DreamWorks acquihired AwesomenessTV for the price of $33 million, a figure that could rise all the way up to $117 million by 2015 if AwesomenessTV CEO and Founder Brian Robbins is able to hit his earnings targets in both 2014 and 2015. While DreamWorks gained AwesomenessTV, its main goal was to bring Robbins onto its team. Robbins will continue to operate the Awesommeness TV channel, but he will also be taking on an executive role at DreamWorks, where he will be producing a dedicated digital family channel for the company.

Robbins will have access to all of DreamWorks’s resources and IPs to produce the channel. According to Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks CEO, Robbins is a perfect match to build the company’s online presence and also its digital family channel because he “has an extraordinary track record in creating family content both for traditional and new platforms”. Robbins responded by saying that it’s an incredible opportunity to have access to DreamWorks’s resources and that he “can’t wait to get started.”

Robbins created AwesomenessTV last June, investing $3.5 million into the channel, most of which came from investors like MK Capital and DreamWorks. The channel was, as AllThingsD puts it, the next-generation of Nickelodeon because it targeted the young viewers of YouTube’s demographic. YouTube’s Global Head of Content, Robert Kyncl, stated that in a short amount of time, Robbins “built AwesomenessTV into a powerful, next-generation, audience network on YouTube.” Many speculate that this may be the start of an “incredible evolution of online entertainment.”

[via AllThingsD]

Rovio and DreamWorks will be launching the new mobile game on iOS and Android, and will also be releasing an exclusive short animated clip to go along with the game. The game take place during the fictional “Croodaceous period,” and it features the Croods “breaking out of the Stone Age with the use of a new r-evolutionary tool: the IDEA!”

The movie will release in theaters on March 22, and it stars Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, and Emma Stone. Reynolds starred in The Green Lantern and Stone starred in The Amazing Spider-Man. The Croods is about “the world’s first family” as they embark on a journey and discover an incredible new world outside their cave that’s filled with different creatures.

The teaser trailer above shows us a short animated clip promoting the new game. It features the Croods going after what looks to be a fruit hanging from a tree, although we’re not exactly sure what it is. We do see a bit of actual gameplay towards the end of the teaser, but only for a split second before an angry fist come in to smash the smartphone and tablet screens.

The show will based off the upcoming animated DreamWorks film Turbo, which is about a snail who gains special superpowers after a freak accident that allow him to travel at high speeds, something we’re sure all snails would be thankful for. However, while the series will be based on the new movie, the title will have a slightly different name: Turbo: F.A.S.T. (Fast Action Stunt Team).

The film stars Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, and Michael Pena, and it is opening in theaters on July 19, while the original series on Netflix will debut sometime in December. Netflix’s House of Cards is currently a huge hit, and has officially put Netflix on the map of companies creating great original content. Plus, Netflix is currently after HBO, so we’ll definitely see more original shows from the streaming service in the future.

Netflix has started to cater more towards kids in recent years. Back in December, they announced that they will soon offer Disney movies, starting with new films released in 2016. Plus, the streaming service added a “Just for Kids” section to its interface not too long ago that features programming specifically catered towards kids.

DreamWorks for those of you unfamiliar is a group responsible for such blockbuster digital animation films as Antz (their first animated film from 1998), Shrek, Madagascar, and more recently both Megamind and Kung Fu Panda. As the group certainly has a bunch more films in development and coming soon, everything from How to Train Your Dragon 2 to The Grimm Legacy to the everloving classic Captain Underpants, they’ve got more than a little incentive to make their animation process streamlined and improved.

What Katzenberg calls the holy grail and is saying they’re on the verge of using is the ability to work in real-time. Where animating just a few seconds of video can take even the most skilled animator a week to make a reality now, a 50 to 70 percent speed increase in the whole process can be expected with the methods DreamWorks and Intel are working on now. Artists will be able to do effects and color work in real time, while the implications Katzenberg says are revolutionary can be seen to be working with any type of high-end rendering, from oil simulations to airplane design to medical imaging.

