3, 2014

Polar bears instead of dragons at Super Bowl XLVI Siege up for VES Award

Just two more days to the biggest sports television event of the year in the US: The 46th NFL Super Bowl will be played this Sunday, the Championship game of the American National Football League. While most are anxiously awaiting this years already classic rematch between Tom Bradys New England Patriots and Eli Mannings New York giants at the Indiana Colts Lucas Oil Stadium, the final match of the season is also known to have the most expensive, and brilliantly created ad campaigns.

Okay, so normally I would agree that most commercials out there are just scrambling your brain, but there are certainly a few gems that can make your jaw drop and the Super Bowl has made a tradition of it to show some pretty impressing stuff. The huge amount of viewers (100.000.000 world wide) and the extremely high costs of air time during the match, makes the Super Bowl the perfect showcase for exclusive and expensive commercials. The average cost for a 30-second spot this year was $3.5 million to $4 million Dollars. Remember last year, Coca Cola had the brilliantly CG animated Siege, directed by FX&Mat and created by the multi Oscar nominated and winning studio Framestore.

Above and below: 3D models for the dragon from Siege. Framestore won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the BAFTA in 2008 for their work on The Golden Compass and was nominated in 2007 for Superman Returns, in 2009 for The Dark Knight and in 2010 for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.

The London based CG house also worked on every Potter movie since the first one came out and has worked elaborately on the final one, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (the last of the eight movie franchise and the second based based on J.K. Rowlings seventh book) which became the third highest grossing film ever (worldwide a total of $1,328,111,219 Billion dollars). Framestore, along with Moving Pictures Company and Double Negative have collectively worked on the VFX for Hallows 2. Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler and John Richardson are nominated for their work and are up for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects this year, but will have to compete with the extremely talented creative team behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes (also nominated are Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Hugo and Real Steel).

above and below: designs and 3D models for Balfour the main character in Coca Colas Siege and the Orc general and his beast.

Siege is nominated for the 10th annual VES Awards, the awards for outstanding visual effects given by the Visual Effects Society. Framestore is among the nominees in the category Oustanding Visual Effects in an Animated Commercial or Video Game Trailer.The ceremony takes place February 7th. The VES is the entertainment industrys only non-profit honorary society dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences and applications of visual effects. It represents the full breadth of visual effects practitioners in all areas of entertainment from film, television and commercial to music videos and games. It currently has 2300 members in 26 countries.

This week Coca Cola announced it would be trading the dragons for their regular Polar bear characters, as they would be part of a much larger campaign (theyre having their own party at CokePolarBowl.com where you can watch the game live and comment on it through facebook, etc). So unfortunately no sequel to Siege. If youve never been able to watch this brilliantly animated commercial, check it out below, (you can toggle 1080p HD) Ive added the polar bears vid behind it (sure, theyre cool too!). You can also head over to Pixologic who have the video up on their site, followed by some behind-the-scenes footage and an interview with the creators. If you want to read what Framestores visual effects supervisor Diarmid Harrison-Murray had to say about it, you can also read his interview at FXGuide. Anyway, gonna have fun watching the game Sunday, so Cheers guys!

Cómic The Walking Dead 103

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Mob of the Haunted Mansion my Disney story reprinted

As of this week you can find one of my Comic stories for Disney collected in the Summer Holiday Special, published by Sanoma and for sale at all the HEMA stores!

Well, its official: its summer alright! And to celebrate it, all the major Comic publishers here come out with their own Summer Holiday Special! Sanoma had already recently published their usual Disney books: The regular Donald Duck Summer Holiday 2011 comic book special (which has appeared every year since 1978) andthe Beagle Boys Summer Holiday 2011 comic book. Theyre filled with comic reprints, games and trivia and the usual coloring page, which should keep your kids busy, while youre trying get your family to your place of destination alive, at least, thats the idea!

Reprint.

The HEMA concern, a nationwide chain of department stores, which has also branched out in Germany and Belgium, teamed up with the folks at Sanoma Media to create their own line of Summer Holiday Books this year. They all have the same graphic design on the cover, sharing the title Op vakantie met (On holiday with) and focus on different characters like Nijntje, Barbapapa, Nickelodeon, Hello Kitty and of course: Donald Duck !

Its nice to see the guys at Disney had chosen one of my stories for the Donald Duck version. Gespuis in t spookhuis, ( Mob of the Haunted Mansion) is a good lenghty thriller with some nice plot twists and enough laughs to cheer it all up. I can understand they wanted to reprint it again, as it keeps you to your seat long enough and definitely intices a re-read.

Originally it was 15 pages longer even, and I got it back the first time around from Tom Roep (editor in chief) saying it was way too long! (I primarely used to read the Barks library books and they all have these huge stories in them, so I guess I modeled it after that).

Above: two pages from Mob of the Mansion as it was first published in 2001. The Disney crew had designed their Weekly magazine around the story (the issue had black pages) with a contest winning you some cool prizes and games for your Nintendo handheld.

Hall of Fame.

Mob of the Haunted Mansion was one of the stories I did with Bas Heymans for the Donald Duck Weekly, its a 20 page story, first printed in May 2001 and it has definitely been picked up abroad, as it was translated in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Norway. In the Netherlands, the story even made the cover of Donald Ducks Funniest Adventures #4 and it also served for the cover of issue 32 of Disneys Hall of Fame comic book series in Norway.

One of my other stories done for Disney, Donald Duck: Temporarily Millionaire (also with Bas Heymans) was published in April this year in Aku Ankka Ekstra issue 156 in Finland. (the monthly Donald Duck Extra magazine). Below: various covers from around the world, which published the ghost story in their respective comic magazines. The Dutch cover is the last one on the right.

The other three stories in Hemas Donald Duck Summer Comic Book Special are The Caravan Race by Ben Verhagen and Jan Kruse, Timber by Paul Halas with Flor Collins and Vicar and The Egyptian Princes Secret by Marco Rota. The books are for sale now in all the HEMA stores and cost € 4,00 Euros each.

HEMA has 445 department stores in The Netherlands, 62 in Belgium, 8 in Germany, 3 in Luxembourg and recently opened 4 stores in Paris, France!