Shanghai Hippo Animation Design and Australia’s Vue Group are expanding their 3D animation co-venture.
Last December the two entities unveiled plans to co-produce three films with aggregate budgets of more than $57 million.
This week Shanghai Hippo Animation Design CEO Kerr Xu and Vue Group MD Alan Lindsay told IF they will collaborate on four to five films a year. They say they are able to produce 3D animation much faster and far more cheaply than the US studios.
“We don’t need 20 executive producers. We do the character design in- house and I direct, produce and write," Kerr tells IF on a visit to Vue’s VFX facility in Bunbury WA. “We save an awful lot of money.”
The first film from the co-venture, Farm House II – Perfect Friends, will open in 4,500 cinemas in China on October 1. Kerr estimates there will be 15,000 sessions a day for the sequel to Farm House 81, which sees Cluck Norris ruling the roost as a soldier with unique superpowers.
Enemy spy Annie infiltrates Farm House 81 to learn the secret of Cluck's power and uses this knowledge to steal the moon's energy and to morph into the monster Anka, who is intent on destroying Farm House 81.
Kung Fu Style, a comedy-adventure which follows Kung Fu kid Dodo Lee, who dreams of being a star at Oscar Lei’s movie studio but is stuck as a puppeteer in his father’s show, will be launched in January during Chinese New Year, a peak cinemagoing period.
When Dodo encounters superstar Kitty Mo, dreams and reality clash and the pair find themselves in a fight between good and evil orchestrated by the power-crazed Oscar.
The Vue Group handled the VFX sequences for both films and is recruiting the voice casts for the English-language versions.
Kerr aims to conclude worldwide distribution deals for Perfect Friends at the American Film Market in November and says he is weighing offers from US studio.
The next production is The Water Planet, the story of aliens who steal the Earth’s water and a family’s attempts to retrieve it; Kerr says that will be shot in 3D and 4D, the latter involving simulated physical effects which can include rain, wind, strobe lights, and vibration synchronised with the film.
That will be followed by The Galactic Storm, an outer space adventure based on a popular Chinese novel whose English title is The Skeleton Fairy. Kerr likens the narrative to a cross between Star Wars and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
Those two projects will cost almost twice as much as the first three, Kerr says, financed partly by the Western Australia/China Film Fund he set up.