One of the more mainstream titles premiering at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is the awesome-looking animated kids film Hotel Transylvania. What a lot of people don’t realize, however, is that a huge part of the animation and lighting of the film was completed at the Vancouver offices of Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), and that having Hotel Transylvania premiere at TIFF 2012 makes a lot of sense. Here are some stats Sony provided us about the Canadian connection:
At its peak, they had 73 artists working on the film in SPI’s Vancouver office. Here’s the breakdown of work:
Hotel Transylvania Animation:
Culver City – 492 shots
Vancouver – 694 shotsHotel Transylvania Lighting/Comp:
Culver City – 965 shots
Vancouver – 241 shotsKey Canadian artists who contributed to the film include:
Belfountain, Ontario – Jeff Panko (Animation Lead)
Ottawa, Ontario – Sacha Kapijimpanga (Animation Lead)
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – James Crossley (Animation Supervisor)
Surrey, British Columbia – Mathew Cowie (Animation Lead)
Vancouver, British Columbia – Kevin Webb (Animation Lead)
Winnipeg, Manitoba – Mark Krentz (Environmental Model Lead)
Check out some new images, the official synopsis, and the trailer for the film below.
About Hotel Transylvania:
Welcome to the Hotel Transylvania, Dracula’s (Adam Sandler) lavish five-stake resort, where monsters and their families can live it up, free to be the monsters they are without humans to bother them. On one special weekend, Dracula has invited some of the world’s most famous monsters – Frankenstein and his bride, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, a family of werewolves, and more – to celebrate his daughter Mavis’s 118th birthday. For Drac, catering to all of these legendary monsters is no problem – but his world could come crashing down when one ordinary guy stumbles on the hotel and takes a shine to Mavis.
TIFF 2012 runs from September 6 to 16. Follow all of our coverage of the festival at criticizethis.ca/tiff.
