Tyler Perry creator of “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion” is jumping on the animation train with the help of Exodus Film Group according to Animation Magazine.

Perry’s yet untitled project will follow his character Madea on her comedic trials and tribulations, and will teach “children about family values, in a way that only Madea could!” “After receiving thousands of letters from parents telling me how much their kids love Madea and realizing that a lot of the plays were not kid friendly,” says Perry, “I wanted to do something more appropriate and this seems to be it. A ‘Madea’ animation looks like the best way.”Max Howard, Exodus president adds, “We know this opportunity to work with Tyler was highly sought after and we are thrilled he chose to partner with Exodus.”  

Exodus has a multi picture deal with The Weinstein Co to jointly develop CG-animated Movies.

Josh Raskin is the director of “I Met the Walrus” , an animated short that brings to life the audio interview with John Lennon that took place in 1969. The Interviewer was 14 year old canadian Jerry Levitan, who skipped school to seek out the Beatle in a downtown Toronto hotel. The National Post to day interviewed Raskin about his film and the fasinating story of how

Levitan captured his 40-minute interview with Lennon on tape, and has held on to it, waiting for an appropriate way to make it known to the world. Enter Raskin.The Ryerson University grad, who studied new media, had made a film for the National Film Board, “a 1940s propaganda film remix project,” as Raskin describes it, that involved keeping the movie’s original audio while creating new visuals. Levitan saw the film and tracked Raskin down. “He told me his story and I was immediately sold,” the director explains. “I think The Beatles are the best band ever. My parents are big fans, so I must have inherited it through breast milk or something.”  

 Raskin is up against 4 other films this year Madame Tutli-Putli, Même les Pigeons vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven),My Love (Moya Lyubov), and Peter & the Wolf.

Director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Oscar-winning producer Graham King (The Departed) have announced today that they are in development on a $100 million dollar animated feature film.The pair are in talks with Sweeney Todd writer John Logan.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that the release date for the pic is an extremely ambitious 2010 and script has yet to be written. The film is to be co-produced with Verbinski’s Blind Wink Prods. and King’s GK Films. So far they have wrangled Storyboard artist James Ward and VFX Sup. Mark McCreery both who worked with Verbinski on Pirates.

No animation house has been tagged for the production as of yet, the team says that they will decide whether to go out of house to an established company or rather build their own animation unit from scratch after the script is finished.

Havok announced today that they will offer the PC version of their award-winning physics and animation software product – Havok Complete – for download free of charge.  Available for non-commercial use, Havok Complete for the PC will be freely downloadable in May 2008.

Havok’s core platform, Havok Complete combines the industry-leading Havok Physics engine and Havok Animation, the company’s premier character animation solution. Havok Complete is already the most popular solution in the cross-platform AAA games market, featuring technology used in over 200 games. By making Havok Complete for the PC freely downloadable, Havok will further build on its leading position by completely removing the barriers to entry for the large number of independent developers, academic institutions and enthusiasts in the PC space.    

The Hollywood Reporter says that Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Brothers is putting the manga classic “Akira” into production for a theatrical release under DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way. 

 Gary Whitta has been hired to write the adaptation…Akira originated in 1988 as a manga and then as an animated film co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. The story was set in a neon-lit futuristic post-nuclear war Tokyo in 2019 where a teen biker gang member is subjected to a government experiment which unleashes his latent powers. The gang’s leader must find a way to stop the ensuing swathe of destruction.With its mature themes and cutting edge animation, “Akira” was a milestone movie in anime and even animation circles, and led the way for anime making inroads into Western pop culture in the 1990s.

Image Metrics introduces new facial animation software that does not require the actor to wear tracking marks on their face. This video from g4tv shows it in action:

Today at the 2008 Game developers conference Havok introduced 2 new tools into their arsenal of physics based tools, Havok Cloth and Havok Destrucion. With a line up of Award winning tools such as Behavior™, Physics™ and Animation™ Havok is easing the jobs or artists and animators with these new tools. According to The Earth Times David Coghlan, Vice President of Development for Havok said,

“Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction will further increase the standard of realism and immersion in games. Havok Cloth enables scalable clothing that will significantly enhance the visual impact of on-screen characters. Havok Destruction will drive high-adrenaline action scenes with unprecedented levels of physics mayhem.” 

Havok Cloth(TM) is a new performance-optimized development tool designed to minimize the time that game artists spend on animating the behavior of character garments and environmental cloth. It enables increased realism for cutting-edge games, is easily customizable and fits into today’s workflow without burdening artists, animators or programmers. Havok Cloth(TM) features: — Highly realistic physically-based simulation of cloth and character clothing with low CPU and memory overhead — Multithreaded and platform-optimized (including PLAYSTATION(R)3) — Artist-driven control of the full range of cloth behavioral properties such as stretching, damping and bending — Artist-friendly, modeller-based, cloth setup toolsHavok Destruction(TM) is the cross-platform tool for simulation of rigid body destruction. Destruction gives the game artist total control over the simulation, drastically reducing the production time and cost of creating large numbers of realistic destructible game objects. Havok Destruction can create a completely new game play experience by giving additional realism to structural mechanics, graphical effects and game level design.Havok Destruction(TM) features: — Dynamic fracture of game objects including: shattering, fracture and deformation. — Software Development Kit that is fully multithreaded, optimized for the PLAYSTATION(R)3 and Xbox 360(R) and makes optimal use of Havok Physics — Art Tool Support About Havok

Softimage today has launched a forum based website called Softimage|NET for the 3d community that uses Softimage. It has galleries, support and a “How To” section. It is similar to Autodesk’s  ”AREA” Site which provides a place for users of Autodesk MAYA and 3DSMax to gather. Speaking of Maya,  Audodesk announced today that they are dropping the price of May Unlimited Standalone from 6,995 to 4,995 and the Network license version from 8,345 to 6,245. While Maya Complete 2008 users can upgrade to Maya Unlimited for only 2,995. All of this and they just released Maya 2008 Extension 2.

The Providence Journal reports that Director Michael Corrente is starting pre-production on an animated Horror film. 

Corrente and the three-man team from The Story Hat, based on Weybosset Street in Providence, will begin preproduction this week on a computer-animated horror film called Bloodline, which tells the story of tattoos that grow and change and wreak havoc on their bearers. The film, which could take upwards of 16 months to create, is touted by Corrente as “the first American animated feature-length [computer-generated imagery] horror movie ever made.” “You couldn’t do this in live action. It wouldn’t work. These elements come together perfectly and are suited for animation. Because you can watch it grow and actually morph into something really scary,” Corrente said. “You take that, and throw in a great story … and it was electrifying to me. I just thought this was a no-brainer. It’ll work.”   

 The Horror genre has not been attempted in animation as of yet but we are aware of at least 1 other production company that has an animated horror film in development. 

OC3 has announced it is partnering with Softimage to create a plugin for their program FaceFX. According to Gamasutra it is a lip syncing plug-in that is designed to help game developers and 3d animators speed their workflow and create more realistic lip sync and facial expressions.

OC3 notes that the plugin uses only a sound file and optional text file to generate highly realistic facial animation data for use in video games and 3D animations. The company notes that FaceFX was used by Epic for Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War, meaning mod developers using either will be able to use Softimage assets with the plugin for machinima movies and other game mods.