|
|
|
|
IN PRODUCTION |
|
| PAGE ONE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All cast & character images: © 2003 Fathom Studios and Electric Eye Entertainment Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
|
In this month's column, Martin Goodman delves into the making of Delgo as the latest indie triumph with Marc Adler, CEO of Atlanta-based Fathom Studios, and Warren Grubb, Fathom's head animation director.....
UPDATED DECEMBER 4, 2008 by Martin Goodman (Dr. Toon) - Animation World Magazine On Dec. 12, the long-gestating animated film Delgo will begin playing in theaters across the country. This film represents a major victory for independent animation filmmakers: it was conceived, written, financed, animated and distributed totally through the efforts of Fathom Studios. Located in Atlanta, far from the major studios of Hollywood, Fathom also broke ground by allowing the public to visit the Delgo website and view the raw, unpolished, day-to-day process of creating the CG film. Fans were able to see artwork, test scenes and refinements in realtime as the animators worked on them through the courtesy of Fathom's "Digital Dailies."Delgo boasts an impressive voice cast that includes Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Burt Reynolds, Michael Clarke Duncan, Lou Gossett Jr., Eric Idle, Malcolm McDowell, Chris Kattan, Kelly Ripa, Val Kilmer, Sally Kellerman and, in her final film role, Anne Bancroft. As Delgo neared release, Animation World Magazine talked with Marc Adler, Fathom's CEO (and Sublime Patron of Dreams), and Warren Grubb, Fathom's talented head animation director (Master Artisan of Kinematic Wonders). Dr. Toon (DT): Delgo now has a best feature award at Anima Mundi as well as being in the running for a Best Animated feature nomination at the Oscars. Do you think that this will finally change the minds of reluctant distributors as far as independently produced animated films are concerned? Marc Adler (MA): Hollywood is known for being creative, but they still have a formula for creating animation. The formula, as most of us know, is talking animals, comedy, a known story, and those animals have to be big-eyed furry creatures that are cute and merchandisable. That's about 90% of the films from the big studios. With our feature we didn't necessarily match that formula, and it's really my hope that other animated films don't, either. Will Delgo change the mind of reluctant distributors? I hope it does. Once there are enough films that prove that you can do something out of the norm and make it commercially successful with wide appeal, it will change everyone's minds. |
|
DT: Let's talk about independent filmmaking. I read a quote by you, Marc, stating that "Independent filmmaking offers freedom to break molds and disregard orthodoxy that places limits on creativity." How was this most true during the making of Delgo? MA: I always thought that independent film meant doing something different, unique and creative. However, that also makes a project more difficult to distribute. We didn't just want to make a film, and then just hand it off to a distributor and say, "Oh, please do a great job!" and then walk away. But that's where the journey for many independent filmmakers ends. Blood, sweat and tears go into your project, but, in the end, if you're lucky to sell your movie at a film festival, it's picked up by a distributor, and then it's all up to them to find your audience and market your film. Making an independent animated film in the U.S. -- I know there are some that were shipped overseas to be done, but this may be the first independent animation production in the U.S. and that's independently distributed theatrically on any kind of scale. |
 |
|
Delgo represents a major victory for independent animation filmmakers: it was conceived, written, financed, animated and distributed totally through Atlanta's Fathom Studios. |
| When you have a studio that you're attaching your movie to from the beginning, then it's not an independent production. If you get involved with a studio after the movie is made, what does that studio care about a film that they didn't put any money into? If they have a $150 million tentpole film four weeks away, which project are they going to devote their best resources to? They're going to get a fee off your success, but would they put their money in? Even if we went with a studio instead of a direct distribution deal, the studio has its own model, its own formulas, and its own partners. Those might not be the best partners for your particular project. |
 |
In our case, we have an animated fantasy film that's an action-adventure. It's already out of the box in terms of what people might be used to, so if the studio's PR department or the PR firm they hire, or their media-buying firm, or any number of these disparate groups they have internally or outsource to don't appreciate or understand the film or the audience that it will attract -- they aren't the best people to work with. That wasn't something we were ready for. We wanted to not only create a project independently, we wanted to take the "biz" part of the showbiz and market and release this film on our own. We weren't really driving toward a date; we were driving toward a product. We tested the script and the characters, and we wanted to go at a pace that would let us deliver the quality of product that we would want representing our studio. |
| Fathom broke ground by allowing the public to visit the its website and view "Digital Dailies," which gave fans access to the raw, unpolished, day-to-day process of creating the CGI film. |
|
DT:
That's a great deal of dedication to your
plan. You've got a great film, an outstanding voice cast, half a million
visitors to your site a month, any number of top-flight animators, but
you still waited years in order to do what was right for you and
Delgo.
