AWN Headline News

George Lucas has decided to go mostly digital with the live-action segments of STAR WARS EPISODE II. On Sunday, April 9, 2000, Lucas said, after four months of testing high-definition cameras, he will start shooting most of the next STAR WARS installment with Sony digital cameras. Jim Morris, president of Lucas Digital, said the cameras had "exceeded expectations." In June, the film will start shooting in Australia for two months, then move to Italy and Tunisia in August for another month, followed by 18 months of post-production.

William Shpall, chief operating officer of Film Roman, has left the company. John Hyde, president and CEO of Film Roman, has told AWN that Shpall has worked out a deal to leave his post to pursue other Internet deals and projects that have presented themselves to him. Shpall was the father of Film Roman's Web entertainment destination, Level 13, which launched on November 27, 1999. According to Hyde, Shpall with continue on as a consultant to Level 13 and Film Roman's overall Internet strategy until at least the fall of 2000.

Alias|Wavefront announced this week that the fifth major release of their Maya next-generation animation software will feature a universal rendering policy that enables Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited to "float" the Maya Batch Renderer across any number of machines. This new announcement furthers Alias|Wavefront's aim at synergy between all of Maya's tools throughout the production and post-production process and Alias|Wavefront's earlier announcement that Maya 3 will feature a new Trax compositing system further backs up this position.

Discreet, the producers of high-end 3D and 2D computer graphics tools this week launched their new unified paint, animation and 3D visual effects system: combustion*. The Macintosh and Windows NT-based system offers a single, unified paint, animation and 3D-compositing environment for visual effects creation. combustion* features Academy Award-winning technology from inferno* and an extremely fast caching architecture for igniting the desktops and creative imaginations of digital visual effects artists world wide.

Fraud troubles for CINAR Corp. increased as RCMP agents seized four boxes of the ARTHUR TV-series producers' tax documents. With a warrant in hand, a joint team from the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and provincial police searched the Old Montreal offices of the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (Sodec) on the morning of Thursday, April 6, 2000. The search was part of an ongoing investigation launched by the RCMP on October 19, 1999 [AF 10/19/99] after a Bloc Québécois MP made tax fraud allegations in the House of Commons.

* Tuesday, April 18, 2000. Burbank, California, U.S.A.

MIP TV is the premiere television conference and market in the world. The six-day event brings together production companies and distributors from all over the globe. The conference includes a vast array of panels and round-table discussions with some of the world's top professionals. In 1999, MIP TV attracted 10,439 professionals from 2,565 companies from 94 countries, of which 1,170 were exhibiting companies from 50 different countries. This year MIP TV will be featuring a focus on the Internet and other related new technologies.

Veteran animation producer and executive Max Howard has finalized a first-look production deal with DreamWorks. Launching his new production company, Melwood Pictures, Howard will be developing both live-action and animated features. Therefore, he will be stepping down as producer on DreamWorks Pictures' upcoming animated release SPIRIT, STALLION OF THE CIMARRON. Howard came to DreamWorks from Warner Bros. where he served as president of feature animation. During his tenure, the studio produced the award-winning animated feature THE IRON GIANT, as well as QUEST FOR CAMELOT and SPACE JAM.