Visual effects house Rocket Science and live-action TV and movie production company Screen Door have joined forces to create Fandango Animation, a new company dedicated to becoming one of Canada’s most significant suppliers and producers of television and new media properties for the children, youth and adult markets. Former Nelvana exec Heather Walker, who has produced more than 300 hours of animation, will head production efforts.
‘We are consistently asked to quote on animation-based projects, both 3D and 2D,’ says Rocket Science co-founder Tom Turnbull, ‘and with our proven capabilities, along with the expansion of the animation market both into new media and to an older tech-savvy demographic, the time seems right to commit ourselves in this direction.’
Screen Door co-founder Heather Haldane Turnbull adds that Fandango will take advantage of Canada’s federal and provincial tax credits to competitively price its service work and the company’s own original projects.
Fandango is ramping up in Rocket Science’s Toronto facilities, which will house more than 18 animators working on Maya, 3D Studio Max and Toon Boom. The outfit will operate with a 70-processor render farm, twenty terabytes of redundant server storage on a 10-gigabit local network, a proprietary, cross-platform render manager and automated dailies conforming software. In addition, an Interactive client feedback system will enable customers to engage in real-time visual interaction with key creative anywhere in the world. For more information, go to www.fandangoanimation.com.
