AWN Headline News

The annual Rushes Soho Shorts Festival has announced its winners. The Annecy Student Award winner OVERTIME, which pays tribute to the work of Jim Henson, took home the Vue Animation Award. The film was produced by Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berlano and Damien Ferrie via Supinfocom. The animation runners-up were CITY PARADISE by Gaelle Denis at Passion Pictures and MAESTRO by Geza M. Toth at Kedd Ltd.

DreamWorks is in final negotiations to acquire the film rights from Paramount to Tom Clancy's videogame franchise SPLINTER CELL, reports VARIETY. Daniel Pyne (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake) is set to write the screenplay. Michael Ovitz, Clancy's longtime manager, will still produce.

Softwrap, a leader in digital rights management (DRM), announced that it has partnered with Italy's largest online games distribution website www.videogame.it to battle against piracy. The site is a subsidiary of Leader SPA group, one of the most important videogames distributors in Italy. Softwrap is licensing its technology to Videogame.it in order to fulfill all its security requirements for titles sold electronically through its website.

Rhythm + Hues Commercial Studios has gained two new additions to its staff including director Mark Dippé and Lisa White, who is the new head of production, commercial digital.

Dippé joined George Lucas Industrial Light & Magic in 1988 and was a major part of the digital filmmaking group there. His work in photorealistic computer generated characters includes THE ABYSS, the liquid metal T-1000 in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY. He also had a principal role in creating the first living digital creatures in JURASSIC PARK.

IDT Ent. has announced two key executive appointments. Neil S. Braun, currently president/coo of Vanguard Animation and former president of the NBC Television Network, chairman/ceo of Viacom Ent. and president/coo of Imagine Films Ent., has been named president of feature films and television. Veteran animation producer and creative affairs exec Jerry Davis, whose credits include ROBOTS, ICE AGE, IRON GIANT and TOY STORY, has been named cco, animated features.

EMPRESS CHUNG is set to be the first major feature animated entirely in communist North Korea to see a wide release in a capitalist country when it opens in South Korea on Friday, reports REUTERS. It will open in Pyongyang on Aug. 15, the same day the Korean peninsula was freed from Japanese colonial control and was divided into North and South Korea by the Allied forces. The film directed by Nelson Shin will be the first to open jointly in North and South Korea.

"We made it together. We will watch it together. I couldn't be happier," Shin said.

The producers of the 1979 flick PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR filed suit Aug. 8, 2005, in federal court in New York claiming DreamWorks and Warner Bros. THE ISLAND lifted sections of their film, reports VARIETY. Outside of the usual request for unspecified damages and part of the proceeds, the lawsuit demands the court to order the studios to withdraw the film from theaters and bar further release.