DreamWorks and Intel are on a four-year effort to make this software re-write a reality and Katzenberg said today that they were just about two-thirds done at the moment, with the product already having been used on a number of products. Real-time digital animation rendering is and has been a goal of any dreamer in the animation industry for more than anyone’s fair share of time sitting around waiting for a scene to fill itself out and the characters to start moving.

If DreamWorks and Intel succeed here, there will be much rejoicing.

[via Forward Thinking]

Previously the movies from DreamWorks went to HBO when they hit TV for the first time. The deal is said to cover not only films, but also TV specials. That means the holiday content that DreamWorks offers will hit Netflix as well. The terms of the deal aren’t public at this time, but according to the NYT, analysts think that Netflix is coughing up $30 million per movie for the content.

The content won’t hit Netflix until 2013 according to reports. The deal between Netflix and DreamWorks is the first deal to be made of this sort between a streaming content provider and a major movie studio. Generally, flicks from studios as large as DreamWorks go to cable channels like HBO within a few months of hitting DVD. This Netflix deal represents a major shift for a movie studio. Netflix has been struggling with customer defection since it upped prices recently.

[via NYT]

Currently, DreamWorks has a deal with HBO that won’t expire until 2014. However, it’s reported that DreamWorks has been allowed out of the contract two years early, making it possible for them to make the switch to Netflix this year. But even so, access to DreamWorks content may not start until 2013. And although the addition of DreamWorks movies won’t be a significant amount of content, its films have been among the highest grossing and should be quite popular with Netflix subscribers.

This development will also help Netflix to further its streaming-only strategy, which it believes to be the future of its business. The company has recently split its DVD and streaming bundle, almost doubling the total subscription rate for customers to keep both services. Instead of $9.99 for the bundle, customers now have to pay $7.99 for each.

[via VentureBeat]

“You have the ability to think AND act globally.” “Mobile is the dominant computing platform and it’s never going back.” These are the quotes that matter, as spoken again by Dr Paul Jacobs. CreativeArtistsAgency aka CAA, Qualcomm’s newest partners in business spoke next. It’s noted that 250 Snapdradon devices are in development – an impressive number by anyone’s yardstick. He went on to remind the audience that on benchmark tests in the past, single-core Snapdragon processors have beaten dual-core processors run by the competition. In their a-synchronous dual-core devices of the future, Qualcomm will only run one core when one core is needed, two when two are needed. This makes the best of the cores, says Jacobs, and it sets Qualcomm apart from the rest of the competition. HP is seen on the screen, their whole new lineup toting some magic for the near future, then it’s Sony Ericsson’s turn.

The new lineup of course includes our favorite Xperia PLAY device amongst a couple other smaller players, and their Executive Vice President and Chief Creation Officer Rikko Sakaguchi notes that their mission is to combine communication and entertainment. Check out our recent review of the Verizon Xperia PLAY here.

The note by Qualcomm comes in the form of 3D – they showing up on the big screen a bunch of video games and video captured and played back for the audience. Next they punctuate the experience with a scene from Kung Fu Panda 2, a 3D movie that’s just come out in theaters this weekend. All of this is being shown on the Qualcomm MPD, a device we’re just a bit familiar with, running its ADRENO GPU. All of this is played back from the smartphone. Have a peek at the MPD here.

A bit of the ol’ peer-to-peer gaming was demonstrated on an HTC tablet, and it was mentioned that there’d be augmented reality in earnest for Apple’s iOS by July of this year. The HTC tablet used was a HTC Flyer (we’ve got two reviews of this device, believe it or not,) and the game was a lovely PAC-MAN racing game.

Of course they bust the MPD out again for another show of power, this one in Augmented Reality showing off some Dreamworks DVDs, each one of them looked at through the MPD’s camera. This camera sees each of the DVD cases and displays a trailer for each of the movies inside!

