Pentafour Pins Hollywood Hopes on ‘Sinbad’ Debut

Pixar woke up Hollywood to the possibilities of computer animation with the success of “Toy Story,” produced for Disney. With DreamWorks’ “Antz,” Pacific Data Images proved two could play the game. Now India’s second-largest software company, Pentafour Software & Exports Ltd., hopes to become the latest company to turn digital images into box office gold.

Pentafour is banking on its 24 years of experience in creating software for more traditional business applications and on its cheap Indian labor costs to help make it a player in the animation field. Already the majority of television animation for the U.S. market is done overseas for budget reasons.

Through offices in both Hollywood and Madras, India, Pentafour is putting the finishing touches on its first full-length animated feature, expected to be completed by year’s end. It’s also working on projects for Morgan Creek/Warner Bros. (“The King and I” film, due out in early 1999) and Sony’s television unit.

The feature “Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists” is being bankrolled by the Improvision Group, six overseas investors who have made a number of media investments in Asia. Kathy Morgan International, an established Los Angeles-based film-sales firm, represents rights to all territories. Assuming the movie gets distribution by next year, it would be the first full-length theatrical film to feature “optical-motion-capture” animation throughout.

Sriram Sundar Rajan, Pentafour’s head of business development and a co-producer of the film, said Pentafour hopes “Sinbad” will show Hollywood that the company can produce a top-quality product and interest a studio enough to partner with Pentafour a la Pixar-Disney and PDI-DreamWorks.

Pentafour “jumped at this first opportunity” to do “Sinbad” with the outside investors, Rajan said. “Being an Indian company, we still needed more exposure here. The studios are always looking for content, and we’re confident we’ll partner on future projects with a major studio.”

The optical-motion-capture process starts with an actor wearing reflective balls attached to a tight-fitting suit, acting out a character’s movements. The action is tracked by optical cameras, which send the information into a computer. There the data is turned into 3-D motion data, which in turn is used to form a sort of skeletal character image.

This basic skeleton is then overlaid with computer-generated images that flesh out the character. Finally, nuances such as shading and texture are added to complete the picture--in this case, a fantasy-adventure yarn based on Sinbad, the Arabian Nights character.

Unlike the lower-budget animation of decades ago--which was clearly inferior in its jerky movements and crude drawings--digital magic should give “Sinbad” a very polished look.

But the movie still may fight an uphill battle in the U.S. market. In one fantasy sequence, psychedelically colored floating mushrooms may strike Americans as drug imagery, inappropriate for animated fare.

Rajan counters that the filmmakers were very aware of having the film have an “American” look, and that all the lead creative people--including the co-directors, the screenwriter and the production designer--are American. He concedes that the film’s fantasy sequences may be somewhat unusual to American audiences, but that this is due to the nature of the story, not the “foreign-ness” of the production.

To broaden the film’s box office appeal, the producers hired well-known American voice talent. Brendan Fraser, the star of “George of the Jungle,” plays Sinbad. Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock on “Star Trek,” plays a supporting character. The producers are aiming primarily for the teenage-boy audience that made the video game-based “Mortal Kombat” a hit, but also think the movie will appeal to girls and families.

Motion capture has started to catch on in TV shows and videos aimed at children, as well as for use in special effects for such films as “Titanic” (some crowd scenes were created using motion-capture animation). There are at least a dozen firms already specializing in motion-capture animation.

Paris-based Medialab--half owned by European cable TV giant Canal Plus--struck a deal earlier this year with Canada’s Cin-Groupe to produce films and TV series using motion-capture animation. Most other companies producing motion capture have not yet moved beyond television and limited special-effects film use.

But, in general, motion capture has been regarded as inferior to the fully computer-generated images used on such films as “Toy Story” and “Antz.” Until recently, motion-capture technology resulted in glitches such as jerky movements and hands that appear to slice through rather than touch each other.

Rajan said that new techniques have eliminated these problems and that his firm will deliver exceptionally high-quality product at low cost. “We can make an animated film in a third of the time and for a third of the money it costs to make a traditional cel-animated or CGI [computer-generated image] film,” said Rajan.

“Sinbad” is budgeted at less than $20 million--perhaps a quarter or fifth as much as animated films from Disney--and should be completed in 12 months. Rajan said that since Pentafour has mastered the process and images are “banked” in its computers, future productions will only take six or seven months to complete.

Pentafour is a publicly traded company, listed on the Indian and Luxembourg stock exchanges. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 1998, the company had revenue of $78.3 million and a net profit of $18.3 million. The company employs 1,600 people worldwide, 600 of whom are dedicated to entertainment product, Rajan said.

The move into entertainment is seen as a way to move Pentafour “up the value chain.” Executives feel the work has greater growth prospects and higher profit potential than more traditional, noncreative software applications. Pentafour has back-end profit participation in the film, though the Improvision investors own the copyright.

Rajan said the movie’s investors preferred not to make an early deal that would have required them to sell all rights, as they think the rights to spinoffs such as video games and sequels are too valuable to sign away. The strategy is risky: It could pay off handsomely if the movie is a hit, but end up costing them millions if the movie tanks.

Pentafour’s first opportunity to show off its entertainment applications came in 1993, through the suicide of popular Indian actress Divya Bharti, who left several movies unfinished when she died.

Pentafour executives, who had already experimented with creating “virtual actors,” contacted the producers of Bharti’s films about completing them using a computerized image of the actress. They ultimately were not able to put their work on the big screen because of legal issues governing the use of a person’s likeness, but Pentafour’s demonstration tests got the company some attention.

In 1995, Pentafour entered a co-venture with high-end computer equipment maker Silicon Graphics. The deal gave Pentafour a studio filled with millions of dollars worth of equipment, with which they entered the video game animation market. The company has produced dozens of games for the Asian market.

With films, Pentafour is entering a much bigger arena. Building its own film library could be the next step, should its current projects prove successful. For now, Pentafour has just started on a multi-picture deal with the “Sinbad” producers, who plan to spin off their movies into games, sequels and television programs.

But the U.S. animation market is hard to crack. Long dominated by Disney, even such powerful studios as Warner Bros. and Fox have faced an uphill battle to compete.