February 2, 2006

Games and movies join forces with glanz.LEISTUNG:

Hannibal documentary features Ancient Wars: Sparta

Playlogic Entertainment's RTS game Ancient Wars: Sparta will be used to visualize many historical scenes, battles and ancient handcrafts in the documentary “Hannibal". The collaboration between German full-service gaming agency IMC and movie production company ZEITFILM was so successful that both companies agreed to team up and found a joint venture named glanz.LEISTUNG.

Both partners have established an impressive track record in their business fields, working for well known companies: ZEITFILM has realized projects for Discovery Channel, The History Channel, ARD, ARTE, WDR, ZDF, AETN and others. IMC has developed games for Atari, Playlogic, Akella, 1C and other publishers and development teams all over the world.

glanz.LEISTUNG´s main task is to help studios, film teams, producers and directors to find adequate game products to visualize scenes, events, happenings, complex animations and other tasks for their production and organize the recording of this footage in every available format. Currently the company finished the first approach which has been unveiled in Washington early 2006.

The first part from the five episode TV documentary “Rebels of History“ features the life of 28 year old Hannibal Barca. Ancient life is shown for the very first time in movie history by the combination of real filmed footage with living animals and actors, and the visualization with footage from the upcoming modern entertainment PC games Ancient Wars: Sparta. The result is an extremely convincing and never before seen mix of established live acting and technically unique illustrations. This spadework proves the value of glanz.LEISTUNG´s idea to bring the industry of movies/documentations and the gaming industry closer together than ever before.

Successors to Hannibal in the “Rebels of History“ series will be shot later on - once again with implementation of computer game visualizations: El Cid, Joan of Arc, Nicolaus Copernicus and Robert “Rob Roy“ MacGregor.

Joerg Altekruse, Managing Director of ZEITFILM said, “The possibilities by using games to visualize difficult and hard to shoot events in movies are nearly unlimited. With these powerful graphics we are much more flexible, than using time consuming rendered animations. With computer games and their nearly unlimited potential, the profit to create an aesthetic appeal for the audience is very intense.“

Jeanne-Marie Ehbauer, joint managing director of IMC,  “From own experiences we know that it’s not too easy to present complex expert knowledge in a comprehensible way. As we are aware of the huge potentials of the interactive entertainment industry we are looking forward to solve such problems while working in close collaboration with the film and documentation industry. glanz.LEISTUNG gives us the opportunity to provide film-makers or other creative people ideas and options to create realistic spectacular visuals without spending millions of dollars for CGI effects.“

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