MA: We did have a major studio deal at one time. We had the terms sheet and were working on the contract, and the head of the studio resigned. In the process of that, we learned all those things that I just described to you. So, we decided to go and find our own team. We talked with different consultants, we used a wonderful media-buying company that does all the TV buys for the toy market. They understood the age 8-12 group that is the true target for this movie. So there were a lot of things we garnered from our experiences with the major studio, including how to go out and find the partners that we felt were the best fit. We were able to cherry-pick partners that were experts in their respective fields. We learned that it's not just about getting distribution; it's really about getting the best distribution possible. Getting a big, famous logo in front of the movie doesn't necessarily mean getting an audience in front of the film. It may make you feel good and it might be good for press, but it's not necessarily the best thing for the film. We enjoy the process of show business, and that's not only the "show," but also the "biz." We wanted to be fully exposed to both aspects of it. DT: Warren, let's talk about how the film was created. You've been described as the "digital handyman" on Delgo. What were some of the challenges you had to overcome in animating this unusual film? What were your prime achievements? Warren Grubb (WG): The main challenge was the scope of it. We wanted to do something on a very large scale with an epic feel; the story we had was about an entire world. That meant creating a large number of characters and having them perform at the level needed for a feature film. I think my proudest achievement was leading a team in creating and rigging a bunch of characters in such a way that we could have a lot of variations without spending the time that we might have using different processes. Due to our technology, we were able to do not just a few major characters but a dozen of them, along with dozens of secondary and tertiary characters based on those characters. We set up a system where you could make the main characters pretty quickly and then build off of those other characters just as quickly. |
|
DT: Tell me about your collaboration with art director Mark Jackson in creating an entirely novel universe and zoology. WG: That was a lot of fun for two reasons. Not only was there the fact that we had this unfettered freedom to go and take things that you normally see around the world but also take things from our fantasy experiences and things that we read while growing up. Looking at it from a technical standpoint, you could design anything you wanted, but at the same time we had to decide what would be believable in this world. Some of the ideas didn't work. We had an idea for certain characters that sounded really cool when we described them and Mark designed them. They had an internal gas system that made them lighter than air, but when we animated them and showed them to people, they couldn't grasp it, because they expected to see things behave the way they do on Earth. It wasn't believable and it just looked wrong. Sometimes you design things like that in your mind that look very cool, but when someone comes into the theater, it just doesn't translate. So, designing a whole world was a real challenge. None of the creatures or the plants could look like anything you'd find on Earth. |
 |
| The main challenge was producing the scope of Delgo. The filmmakers wanted a very large scale with an epic feel which meant creating a large number of characters and having them perform at the level needed for a feature film. |
|
We couldn't even use most of the off-the-shelf systems at the time in creating the background assets because they were based on Earthly vegetation. You'd be surprised at how much there is to make. All the things you would take for granted day-to-day in Delgo's world have to be designed from scratch. |
 |
DT: Your co-director, Jason Maurer, said, "The best special effects are the ones you never see," because it's really the story that carries a film. How well do think the special effects complimented the story in Delgo? WG: Since the whole feature is animated, that gave us the freedom to do things without a second thought that you couldn't do in live action -- at least without changing the whole method of production. Whether characters are walking down the street or flying, it's the same technology. Our entire feature is driven by flying creatures and magic. The story and the technology come together so well that you don't even think about them as special effects anymore. When somebody looks at it, they won't think, "Oh, it's really cool they made this character fly," they'll say they either hate or love this character that's flying. The fact that we have all these fantasy things at our fingertips to put in there makes the feature more of an adventure. |
| Delgo's world was designed from scratch because none of the creatures or plants could look like anything from Earth. Animators couldn't use off-the-shelf systems for the background assets because they were based on Earthly vegetation. |
|
