At Imagi

The morning hours found me traipsing through Imagi's Galleria offices in Sherman Oaks. Work on Astroboy (the studio's front-burner project) continues apace. A staffer said:

"Imagi is doing something I think every c.g. studio should do. We're taking character models, and only working with them on paper for maybe a week. Then we get those early, rougher models into the computers and do all the rest of the modeling work there. It really helps getting them into 3-D mode earlier, because that's the world they're going to exist in.

"I only wish Disney had done c.g. modeling this way when I was there. They would spend months rendering with pencil and paper, and we'd only get models into the 3-D world way later. I think the method Imagi is using works like gangbusters ..."

On the Gatchaman front, board artists are visualizing a fresher script, and working with newer directors. I had lunch with an Imagi artist who told me the directors' names, but the information entered my ear lobes and crossed the void between them to exit quickly (which is a rococo way of saying: "I like don't remember their freaking names ..."). The word I got over my steaming plate of chicken and broccoli was

"These guys are competent and good. They'll pull the picture together in ways the earlier directors couldn't."

I'm informed that a number of Yank artists have gone to the Hong Kong Mother Studio to work with the locals on the Imagi feature now in the production pipeline. (It isn't just foreigners coming to the U.S. to work. We also outsource talent to countries across the sea. As always, animation is a global enterprise).