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As those who stayed awake in high school geometry class know, a Moebius Strip is a geometric loop with just one surface and one edge. It can be easily made with a strip of paper by twisting it once, then taping the ends together. The film premise is based on an idea by legendary French graphic novelist and Hollywood veteran Jean "Moebius" Giraud, whose works are often favored by the Heavy Metal crowd. Bringing even more Hollywood firepower to the table is veteran screenwriter Jim Cox, a Disney pro whose credits include Fern Gully. Voices are being handled by sci-fi stalwarts such as Mark Hamill (Star Wars) and Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation). Rounding out the team is Frank Foster, a former Senior VP at Sony Pictures, who is directing the feature. Forster has promised this is high-tech effort, noting that "We're using the DPS Velocity software card, which is designed specifically for animation and visual effects people. It's a very efficient way of assembling your dailies and creating animation. It gives us real-time effects, such as dissolves, page turns and titles, which helps us estimate how many frames each shot will wind up being. By the end of pre-production, we'll have the entire movie in this animatic form, so we'll be able to cut it down and start to add our first temporary shots."
In what is promised to be a brand-new premise not based on any of Giraud's books, the high definition film is about a physicist named Simon Weir, who gets trapped at a distant alien planet due to crossing a space-time portal he created. Eight years later his son Jac finds the portal entrance and rescues his father, but now they need to help dad's giant alien benefactor regain his throne. Think of it as a Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale in a MYST setting. One hundred percent 3D CGI animation started in March 2001 in China, with a crew of 200 animators and a budget of $8 million. Giraud, who supervises the production from Paris, created 400 sketches as inspiration for the animation. GDC Holdings Limited obtained intellectual property rights to the epic film and has developed a large number of merchandising products based on the movie's zany characters.
No stranger to Hollywood, the acclaimed illustrator Giraud has produced conceptual designs and storyboards for such sci-fi classics such as Tron, Alien, The Abyss, The Fifth Element, and Rendezvous with Rama. Giraud, who sometimes goes by the nickname Moebius, was born on May 8, 1938 in Nogent-en-Bassigny, France. His early work includes comic strips for the French satirical magazine Hara-Kiri and the development the character Lieutenant Blueberry. He became widely known during the 1980s when his fantasy stories such as Arzach and The Airtight Garage were published in National Lampoon's Heavy Metal magazine. From there, he ventured into Hollywood, where he met Frank Foster at Sony, a company where Giraud made an aborted attempt to film his epic The Airtight Garage. Giraud has high standards for Through the Moebius Strip despite the limited budget, observing that "All of the CG movies that have been made so far have been made with almost an army. It has become crazy. With every sequel they increase their staff, they have a lot of money and the production becomes a kind of monster. We are absolutely not in that league. We are human. We are a few people, with not a great deal of money, so we are trying to push in every way we can with our imaginations."
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