MARCH 2008 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [PDF] [RTF] [DOC] [ZIP]

Dreamhive completes trailer for Rubin's Iron And The Maiden

The Dreamhive Animation Studio has announced the completion of a two minute animated trailer for Jason Rubin's successful Iron and The Maiden comic book mini-series, published by Aspen comics.

Set in an alternate 1930's city with bits of futuristic technology, the comic follows Michael Iron, an ex-mobster strongman turned hero with a cybernetic arm. His desire to leave the corrupt City behind and live a peaceful life in the country with the woman he loves sets him against the combined corruption of his former employer the Syndicate, the City Government and a pseudo-church called The Order.

The Dreamhive Animation Studio was tapped in late 2006 by Rubin to begin early pre-production work on a 3D interpretation of his vision. "From day one we were extremely excited about being involved with Jason's property" said co-founder and Character Director, Billy Harper. "I knew that Jason would bring the same passion and commitment to excellence to Iron and The Maiden, that he brought to the Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games at Naughty Dog"

The Dreamhive established a robust production pipeline for the project that merges both software and real-time rendering techniques. "We have a strong background in game development" said co-founder and Senior CG Supervisor, Wes Grandmont III. "This was the perfect project for us to leverage our experience in developing next generation games and apply it to feature animation".

The characters and environments for the project were created and rendered at film resolution using in-house authored real-time shaders within Autodesk's Maya running on Nvidia graphics hardware. Tom Angus, co-founder and Creative World Director said, "We were able to work with our models and view them exactly as they would appear in the final renders. It drastically improved our ability to iterate with a small crew".

The trailer, which has not been publicly released yet, will be available online in the near future. Images from the trailer were published in February's IRON AND THE MAIDEN: BRUTES BIMS, & THE CITY, with a version featuring a 3D cover done by The Dreamhive. The images can also be seen on the studio's site: www.thedreamhive.com.