MA: I think Delgo is unique on many levels. Just with our color palette alone, we're really taking it to extremes. Kids are used to these bright pastels with no use of pure black shadows, which is more of what video games do. It's not something you do in a kid's film, because it makes it look "older" or "edgier." We don't shy away from that. If you look at our film, the saturation and contrast are so much more vibrant, you'll see how rich it is and how different it feels. That comes from the color palette and the use of heavy, rich textures, the medium that we chose for this epic world. DT: How many full-time employees finally worked on Delgo? MA: I'd say we had about 300 over the course of the project. DT: Back when you were initially recruiting for animators, Animation World Network was able to steer some people to you, isn't that right? MA: We actually got a lot of people through AWN. You have a great job board. There are only so many "watering holes" for people of any caliber to go and get information, and you're among the top of the list, so with a couple of posts -- and then those people know other people too -- we got some incredible talent. And it's not just any particular geographic territory; we're willing to take people from all over the world if they qualify, and that's what AWN can do through the web. Not only that, you've been a great resource for information, because we learn things from other users. Sometimes someone on our crew has posed a question only to have it answered by someone on your job boards. It's an incredible site. |
|
DT: Marc, talk
about how the novel concept of having the Digital Dailies -- which let
anyone and everyone watch the development of Delgo online while it was
still a work-in-progress --came about. MA: We had an internally designed program called Storyline, an incredible online tool that a bunch of us collaborated on developing in order to serve our specific needs in our pipeline management. We have a sister company, Macquarium Intelligent Communications, which is involved in web development. With their aid, we created an online tool so that anyone in the office could collaborate with others both in and outside our office. If you're an animator, you have access to the animation section that's security-based. The directors have different access than the lighters, and so on. Each component of the software allows you to see, in a filmstrip format, every shot in the film relative to the shots before and after it within the sequence along with notes from the directors, time-of-day information, what's happening in the scene, what the motivation is for the characters -- anything and everything is on this particular forum, including file nomenclature and everything else that would go into what we call the "bible." DT: That was important because so many of your employees were on flextime production schedules. |
 |
| Delgo's color palette gives the film a unique look. The saturation and contrast are more vibrant and rich that other animation geared to kids. |
|
MA: Correct. They could have been in another country or anywhere with different hours. We didn't just pick people up that were outside of the country or even the city. They actually had to come and work on-site for at least three months first, meet the staff and their manager, become familiar with the system, and work together in order to really understand what they were best at and what we could assign them to. DT: Who made the decision to let the public see the Digital Dailies? |
 |
MA: I did… with much consternation. Nothing like the Digital
Dailies had ever been done before. We had a bunch of folks that would
come into town and they would want to see what we were doing. When we
showed them the Storyline system, everyone was so impressed. Some folks
even asked if they could purchase the software! But Storyline was
written for our particular needs and workflow, and we're not really
software developers, we're animators and filmmakers. We thought that
since everyone was so intrigued, what if we took a component of
Storyline and put it online for the world to see. That decision was a
frustrating one because what you're doing is posting work-in-progress,
not necessarily what you want the public to see. But there it is, in
real-time. Some people didn't want their names associated with work that
wasn't polished, or they didn't want their first revision of something
seen, and this led to a lot of discussion about whether we were going to
do it at all. When we went with the decision, it was
with great fanfare; during production we were getting up to a
half-million visitors a month. Students, other animators, fantasy buffs,
you name it, would come to the site and explore it -- see the real
process of making a movie, not the "behind-the- |
| Fathom's designed program Storyline was so impressive that it eventually led to posting dailies online for all to see. The results were positive: they got a half-million visitors a month and viewers loved seeing the real filmmaking process. |
|
