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White Tiger ProposalAn Animated Kung-Fu Feature Film

PRESENTED 09 FEBRUARY 2007

© Meticulous 2007WGA Registered Script

Meticulous | White Tiger Proposal | 1

Treatment

The film follows the path of Zi — a young Shaolin monk. When Zi’s home is de-stroyed by fire, he is forced to undertake a great quest—the quest to find “the answer to all things.” On his journey he meets new friends, faces five grueling tests—courage, skill, fear of death, deception, and test of self—and transforms himself from a young monk into a martial arts master. It is a heartfelt journey with many smiles, tears and unexpected twists. Ultimately Zi finds a new home, reunites with old friends and discovers “the answer to all things.”


Concept: Small, Fast, Elite

Ten years ago, the “Sundance Revolution” changed the film industry. Today, the same shift is occurring in animation. What was once the domain of large facilities with hundreds of animators and 200 million dollar budgets is now at-tainable by small teams. The accessibility of technology has leveled the play-ing field. Small budget films such as Hoodwinked, Doogal and Pooh’s Heffa-lump Movie are creating both a stir and large enough returns to cause any company putting out any $100 million + animated film to take notice.

By combining tried and tested techniques with timing and opportunity, we will open a small American animation studio and deliver world class stories to the world.


How We Do ItEnvironmentsThe Matrix employed a new concept for visual effects: Digital Cinematography. This is the idea of digitizing the real world and bringing it into the computer instead of creating it from scratch. This simple idea won the team an Oscar for Visual Effects.

These cutting edge effects, when applied to photo-real major motion pictures, require a multimillion dollar visual effects budget. However, if these same techniques are used for stylized (non-photo-real) purposes, such as animation, a new world of possibilities is revealed.

We do not need to build our entire world. We drive over, take a picture, proc-ess it, and do lunch.

With a still camera, extensive storyboards and pre-developed scene concepts for shot reference, and a fisheye lens, one person or a small team can capture all the information needed to generate base backgrounds for our film. The photographs are then processed using Meticulous’ proprietary algorithm to look painterly. With a small travel budget, some early morning natural lighting, we can reduce costs and staff required. The remainder of backgrounds can be achieved through matte painting and minor 3d work.

On the left: Image Analysis, on the right, the stylized background.


CharactersAs with most modern animation, our characters will be modeled and textured digitally. Using motion capture systems for physical motion, we can efficiently work through the larger parts of animation and blocking in what feels like more traditional stage acting, while allowing the CG animators to focus on fa-cial and detail work. The characters will then be integrated into the environ-ment.

IntegrationTraditionally it has taken several lighting artists and large render farms costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce an animated film. This is a big bottleneck. Using the fisheye lense photography from our environments, the computer can extrapolate the lighting into a format referred to as HDRI (or high dynamic range imaging). With this format, we can utilize software to let the computer actually light the scene for most daytime shots. This saves itera-tions, therefore reducing man-hours and time, and ultimately saving on cost.

The spherically wrapped location photo is the lighting, and the characters sit right inside it.

The photo to the right is a computer rendering—a fake sphere that is re-flecting a fisheye photograph taken on a beach during production for The Sandbox. Imagine the sphere be-ing the character walking on the sand.

We plan to render the film elements using the ResPower online render farm. Using this system gives us ac-cess to a 700 computer render farm for $2000 a month. This would easily cost us over 3 million for us to create a similar farm on our own, not to mention electrical, cooling, and space costs.

Finally, with the characters rendered and the backgrounds chosen, the compositing team can make any final ad-justments in 2d. Subtle animation of water, dressing of fire elements through-out the scene and more can be done quickly and efficiently in 2d and bring the final cell to life.


DeliveryOur final output resolution will be at approximately 2k plates. We can blow this up to 4k plates during the negative printing process with Pacific Title. De-pending on distribution intentions, we could render at an even lower resolu-tion (1080i for example) and blow it up for limited festival screenings. Reduc-ing the actual output size saves render times, man hours, and printing costs.

