Archived News

Global Post Production Powerhouse, Prime Focus Group, Expands Holdings to North America with Purchase of Hollywood and New York-based Post Logic Studios and Frantic Films’ VFX offices in Los Angeles, Winnipeg and Vancouver

Film Effects Veteran to Build Digital Mattes & Concepts Division; Company Heavily Recruiting Animators, Technical Directors and Effects Specialists to Fill Open Positions in Hollywood, Vancouver and Winnipeg

VFX Designer Kevin Tod Haug chats with Tara DiLullo Bennett about the escalating challenges of creating imaginative effects on Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium while juggling the work of 10 vendors.

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How a Team of VFX Wizards Brought Color Back to a Depleted Toy Store

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Looking for the perfect wedding gift for the graphics guru who has everything?  Consider a standard bundle of our Krakatoa particle rendering software.  

Brandon Pletsch of Radius Medical Animation (www.radiusmedicalanimation.com) did just that and his good friend Khye Kading can now render millions of particles before, during, and after the honeymoon.

Congratulations to Khye and his beautiful bride!

Frantic Films arrives at this year's MIPCOM with a clutch of new projects and determined to build upon the company's recent successes. The Winnipeg-based live action production company will introduce a number of new projects at MIPCOM, the world's largest television content market and forum, which runs October 8 to 12, in Cannes, France.

Frantic Films announces the release of a plugin patch for Deadline 2.7.29178. This patch adds support for support for Maya 2008 and includes a new plugin for Houdini's standalone Mantra renderer. Other minor features include:

• VIZ 2008 can now be selected from when submitting VIZ jobs from the monitor
• Memory options are now available when submitting After Effects jobs.
• Lightwave 9.3 jobs no longer fail due to stdout parsing
• XSI 6.5 jobs report progress correctly.

Winnipeg's Frantic Films has again been named one of 'Manitoba's Top 100 Companies' by Manitoba Business Magazine.

The annual survey of Manitoba movers and shakers rated the Winnipeg-based live action and visual effects company 89th in its July/August 2007 Special Issue.

Frantic Films moved up the list from 2006's  ranking of 95th on the strength of another great year of significant growth. Frantic remains the only film, television and commercial production company in the Top 100.

Earlier in the year, Manitoba Business Magazine rated Frantic Films 11th  on its annual 'Fastest 50' rankings of the 50 fastest growing companies in the province.

For more information on the Top 100 visit the Manitoba Business Magazine website.

http://www.manitobabusinessmagazine.com/

Frantic Films was today nominated for four Gemini Awards for its work on three documentaries.

Don Young was nominated for both Best Direction in a Documentary Program or Series and Best Writing in a Documentary Program or Series for Devil's Brigade. Dan Caldwell received a Best Editor in a Documentary Program or Series nomination for his work on Music Rising.
Frantic also received a nomination for Peter Jordan's Grey Cup Adventure in the Best Sports Feature Category.

The Gemini Awards will be presented October 15, 16, 17 in Toronto with the final gala held October 28 in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Frantic Films is also up for a fifth Gemini Award. The website for Devil's Brigade is up for The Gemini Most Popular Website Award, which is awarded based on viewers' votes. The site http://www.devilsbrigade.tv, attracted the nominating committee with its unique feature that allowed visitors and veterans to interact. The Gemini voting page can be found at http://www.geminiawards.ca/gemini22/mpw/pickvote.cfm and is in effect till September 12.

Frantic Films announces the release of Deadline 2.7.29178. This is primarily a maintenance release which fixes some bugs that appeared in Deadline 2.7.27948, and adds support for new versions of software. Those already running Deadline 2.7.27948 will not need a new license to install this version. New features include:

• An Auto Job Timeout allows tasks of a job to be automatically requeued when their rendering time reaches a certain threshold, which is completely customizable.
• Important bug fixes for sequential jobs, temperature shutdown, and wake on lan functionality.
• New plugin support for After Effects 8 (CS3), Fusion 5.2, Houdini 9, Renderman For Maya 2.0, and VIZ 2008.

Winnipeg's Frantic Films is in the running for a Best Website Gemini Award. Frantic's living history television series Devil's Brigade led to the creation of the website http://www.devilsbrigade.tv.

Award selectors chose 23 websites from Gemini-nominated shows for the competition. Visitors to those websites are encouraged to vote for the site and the top vote getters will be considered for the Gemini.

What caught the selectors' attention to the Devil's Brigade website was the vet reactions to the site users' comments, which allowed an experience of the show beyond its TV exposure and which also became a launching point for a community dialogue between veterans and viewers.

For more information on the Best Wesite Gemini Award and to vote for this site now, visit the link: http://www.geminiawards.ca/gemini22/mpw/pickvote.cfm

Frantic Films announces the commercial release of Krakatoa, the company’s high-volume point-based particle rendering, manipulation and management toolkit. Available as a plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max running on Windows, the software enables VFX artists to create dust, smoke, silt, ocean surface foam, plasma and even solid objects, all at unprecedented speeds. Krakatoa was demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH conference August 5-9, 2007 in San Diego, California.

The software division of Frantic Films today announced the release of Awake, a plug-in pack for eyeon Software’s Fusion 5. Awake includes six powerful plug-ins: Lens Distort, Stereo Image Stacking, Stereo Image Unstacking, Frequency Blur, Spherical Distort, and Digital Camera Noise. Awake will be demonstrated at both the eyeon Software booth and at the Frantic Films booth at this year’s SIGGRAPH Conference in San Diego, California.

Frantic's software division will be demonstrating an array of new software products at SIGGRAPH 2007, to be held in San Diego.

Along with a new version of Deadline, the company’s popular render farm solution, Frantic Films will be introducing commercial versions of several highly anticipated new technologies and will showcase the latest developments in its current software suite.

Executive Producer and CEO of Frantic Films, Jamie Brown, today announced the appointment of Derek Anderson as Frantic Films' new Director of Development for its Live Action division.

Winnipeg's Frantic Films is pleased to announce that the documentary Music Rising has been honoured with an Award of Excellence and an Honorable Mention at the prestigious Accolade Awards in La Jolla, California.

Frantic Films announced it has secured equity investment from Toronto-based Priveq Capital Funds.

The proceeds of this capital investment will be used to fund the growth of all Frantic’s divisions through acquisitions and expansion of current operations.

Frantic Films' software division is pleased to announce the release of Deadline 2.0, the second generation of the company’s production-proven and ultra-reliable render farm management software. The software will be unveiled at this year's SIGGRAPH in San Diego.
Beyond Deadline’s intuitive artist-designed user interface, robust architecture and broad plugin support, Deadline 2.0 offers a variety of new features, including: a power management system;  performance enhancement technologies; new and improved plug in support and a host of other valuable improvements.