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Mercury Filmworks Lands Looney Tunes CG Paint Contract

Canadian independent digital animation service studio Mercury Filmworks has been selected by Warner Bros. Feature Animation to provide digital paint services for its live-action/animation feature film, LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION. Directed by Joe Dante, the production, starring Brendan Fraser and Jenna Elfman, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny with a co-staring the cast of whimsical Looney Tunes characters, is scheduled for release in November 2003.

Following the wrap of live-action shooting on BACK IN ACTION, Mercury started production on February 19, 2003 and will wrap in mid-September. The animation is being scanned in Mercurys Toronto facilities and digitally transferred to the Vancouver studio where most of the work will take place using USAnimation version 6. The inter-studio production is also benefiting from real-time tracking via a new, and yet to be released version of a joint venture Toon Boom Technologies/Sentient Research real-time production and supply-chain management system code named Piranha.

"Given the creative and technical intensity of this film," said Mercurys president/exec producer Clint Eland, " Warner Bros. needed bullet-proof assurance that an outside studio could, at minimum, perform to the levels they are used to achieving internally. Our track record in episodic television and feature film enabled us to demonstrate why we consider ourselves the best in the field. We are thrilled to play a small part in the making of this movie."

In LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION, Jenna Elfman plays a studio exec who fires both Daffy and his partner in crime, a security guard played by Brendan Fraser. When Bugs reminds Elfman that hes no good without his comic foil, she agrees to join him and Fraser on an around-the-world search for the feisty mallard, encountering virtually the entire gallery of Looney Tunes Characters along the way.

Delivering more than 250 half-hours of television and feature animation to producers and broadcasters in its first five years, Mercury Filmworks, started as a small three-person operation. It now employs more than 120 people between its Vancouver and Toronto studios. It provides pre-production, digital animation, production design, digital paint, effects, compositing, 3D animation and digital post-production. Check out the company's Website at www.mercuryfilmworks.com.

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