MarketingThere are several films in this genre about to hit in the next few years. In addi-tion to the Beijing Olympics and a general buzz about all things Chinese that will be in the media in 2008, there are a variety of other projects coming to market. Dreamworks is planning to release Kung-Fu Panda. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are making an CG animated comeback. The Weinstein Company is bringing several live action titles to the US, including Snow White and the Seven (a kung fu version of the Disney classic).

This combined with the recent live-action features from the Chinese market (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero) will help us ride the wave in 2008.

In addition to domestic box office and/or DVD sales, this could be dubbed in Chinese and released in Mainland China and Taiwan and probably do a decent box office.


Key Staff

Kory Juul, Director/WriterKory has been making movies since he was eleven years old. By age fifteen, he had won a “Young Spielberg” award for his first computer animated short (1994). At 25, he had worked on several of the largest Hollywood effects films: The Matrix Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, The Starwars Prequels Trilogy, I Ro-bot, King Kong, and more. Kory took some time away from the system and di-rected his first short film (as well as Meticulous’ first short) — The Sandbox. Completed on two laptops for $10,000, it has shown at festivals around the world since debuting in September of 2005 in Los Angeles. It’s appeared in Austria, Portugal, Brazil and even had a screening at Pixar’s Emeryville facility.

Angelo Reyes, Writer/Co-ProducerAs Assistant Chief of the West Wind Martial Arts Schools, Angelo has over-seen the growth of a million dollar a year system for the past 28 years. Angelo brings years of business management, a loyal team of martial artists, and ex-tensive knowledge of fight choreography. The script is based on his personal experience and years of teaching.

John Athayde, ProducerPrior to Meticulous, John ran the DC wing of RTKL's Liquid Media team - the group responsible for 3d visualization and new media in the then fifth largest Architecture/Engineering firm in the world. He has also managed rapidly growing creative teams in high stress, fast turnaround environments with multi-million dollar budgets. Recently he’s been digging into e-commerce and visual effects production pipelines. He spends more time with his laptop than is probably good for his health. He holds a Master's degree in Architecture from the Catholic University of America.

Angie Athayde-Stevens, ProducerAngie has worked in the film industry for 8 years as a casting director, produc-tion assistant, producer's assistant, assistant director and most recently, pro-ducer. She has worked on over 35 feature films including What Women Want, Somethings Gotta Give, Terminator 3, Charlie's Angels 2 and Seabiscuit. She has a special place in her heart for Seabiscuit, where she met and married Gary Stevens. She continues to work in the industry and resides in Los Ange-les with her husband and 2 dogs.


http://www.garystevens.com/

http://www.garystevens.com/

Industry BenchmarksWhite Tiger is budgeted at approximately 15 million as a union compliant pic-ture with a two year production cycle. Here are some industry bench marks to show other budgets and how the films fared (numbers from Fall 2006). Spe-cific figures for TV movie deals, on-demand and merchandising were unavail-able and are therefore not included.

High Budget (Studio Blockbusters)Chicken Little Budget: $150 Million Box Office: $315 Million DVD Sales: $17.8 Million

Over the Hedge Budget: $80 Million Box Office: $322 Million DVD Sales: $13 Million

Medium Budget (Fall/Spring releases)Curious George Budget: $50 Million Box Office: $69 Million DVD Sales: $7 Million (first month of release)

Barnyard: Original Party Animals Budget: $51 Million Box Office: $88 Million DVD Sales: TBD

Indie Animation (Limited Release, DVD Sales)Doogal Budget: $20 Million Box Office: $26 Million DVD Sales: $3 Million

Jonah: Veggietales Budget: $14 Million Box Office: $25 Million DVD Sales: TBD

Hoodwinked Budget: $15 Million Box Office: $100 Million DVD Sales: $22 Million

Pooh’s Heffalump Budget: $20 Million Box Office: $52 Million DVD Sales: TBD


© 2006 Meticulous

Hu ZiOlder (left) and flash back (right)

© 2006 Meticulous

The Crane LadyWith and without hat

© 2006 Meticulous

Bok ChoiThe Grasshopper Sidekick

© 2006 Meticulous

Death/The Panther

© 2006 Meticulous

The Monkey MasterWith the medalions

white tiger proposal - patchvault · the final cell to life. meticulous | white tiger proposal | 5....

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