Dreamworks was invited on stage via President of Production and Feature Animation, John Batter. He speaks of pre-selling DVDS using augmented reality, again pushing the entertaining experience of doing so, and partnering with national retailers to do so. Pre-selling DVDs, he says, allows for custom content to be pushed to the users phone, content that’s exclusive to this sort of situation, available only on pre-purchase and only through the device.

This all leads into the Digital 6th Sense, a piece of your personal self you the consumer will soon be using to interact with your media-laden environment. The Digital 6th Sense is the camera in the device, the Augmented Reality acting as an extension of our eyes. Additional exciting expansions of our senses are coming on, says Dr Paul Jacobs, sensors popping up not only all around us, but on us as well.

Finally, before the beginning of the keynote there was a screen that showed some options for what the audience felt was the Biggest Opportunity in Mobile in the Next Five Years. Have a peek at what the poll resulted in here:

Finally there was a bit of a sitdown where one quote stood out from all others: Jon Rubinstein noted that he believed that giants in the mobile space today (aka Apple and Google’s Android implied) “may not be giants in the future.” Power shifts a-brewin? Stick with us throughout the week as we’ll be hanging out at Uplinq 2011 the whole time!

The books being optioned are “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy” by journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian, and “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former partner of Assange that’s currently what’s known as a “defector” from the organization. As mentioned above, the movie isn’t at a point where it’s been green-lit by any means, and no director or producer is yet slated to be attached.

One of the inspirations for this particular set of actions is almost certainly “The Social Network,” aka the Facebook Movie. This film made approximately $221 million at worldwide box offices and found itself the earner of a best picture Oscar nomination in 2011. Co-presidents of DreamWorks, Holly Bario and Mark Sourian, have decided to option the books mentioned more than likely because even making that $221 million, the Facebook movie will appear quite tame in terms of drama when compared to this new global hero story.

[via Rueters]

Video and gallery after the cut

As with Kung Fu Panda, it starts with a whole 3,500 square foot room packed full of blade servers.  HP provided over 9,000 cores spread across multiple racks of individual HP ProLiant BL460c blades, each rack demanding 18kw of power.  Over 500 artists and animators worked directly in 2D and 3D on HP xw8600 dual-Xeon quadcore workstations and with HP DreamColor monitors.  It required hundreds of blades for each individual character; B.O.B., for instance, is made up of 12,000 unique bubbles, but with this current generation hardware DreamWorks could render a frame in a few seconds, rather than several minutes with previous-gen machines.

In all, thirty sequences were created, a total of more than 120TB of data and taking over 920,970 manhours.  The standout mothership destruction scene alone amounted to 6TB for the single shot.  Each is created in multiple versions: both 2D analog and 2D digital, for the bulk of movie theaters, each of which are taken from a 3D master using the new DreamWorks InTru 3D system.  Every frame is HD resolution, and there are over 100,000 frames in the 2D versions and twice that amount in the 3D film.

As with previous 3D films, Monsters vs. Aliens requires special glasses to be viewed properly.  Where InTru 3D differs from the older systems is in its use of digital synchronization: by perfectly matching the separate left- and right-eye images (which are combined into one, 3D image by the brain) not only are ghosting, motion blur and eye-strain bypassed, but animators have far greater control over the depth of the shot.  Working with Phil Captain 3D McNally (who legally changed his name – no, really) DreamWorks’ animators use depth in front of, and behind, the screen to draw the viewer’s interest.

Along the way, they tested out just about every 3D display, auto-stereo screen and headset on the market, developing their own proprietary system of full-pipeline 3D authoring, not just of individual scenes but of scene-to-scene depth continuity.  Most of the available systems are either too expensive, too bulky or two individual-user focused (or a combination of all three) to scale up to theater-size glasses-free viewing.  DreamWorks revealed, however, that they are currently in talks with eyeglasses and sunglasses manufacturers regarding building the polarization technology required to view InTru 3D into standard lenses.

