Disney’s Secret Lab: A Sad History

[Another Voice]

The Ain’t It Cool website has posted an excellent history of DreamQuest Imagines, which later became Disney’s The Secret Lab special effects house. This was the group of people who created all the amazing CGI images for ‘Dinosaur’, ‘102 Dalmatians’ and this weekend’s ‘Reign of Fire’.

The group was dissolved by Disney last year as part of budget cuts. Skelton crews were left to finish ‘Reign’ and another project. There was an attempt made to put together a few other projects to keep the dragon people together, but they too have just fallen victim to Disney’s desire for cash without effort. Disney will have lost several hundred million dollars on their purchase of DreamQuest and subsequent investments into The Lab. An equal amount is now being paid out to Industrial Light and Magic and other outside special effects houses that will now be doing CGI work for Disney.

The entire article can be found at http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=12700 .


While the article itself is “G-rated”, some of the public comments in the forums on this site use language which may be considered offensive.

 

[YoHo]

Harry Knowles has something both useful and Factual on his site?!?


THE END IS NEAR!!!

 

[manning]

It finally hit Disney too, OUTSOURCING!

 

[Sarangel]

How truely sad... I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I keep hoping someone with the power to change things will get a clue.

Sarangel

 

[Panthius]

With the success of Monster's Inc. and Shrek and other CGI movies, wasn't there talk of keeping "The Secret Lab" together...or rebuilding it in some way? I am almost certain I heard this not too many months ago when Shrek and Monsters were on their runs.

Panthius

 

[Another Voice]

This week’s plan is to “retrain” current animators on computers and simply “convert” Feature Animation into a CGI group. In practical terms that means firing most of the current animation staff, trying to hire people away from Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky and other places – and then outsourcing most of the work anyway. The “big” CGI feature Disney had in the works, ‘The Ice Queen’ has ground to a halt due to staff leaving, story problems, and Disney’s internal problems (no one wants to work there).

Right now the pressure is for Disney to announce some CGI films. The format is currently “hot” thanks to ‘Shrek’, ‘Monsters’, and ‘Ice Age’. Everyone in town is jumping on the band wagon. But, this is Disney, so expect to see a lot of smoke but very little fire.

 

[BRERALEX]

whatever. saw reign of fire last night and think its gonna be mediocre at best as far as box office goes. plus with road to perdition out thats some good competition, so things will get worse and worse.

MID LEVEL SPOILER
and i know they dont film movies in sequential order but that last scene in reign of fire was totally horrible special effects wise ouch ouch ouch looks like they took a page out of highlander end game it was so bad lolol