AWN Headline News

Peter Jackson has petitioned the Directors Guild of America to give an Animation Directed By credit on KING KONG to the supervisors who helped bring Kong to life, reports David Poland of MOVIE CITY NEWS (www.moviecitynews.com). However, the animators are not identified by Poland. Joe Letteri and Ben Snow served as visual effects supervisors and Christian Rivers directed the MoCap sessions with Andy Serkis.

The DGA has never allowed such a credit before.

The long-awaited DVD debut of the original KING KONG (Warner Home Video, $26.99 for special edition or $39.92 for collectors edition) arrives Nov. 22, 2005, looking as great as you might expect of a vintage movie whose negative has long since vanished. Superb contrast and clarity are the result of a DVD production two years in the making, and now we can view the uncensored version in all its terror and glory. As Ray Harryhausen suggests in his commentary, this is the first example of an animated character in a starring role the first modern movie monster.

IMAX Corp. and Warner Bros. Pictures announced that HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE shattered every record for an IMAX Hollywood simultaneous release. In its debut at 66 North American IMAX theaters, the film posted the biggest three-day opening ever, beating the previous record by more than 30%, with an estimated $2.93 million over the period ended Nov. 20, for a per-screen average of more than $44,000.

BOXX Technologies Inc. will co-sponsor a series of events with Alias surrounding the new release of Alias StudioTools13, the standard for outstanding design in transportation and consumer products.

The Design for the Senses events will gather leading designers in eight major design centers through the months of November, December and January. The tour represents an opportunity to showcase how the close cooperation between BOXX and Alias benefits the design community.

Autodesk Inc. has released a new configuration of its Academy Award-winning Discreet Inferno visual effects system for the Japanese market. The system is designed to meet the specific platform performance and branding requirements of many Japanese post-production facilities.

Helping to give game enthusiasts another way to get their fix, Concrete Pictures has teamed with MTV on two new promotional campaigns. The Philadelphia-based creative production company has applied its signature edge and ingenuity to GAMØRZ WEEK and TITLE TRACK, both part of the networks ongoing efforts to connect with the growing and increasingly vocal gaming demographic.