Intel Collaborating with Facebook Users for Animated Short

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Intel Collaborating with Facebook Users for Animated Short

Written by Arya Ponto

Friday, 15 August 2008

Intel Corp. is launching a new Facebook app this Fall, as part of their sponsored Mass Animation Project, that would allow aspiring and professional animators from all over the globe to collaborate on a single animated short.

The actual process is a bit hazy to explain for now, but here's how it is from what I understand:

Yair Landau, former vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and president of Sony Pictures Digital, is producing and directing the short. He is currently developing the story.
Participating animators that has the Facebook app will then be able to download an evalutation version of the Maya 3-D software to create the footage.
All participants (and maybe onlookers) can then use Facebook to vote for the best footage to use.
Reel FX Entertainment animation studio, who've worked on films like Charlotte's Web and TMNT, as well as a bunch of video game cutscenes and trailers, will use proprietary tools to convert selected videos to final-quality animation frames.
There's a chance that the final product will hit theaters, perhaps as an intro to some feature-length animated movie.

Landau referred to the project as a beta test. "If we manage to tell a good story and introduce compelling characters through this, let's see if we can do, for instance, a feature-length project," he said. "If it is also a good user experience, then I think we will do a bunch of things this way."

We're starting to see more and more of these interactive-collaborative filmmaking projects, and I think it's really cool. I talked about Joe Carnahan's OpenCut project a while back. As much as I like to acknowledge the auteur theory, film is still a collaborative medium (especially so in the animation field), and this is just taking that and bringing it into our global-connecting 21st century.