Contract win to develop animated content for new superhero franchise

OMG plc, (LSE: OMG) (“OMG” or the “Group”), the technology group providing image understanding products for the entertainment, defence, life science and engineering industries, announces its VICON House of Moves (HOM), a leading motion capture and animation service company, was contracted by Guardian Media Entertainment (GME), a new joint venture between the National Hockey League® (NHL), SLG Entertainment led by Stan Lee of POW! Entertainment, to develop animated content for a new superhero franchise.

GME will produce the Guardian Project franchise; compelling tales of good vs. evil based on 30 superhero guardians (one to represent each NHL team) told across a variety of content delivery mediums including television, print, social media, Jumbotron and more. The new venture was introduced at today’s NY Comic-Con convention during a panel featuring Vicon House of Moves’ Director Peter Krygowski and VP of Production Brian Rausch, alongside Stan Lee, Chairman, POW Entertainment, Brian Jennings, EVP Marketing, NHL, Adam Baratta, CCO, GME, Tony Chagrin, Co-Founder, GME and comic book artist Neal Adams.

VICON House of Moves was approached by GME with a concept by Stan Lee (creator of many legendary franchises including Spiderman, Iron Man, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four and others) and comic book character drawings. HOM took the original designs and turned around full computer generated (CG) finished animations built around each of the 30 characters. HOM directed and/or developed all assets including models, animation, character rigging, motion capture, lighting, rendering and final output.

“The viewers and fans are never going to expect how truly great this production is going to be thanks to the magic of VICON and the spectacular effects that they’re able to pull off,” said Stan Lee.

In just six months, the HOM animation team was able to turn around several animated shorts, the first of which will be teased at Comic-Con in New York, with a complete roll-out slated over the course of the NHL season. “This is by far the most ambitious project to date for both our mo-cap stages and our animation team. We’re developing hundreds of CG assets—from a film short to broadcast and instadium
promotional clips and a host of other animated assets for delivery on multiple content
platforms,” said Tom Armbruster, Vice President, Sales & Support, VICON. “It was an honor to work with Stan Lee, and to collaborate with the NHL as we’re all huge comic book and hockey fans over here!”

In order to accommodate a challenging delivery schedule, HOM chose to render final animation in the Unreal Game engine. “Our render time goes from roughly 1½ hours per frame down to about 30 seconds. With traditional rendering methods we wouldn’t have had time for iteration—and to develop such a breadth of characters in such a short timeframe, we needed to be able to march forward as quickly as possible. The Unreal Engine lent itself very well to this project because not only did it provide the freedom to generate a tremendous volume of effects very quickly, but also provides an incredibly high quality output. Because we’re delivering final product to a variety of arenas and broadcast venues—all with different playback methods (HD, SD, banners etc), a standard rendering engine wasn’t really an option,” said Brian Rausch, Vice President of Production, VICON House of Moves.

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