As for Monsters vs. Aliens as a film, it’s another great DreamWorks family film with enough action and comedy for the kids together with in-jokes for the adults.  We’d say it’s definitely worth finding your nearest 3D-capable theater to enjoy it, though; now that we’ve watched DreamWorks animation in 3D, there’s no way we’d want to go back to 2D!

We’d like to thank DreamWorks and HP for their hospitality and for sponsoring the InTru 3D event.

Two programs set to launch in the Super Bowl XL III are “3D Monsters vs. Aliens” and “SoBe 3D spot” at the end of the second quarter. An estimated 125 million pairs of 3D glasses at 25,000 locations such as any SoBe displays in super markets will be provided, for free and is yours to keep after the game. If you are a fan of NBC’s comedy “Chuck”, keep the goggle, NBC will be airing Chuck in 3D on the night of February 2, 2009. If you can’t locate any in the outskirt of your town, dial 1-800-646-2904 to obtain one.

“The 60-second SoBe Lifewater spot, directed by Super Bowl commercial veteran and brand architect Peter Arnell, will mark arguably the first ever Super Bowl ad cross over event – with the SoBe Lizards sharing the screen with characters from the upcoming DreamWorks Animation film that will be showcased in the pod’s preceding spot. The SoBe Lizards and stars from DreamWorks’ “Monsters vs. Aliens” will dance alongside current NFL stars as well.”

List of local shops where you can get the 3D glasses

A&P

Coburn

Dollar General

Fairway

Food Lion

Fresh Brands

Frys

Hy Vee

K-Mart

Meijers (to be available on the day of the Super Bowl)

Kroger

Nash Finch

Pathmark

Ralphs

Safeway

Supervalu

Winnie Dixie.

Target (to be available on the day of the Super Bowl)

Super Bowl 3d ads promo video

Check out the exclusive videos from the DreamColor event after the cut

Traditionally, animators, digital film-makers and photo editors have needed to rely on CRT monitors for the best color reproduction, as LCD displays simply weren’t precise enough.  The DreamColor LCD, however, can show more than 64 times the colors a normal LCD is able to, and has convenient push-button access to seven different color space presets: sRGB, Adobe RGB, Rec. 601, Rec. 709, DCI-P3 emulation (97%), and full gamut. 

The LP2480xz is the first display to be introduced under the HP DreamColor Technology initiative, a two-year technology collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation that aims to deliver accurate color that remains consistent from application to application, device to device, and medium to medium. 

The 30-bit display has an RGB LED backlight and a contrast ratio of 1,000:1. Black luminance is an astonishing 0.05 cd/m2 (typ. black level at minimum white level): normal LCDs, even those claiming to be for color-critical applications, usually manage 0.5 cd/m2. Native resolution is 1920 x 1200, but it’s also happy with 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz high-definition. Connectivity includes two DVI-I, DisplayPort 1.1, HDMI 1.3, Component (YPbPr), S-Video and Composite, plus there’s a four-port powered USB hub.

It’s tough to describe just how rich the colors are, and even harder to photograph or video! This is, as you might expect, the best quality image I’ve ever seen on an LCD display, and to be honest it’s probably the best on any screen, no matter the technology, that I’ve come across. The display is now shipping worldwide for a US list price of $3,499. 

Our full gallery of live DreamColor photos from HP’s event is here.  You can find out more information at the LP2480zx’s official page here.

Introduction to the DreamColor partnership:

Animators and DreamWorks pros discuss the DreamColor LCD: 

In production from Fall 2003 to Spring 2008 – a total of 4.5 years! – the film demanded 391 animation artists and, including voice talent (Kung Fu Panda also stars Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie), in excess of 857,680 hours of work altogether.  Artists from around the world converged at DreamWorks two California studios, the 350 miles between them linked by HP’s “Halo Collaboration Studio” video telepresence system, and used more than 400 workstations provided by the company.  Animators primarily used xw9300 and xw9400 workstations, while HP constructed a server-farm of ProLiant DL145 servers and BL465c server blades; in rendering the whole film, the farm churned away for in excess of a whopping 24 million hours, four times as many as the original Shrek film.

