THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, based on the popular book of the same name by C.S. Lewis, will begin production in New Zealand in early 2004, industry development minister Jim Anderton said in a statement. New Zealand-native Andrew Adamson, co-director of the Oscar-winning SHREK, will be directing the live-action film. The production will use stage space and personnel in Auckland.

3D Festival 2004, Europe's largest convention and exhibition for the creative 3D industry (May 3-6 at Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark), has announced its executive committee and preliminary speakers. Synergy, meanwhile, will be the theme, encompassing storytelling, modeling, animating, rendering, programming and business strategies.

Artwork to be considered for EXPOSÉ 2 needs to be submitted before Jan. 29, 2004, four weeks prior to the previous deadline, in order for the book to be shipped in time for SIGGRAPH 2004. EXPOSÉ 2 will go into full production in March 2004, with a release date of July 2004. EXPOSÉ 2 Pre-orders for EXPOSÉ 2 will start in June 2004.

Winners in the 12 competing categories at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival (AEAF) 2003 Awards were announced Dec. 9, 2003 at the Sydney Convention Center, Darling Harbor.

The winners were:

FEATURE FILM VISUAL EFFECTS
THE MATRIX RELOADED: ESC

FEATURE FILM ANIMATION
FINDING NEMO: Pixar

VFX industry veteran Jeff Ross has joined Hollywood-based visual effects shop Eden FX, in the newly created position of evp.

Ross has built an extensive career guiding, managing and overseeing the growth of numerous successful, high-end post-production companies. For the past two years, he served as evp/coo of Sunset Digital, a high definition facility specializing in feature film mastering, digital restoration, linear and non-linear editing and DVD compression and authoring.

SEABISCUIT, writer/director Gary Ross' acclaimed screen adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's revered bestseller about the legendary race horse and his place in American lore, comes to DVD Dec. 16, 2003 (Universal Home Entertainment, $26.98) with several noteworthy extras: commentary from Ross and director Steven Soderbergh, production notes, three featurettes ("Racing Through History," "Bringing the Legend to Life" and "Anatomy of a Movie Moment: From Script to Screen") and co-star Jeff Bridge's on-set photographs.

The Independent Games Festival has announced the finalists in the sixth annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) Competition, which will exhibit their games the Game Developers Conference March 24-26, 2004 in San Jose, California. Selected by a panel of game industry professionals, game development teams will compete for more than $40,000 in cash prizes, double the payout from previous years.

The 10 games selected for the "Open" category are (in alphabetical order):
ACMI by Selectparks (Richmond, Victoria, Australia)

Kevin Mullican has been named cto for iO Film, a technologically advanced, full-service digital film finishing facility specializing in film and video projects from every sector of the entertainment industry.

Billed as a Victorian-era X-MEN, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, led by Sean Connery and a cast of legendary monsters, arrives on DVD on Dec. 16, 2003 (Fox Home Entertainment, $27.98).

When the Visual Information Technology laboratory at the Canadian National Research Council started developing its high resolution 3D scanners in the early 1980s, it probably had no idea that 20 years later one of its spin-offs, XYZ RGB Inc., would be contracted to help bring the characters of THE LORD OF THE RINGS to life on the big screen.