DT: I've seen early interviews in Jason Maurer and you refer to characters with different names. When in production were the story and characters finally set? MA: Well, much of the story was already set, but when we went to get trademarks, some of the names were unavailable. Therefore, Princess Zandra became Princess Kyla, King Fahn became King Zahn -- and Surella became Sedessa. Surella was actually confused in a focus group with Cruella DeVille, so we changed it for that reason. Between legal issues and focus groups, you wind up getting something different. In other cases, you end up putting names in the script and hope they stick, but they don't. Originally our two races were called the Lockni and the Nohri, but they sounded too similar, so we added an "n" to Nohrin. We also tried to have every main character's name star with a different letter, each character have a different color palette, so if you saw an orange shirt in the distance you knew it was Filo, for instance. If you saw red armor, it was Raius. Blue armor was Bogardus. We thought through all of these little issues as we tested out things to see what was memorable. We are very proud of what we've done, and it's been many years in the making. No matter how Delgo turns out theatrically, we've accomplished our goals. |
|
Story:
© 2008 Animation
World Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Images: © 2008 Fathom Studios. All Rights Reserved. |
|
UPDATED OCTOBER 24, 2008 From Daily Variety Fathom drawn toanimated "Delgo" by Sam Thielman Nobody recommends that you start your movie career by producing your own $40 million CGI kids' picture. But try telling that to Atlanta-based 36-year old entrepreneur Marc Adler, who decided to do just that with his first feature, "Delgo." "Delgo" is a sci-fi tale featuring a kidnapped princess, a young man (well, humanoid alien) trying to save his people, and lots of airborne swashbuckling -- Adler speaks admiringly of animator Don Bluth, and his cult kidpic "Titan A.E." in particular. In the voice cast, there's a grab-bag of talent from Anne Bancroft (her last movie) to Eric Idle to Chris Kattan to JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT. Adler, the founder of Fathom Studios, has overseen every aspect of the feature toon through seven years of production on "Delgo," which he produced and co-wrote, along with co-directing the pic with Jason Maurer. Adler tried to sell "Delgo" to an adventurous distributor, but nobody wanted to shoulder the burden of an independent kidpic of that scope. So he's releasing the film himself through distrib-for-hire Freestyle Releasing, which has promised approximately 2,000 screens -- 1,500 in the U.S., and 500 in Canada. It's a serious gamble, to put it mildly. Freestyle has the pic trailering after "Igor," Disney's hit "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" and "City of Ember," and has set the opening for Dec. 12. That's more than two weeks after its nearest kidpic competish, "Bolt," right in the new Harry Potter-free zone. In short, he's trying to do the work of an entire studio all by himself. Adler started production on "Delgo" in 2001. After seeing the pic through numerous rewrites based on feedback from freelancing studio readers, he set up shop in Atlanta and hired concept artists and animators from around the world -- here a designer from Ferarri, there a matte painter from WETA or Industrial Light and Magic -- while funding Fathom through his consortium of Houston-based tech businesses. Since several employees were telecommuting from around the world, Adler had his crew post the dailies onto the Delgo's public website, allowing the animators to work on any part of the film at any time. This had two advantages: production was decentralized, and fans could view snippets of the movie as it evolved. The second part worked a little better than intended: Adler says he started losing employees to competing animation studios once the execs got a load of the work they'd been producing (on the site, Adler replaced his workers' titles with joke credits, and the poachers went away). Now, like the geeky college kid who builds his own computers, Adler has put together a raft of partners for everything from media buying, poster design and trailers to DVD distribution. It's an expensive experiment, but if it works, Adler will have set an impressive precedent for do-it-yourself filmmaking. If it doesn't, he'll at least have everyone's attention. "I have a terms sheet for a three-picture deal on my desk,"' he says (he won't say from which studio). "And I can't decide what to do with it." Should he wait until he can leverage box office from "Delgo," or should he take the money and run in case it's a flop? The time to make that decision is coming up fast and, unlike the other parts of the process, Adler can't hire any experts to guide him through the process -- on this one, he's all by himself. Story: © 2008 Reed Business Information - a Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Fathom
Studios presents
an Electric Eye Entertainment Production
a Farefelian film
| Directed by Marc F. Adler & Jason Mauer Story by Director
of Photography |
Screenplay by Scott Biear Patrick Cowan Carl Dream Jennifer A. Jones Jason Mauer Produced by |
Animation Director Warren Grubb Associate
Producer Made
by |
| PAGE ONE |
|
|
|
|
Images: Copyright Control, Dennis Maxim Inc., Electric Eye Entertainment Corporation, Fathom Studios, and Macquarium Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Image & Name: ™ ® & © Jennifer Love Hewitt, et al and Love Songs Inc. All Rights Reserved.
