An affiliate of Prana Studios has a deal in principle to buy the bankrupt visual-effects company Rhythm & Hues, winning a turbulent, two-day auction.
January 20th, 2014
An affiliate of Prana Studios has a deal in principle to buy the
bankrupt visual-effects company Rhythm & Hues, winning a turbulent,
two-day auction.
Prana is a computer-animation
and visual-effects company based in the United States with a wholly
owned subsidiary in Mumbai, India, where much of its animation is
produced. The company has worked on animation in Hoodwinked and done
visual effects for the 2010 Tron Legacy.
Earlier
in the day, Rhythm & Hues asked for and received an extension to
allow a previously disqualified bidder to re-enter the auction.
Rhythm
& Hues received final offers from Prime Focus and a Chinese
company. However, an attorney for the company told a bankruptcy court
judge that new information came to light that indicated that the bidder
had been shut out of the auction unnecessarily.
The sale caps what has been a turbulent few months for Rhythm & Hues and the visual-effects industry as a whole.
Phenakistoscope (1831) A phenakistoscope disc by Eadweard Muybridge (1893).The phenakistoscope was an early animation device. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. It consists of a disk with a series of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the center of the disk. Slots are cut out of the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the center. The device would be placed in front of a mirror and spun. As the phenakistoscope is spun, a viewer would look through the slots at the reflection of the drawings which would only become visible when a slot passes by the viewer's eye. This created the illusion of animation.