The reason for all that processing is the degree of flexibility DreamWorks required for the feature.  Normal film-makers can move their cameras around as much as they like, but in computer animation your system has to be able to cope with the extra 3D modelling that demands.  Kung Fu Panda utilizes the largest number of moving cameras on any DreamWorks title to date; for instance, in a scene where Po rides a spitting, sparkling fireworks chair into a stadium, it took a total of 54 different systems working together for the panda and chair effects alone.  When Po goes on to blow the chair up with fireworks, the explosion requires 953,593 individually-animated particles.

We had an opportunity to sit down and talk about the animation process, and being fans of traditional cartoons it was good to see that paper-based pitches are still very much part of things.  Multiple storyboards are produced – unsurprisingly using HP color printers and scanners! – and then the artists create preliminary 2D choreography on the computer systems.  What particularly pleased them, we found, was the new ability to work on multiple shots simultaneously courtesy of the extra CPU cores and upgraded memory of the HP machines; the xw9400 proved, in some tasks, to be 50-percent faster than its predecessor.  The 2D is then rendered into CGI courtesy of Animation running on the server farm.  In a cute tradition, every time a scene was finalized the animator responsible was given a fortune cookie with a customized fortune inside.

We were lucky enough, along with the group of journalists and industry analysts, to be treated to a pre-release screening of the film, and all I have to say is WOW!  We’re not film reviewers (they don’t usually have enough USB ports for our liking) but despite the average age in the room being way above the audience DreamWorks are expecting there were plenty of laughs and the visuals are top-notch.  HP may have been more excited about their quad-core BL465c blades with dual-gigabit networking and space for up to 32GB of RAM, but we can guarantee that you won’t be able to miss Kung Fu Panda and its tie-in marketing over the Summer.  DreamWorks tried to tell us that Po’s “Panda Dance” is easy to learn, but we’ll leave it to the kids; there are only so many times you can stumble into a ProLiant server before you get escorted from the premises!

Kung Fu Panda by DreamWorks is released on Friday June 6th at theaters all over the US.  You can find out more about the film by visiting the official website, and more about HP’s involvement here.  Click to view the rest of the image gallery.

Kung Fu Panda Behind the scene video

The Studio has pulled previous scheduled to release Bee movie, supposedly the next big HD-DVD release, as well as There will be Blood – starring Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis and Sweeny Todd – Starring Captain Jack Sparrow as mid-19th century serial killer.

The decision will leave Next week’s March 4 release of Things We Lost in Fire and Into the Wild as last HD DVD titles released by the studio. See-ya!

[via video business]

According to two unnamed execs at Viacom (which owns Paramount) the two companies will together receive around $150 million for their loyalty to the format. What is interesting is that Microsoft, who most prominently supports HD DVD has stated that they have not paid either company, but wouldn’t rule out the use of that tactic in the future.

Other interesting details have emerged, like the fact that no Steven Spielberg movies will be exclusive to HD DVD, and also the deal will only last 18 months. Is this a last-ditch effort for HD DVD, or is the war far from over?

Two Studios to Support HD DVD Over Rival [via NYT]

Paramount and DreamWorks have always backed both high-def formats in the past, however, they have now decided to only back HD DVD. Why the change of heart? According to Bady Grey, CEO and Chairman of Paramount Pictures says that “I believe HD DVD is not only the affordable high quality choice for consumers, but also the smart choice for Paramount.”

DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg also chimed in stating that “the combination of this year’s low- priced HD DVD players and the commitment to release a significant number of hit titles in the fall makes HD DVD the best way to view movies at home.” While this certainly won’t be the end of Blu-ray, we can be sure that Transformers is going to be a big seller when it hits DVD and HD DVD, that’ll be a nice feather in the cap of the HD DVD camp.

Paramount and DreamWorks Go HD DVD Exclusive [via dailytech]