yU + co evokes the brooding spirit of a future world, wracked by conflict and dominated by a warrior race in its darkly handsome main title and end title sequences for THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK.

Donald Edmund Trumbull, a two-time winner of the Academy's Sci-Tech Award has died, reports HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. He was 95. He died June 7, 2004 of natural causes at his daughter's home in Graeagle, California.

Director Bryan Singer's upcoming remake of MGM's 1976 science fiction drama, LOGAN'S RUN, is scheduled to start production in Vancouver in September, reports HOLLYWOOD NORTH REPORT. The production will be one of the first to shoot in the Canadian Motion Picture Park, a new 64,000-square-foot, four-stage complex in South Burnaby. Singer's production has booked studio space through September 2005. Ethan Gross and Paul Tadisco are writing the script based on William Nolan's novel. The story follows a police officer in a futuristic utopia, which kills its citizen at age 21.

Accel-KKR, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Alias management announced the completion of the acquisition of Alias from SGI for $57.5 million. Accel-KKR is a technology-focused private equity firm and Teachers' is one of Canada's largest pension plans with net assets of more than $75 billion CDN.

REALVIZ announced that it is offering a free copy of the award-winning image based 3D modeling software, ImageModeler 3.5 (which retails for 750 Euros/$850) with all purchases of MatchMover Pro 3.0 (which retails for 9,600 Euros/$11,000) made between June 14- 30, 2004.

Linux Workshop
Los Angeles, California, USA
June 26, 2004

Director Darren Aronofsky will start shooting his long-delayed sci-fi drama THE FOUNTAIN in Montreal, Canada, November 1, reports NEWSDAY. Hugh Jackman will star the immortality tale that takes place over three centuries. Cate Blanchett, Ellen Burstyn and Sean Gullette will also star. Aronofsky and Ari Handel penned the scripted. New Regency and Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures are producing the film, which is set to be released by Warner Bros. in 2005 or 2006.

Universal has finally confirmed that Andy Serkis, the actor who brought Gollum to life in the LORD OF THE RINGS series, will indeed play the giant ape in director Peter Jackson's version of KING KONG, reports HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. In addition, Serkis will play Lumpy the cook, a ship member on the Venture as it ventures to Skull Island.

Two of the most popular shorts at Annecy this week were Mike Gabriel’s LORENZO and Chris Landreth’s RYAN. You can be sure that both cutting edge digital works (from Disney and Copper Heart Ent./National Film Board of Canada, respectively) will be vying for an Oscar next year, and VFXWorld is proud to offer an exclusive visual development gallery for LORENZO and an in-depth profile of RYAN by Greg Singer.

Viggo Mortensen has been tapped to star in the New Line Cinema adaptation of graphic novel, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, reports VARIETY. David Cronenberg is set to direct from a script by Josh Olson (INFESTED). The film set to go before cameras in the fall.

Based on the Paradox Press graphic novel by John Wagner, Mortensen will play a small town diner owner who lives peacefully with his lawyer wife and children, until a random act of violence propels him to hero status in press and brings him to the unwanted attention of thugs who believe he is a former colleague on the lam.

An intrepid group of students from Minneapolis will be trekking to Northern California to attend VES 2004, the Visual Effects Society's sixth annual Festival of vfx, June 18-20 in San Rafael. This will be the third year in a row that the aspiring visual effects artists and animators from The Art Institutes International Minnesota (AIM) will attend the festival, accompanied by faculty member Michael Heagle, an instructor of Visual Effects and Motion Graphics.

With the kick off of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Convention in Chicago (June 10-12), Discreet announced that leading architectural firms are using its design visualization offerings for a competitive advantage in winning new commissions and securing approval for high-profile design concepts, including Perkins & Will, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Kohn Pederson Fox, Ellerbe Becket and Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum.

Ex’pression College for Digital Arts of Emeryville, California, announced that its digital visual media students were chosen to design and produce the graphic openings for the Visual Effects Society’s (VES) sixth annual VES Festival on June 18-20 in San Rafael, California. A team of Ex’pression students under the direction of instructor Stephen Kopels is also responsible for videotaping all of the presentations for the VES archives.

Pixar Animation Studios has set a Q3 release for RenderMan Pro Server Release 12 (now entering beta).

Highlights from RenderMan Pro Server Release 12:

3D Baking
* The point cloud file format has been extended to support arbitrary data, and Pixar's innovative format, the brick map, supports data of arbitrary size. Together, any kind of data can be baked to disk and then retrieved with great efficiency.

CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK director/writer David Twohy has announced he is writing a two-hour movie for The Sci Fi Channel that would follow the fate of the Kyra character from the upcoming PITCH BLACK sequel, reports SCI FI WIRE. The character was first introduced as a boyish young teen in PITCH BLACK, but has grown into a beautiful but ferocious fighter for CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. The movie will serve as an end-around pilot for a potential series tentatively titled KYRA, THE LOST YEARS, which would show what happened when Kyra chose to find Riddick after the events of PITCH BLACK.

Softimage Co. announced the worldwide availability of SOFTIMAGE|XSI version 4.0 -- the latest release of its industry leading nonlinear 3D production environment. Starting on June 7, 2004, Softimage customers with maintenance contracts can download version 4.0 at www.softimage.com/download, and first-time orders are scheduled to start shipping next week.

Turbo Squid, worldwide publisher for the Discreet Certified 3ds max Plug-in Program, has released the first two TURBO TOYBOX 3D content packs. Each TURBO TOYBOX contains 30 or more 3D models for gamers to use in customizing their favorite games created with Discreet's gmax. The first two products, Starter TOYBOX and Vehicles TOYBOX, are now available and sell for $9.95 each.

Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer Films have bought Terry Rossio (SHREK, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) and Bill Marsilii's romantic thriller script DEJA VU for several million dollars, reports VARIETY. Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group president Nina Jacobson will oversee movie with evp production Jason Reed. Rossio and his writing partner Ted Elliott will exec produce with Jerry Bruckheimer Films' Mike Stenson and Chad Oman, who originally brought the script to Bruckheimer.

With SPIDER-MAN 2 coming to theaters June 30, 2004, Columbia TriStar Home Ent. is naturally plugging Spidey on DVD as well, reissuing SPIDER-MAN in a three-disc deluxe edition ($24.95) with a few new extras aimed at promoting the sequel, along with a superior quality SPIDER-MAN Superbit disc ($26.96).

While the first two discs in the deluxe edition are the same as the previous SPIDER-MAN collection, disc three includes the following:

Costume design featurette

Rushes Postproduction Ltd. has promoted Paul Hannaford to head of visual effects.

In his new role, Hannaford will be responsible for the visual effects department, encompassing Flame, Inferno, Fire, Combustion and Backdraft. He will also continue to work as an effects artist and vfx shoot supervisor.