New York-based Guava has hired 3D animator Steve Talkowski as its director of animation. Talkowski brings over a decade of experience as an animator to Guava, most recently with New York’s Hornet, where he also served as animation director…Absolute Post Production in London reported that Chris Allen–previously senior producer at London’s Moving Picture Company–will join Absolute in January as executive producer…. New York-based design/post boutique Perception has added Curt Neumann as art director. Neumann joins Perception after having worked with the company as a freelance designer for the past year on projects for Bravo!, AMC, ABC Sports and ESPN….Burbank-based post house FotoKem has signed an agreement with Sohonet, the London-based provider of private network services for film and television, to establish a Point of Presence (POP) on FotoKem’s Burbank campus. Sohonet’s dedicated high-speed network will allow the rapid exchange of media data between FotoKem and major production centers worldwide. Sohonet maintains a high bandwidth transoceanic connection between the London Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and points in Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and Wellington, NZ. The network provides scaleable bandwidth, currently up to one Gigabit/sec, for the transfer of digital media of all types such as film dailies, visual effects files, audio, uncompressed 2k or 4k files or any digital media. Sohonet currently provides point-to-point connections to more than 150 clients worldwide, including London’s Shepperton and Pinewood studios.
Review: Director Alex Parkinson’s “Last Breath” Starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu
A routine deep sea diving mission in the North Sea goes terribly wrong when a young diver is stranded some 300 feet below the surface in the new film "Last Breath." His umbilical cable has severed. The support vessel above is aimlessly drifting away from the site through violent, stormy waters. And the diver has only ten minutes of oxygen in his backup tank.
As if that wasn't enough, it's also a true story.
If merely reading this is giving you heart palpitations already, you can only imagine the white-knuckle experience of watching this all play out on the big screen. It's 40ish minutes of pure suspense and anxiety as the story shuffles between the man at the bottom of the ocean, Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), his fellow saturation divers (Woody Harrelson as Duncan and Simu Liu as Dave) in the diving bell below the waters who are unable to help and the crew in the support vessel above (including Cliff Cutris and Mark Bonnar) scrambling to get their systems back online and operational as the clock rapidly runs out. Ten minutes has never felt so short – and then it just gets worse as the clock starts counting up, showing Chris's time without oxygen.
At one point, Liu's character Dave, a no-nonsense, all-business diver says matter-of-factly at that it's a body recovery, not a rescue. Deep sea saturation diving is a dangerous business, described at the start of the film as the most dangerous job on earth. Chris tells his fiancé, in a short introduction, that it's no more dangerous than going to space. She replies that it's funny that he thinks that is comforting.
The real incident happened in September 2012 – Dave, Duncan and Chris were just one team of divers sent to the ocean floor off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, to repair oil... Read More