It's always depressing to hear of a studio in trouble, especially a Softimage one.

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/happy-feet-2--600-staff-let-go-after-movie-flops.html

Very sad news if it's true. Hope all the staff find more work in the near future.

Bad news indeed. Sounds like they migrated from SI to Maya though so no wonder it tanked

http://www.awn.com/articles/3d/happy-feet-two-more-thrills-and-krills

I noticed in another article that they used 3Delight as the renderer. Interesting! Good for the guys at DNA.

There's a million variables that may have contributed to it's poor box office performance. I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point.

Too bad it didn't do well.

They have big Houdini group there too... Cough... "had".

Ironically, even though they claim right on their home page "if we were to define ourselves we would say we are......Storytellers." it would appear that the lack of a decent story is what killed the movie.

Studios never seem to learn that you can animate and render all you want but if the story blows chunks it won't matter. It's a shame all that work went to waste, the sample scenes I saw looked fantastic.

Perhaps software development is in currently the wrong area. Maybe instead of a new renderer, a nice little package that would analyze a script and tell you if it sucks or not would be a great tool. Perhaps call it "Softstory".

But I suppose any 10 year kid could do that. All the studios have to do is read the script BEFORE making the movie.

Even Pixar is not immune to this syndrome it seems judging by the dreadful Cars 2 story-line. Even my kids who usually like almost any cartoon turned it off and watched Looney Tunes instead.

I also think it was a Houdini - Maya house, maybe no one Softimage there... They had a recruitment a few years ago, asking especially for people proficient with Houdini.
It was almost a "private" house of author of Happy Feet One (and what not else...), something like that... Happy Feet Two probably was the only project....

I think there is a slight mix-up going on. Happy Feet 2 was produced by Dr D Studios, the original Happy Feet was produced by Animal Logic. Animal Logic uses Softimage, AFAIK, I haven't got a clue what Dr D Studios used...

I agree fully with ActionArt: More attention to the story is a good way to try and prevent the sinking of a project. And sequels to animated features aren't always the best of ideas to begin with. For one thing: part of your original audience has often outgrown your movie by the time the sequel is done (and the "new crowd" doesn't know of the original yet)...

Very true. Unless you have a real killer idea for a sequel that could easily stand on it's own, don't do it.

It's just amazing sometimes what stories make it to production where 5 minutes spent with any kid would tell them it's not going to work. It would seem a lot cheaper to really prepare the story first but quite often it just doesn't seem to happen.

"Happy Feet 2" estimated budget was $140 million. Someone please tell me where those money gone ? 1/4 of this I could maybe understand but 140 ? please.

Of course, my mistake. I assumed it was the same studio as it was located in Australia.

Raffa might be the guy to ask about all this, maybe. But from my understanding.....

Animal Logic did Happy Feet 1, but for Happy Feet 2, George Miller and KMM decided to take the IP and do it at their own production studios Dr.D.
AL does use Softimage (XSI as it was), but to the best of my knowledge they also used Maya on HF as well. Giant provided the mocap.
My understanding is that Dr.D mostly uses Maya and probably some other stuff but no Softimage.

Sad to hear about people being let go though.