Studio Artist™Animated Indie Feature "Year of the Fish" to Premiere at 2007 Sundance Film Festival

Animated/Live-Action Film Sets Cinderella in a Chinatown Massage Parlor

HONOLULU HI, January 18 -- Year of the Fish, a contemporary re-telling of Cinderella set in a Chinatown massage parlor, will premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival on January 24th, 2007. This low-budget independent feature film was shot with live actors entirely in Chinatown, New York on low cost video, and then animated in post-production on Apple computers utilizing Studio Artist to create the final high resolution feature film.

Year of the Fish uses Studio Artist's unique intelligent auto painting capabilities to give the film a flowing organic look, best described as “a painting brought to life” that stylistically sets itself apart from previous rotoscoped movies. Using Studio Artist also allowed the animators to accomplish with 3 people what would normally employ 40 full-time artists.  The low-budget production was created on four Apple G5 computers using Studio Artist at a tiny fraction of the cost of the typical animated feature length film.

Writer/Director David Kaplan was able to sample the color palettes from artists such as Van Gogh and Cezanne using Studio Artist's auto-color palette capabilities and then apply these color schemes to the Studio Artist auto-rotoscoping paint process.  “This gives the film a richness and depth unusual to animated fare,” notes Kaplan, who is making his feature film debut. Kaplan also used Studio Artist's Supersizer Interpolator and Warping capabilities to up-size paint animated digital footage to a final high resolution frame size and aspect ratio for the final high resolution cinematic feature film.

Kaplan’s screenplay is based on a 9th Century Chinese variant of Cinderella - the oldest known version of the story. The movie stars Tsai Chin (Memoirs of a Geisha), Ken Leung (X-Men: The Last Stand), Randall Duk Kim (The Matrix: Reloaded) and newcomer An Nguyen. It was produced by Janet Yang (The Joy Luck Club) and Rocco Caruso (Judy Berlin).  Mr. Kaplan is a New York based filmmaker who has made several award-winning short films, most notably Little Red Riding Hood, starring Christina Ricci.

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