Hong Kong company Global Digital Creations Holdings hopes that with its 3D animated movie Thru the Mobius Strip,  it will become a name known worldwide

A Hong Kong company is blazing a pioneering international animated-movie trail – with headquarters in the city, production in the Pearl River Delta, southern China, and distribution worldwide.

Global Digital Creations Holdings (GDC) has ploughed HK$154 million (US$20 million) into a groundbreaking 3D movie, Thru The Mobius Strip, a full-length feature film based on a cult French cartoon. GDC bought the rights to the project, hired a writer from the US and charged its animators with the task of bringing it to life.

The company has state-of-the-art studios in Shenzhen, next-door to Hong Kong, and skilled animators who are expert in the specialised and labour-intensive art of making 3D animated feature films.

The finished product recently debuted at the Cannes film festival in France and received warm reviews.  It will be distributed internationally soon, using the Hong Kong-based marketing and distribution arm of the company.

Hong Kong/PRD cooperation

It is a classic case of Hong Kong being used as the product service headquarters – with the bulk of the actual movie-making completed by the 300 animators and artists in Shenzhen.

"There is no film quite like it," says Ellen Ling Xu, who is in charge of the production studio. "It is like Shakespeare's Hamlet but set in outer space with a science fiction twist to it.

"It is a very exciting time for us -- 3D animation is quite new. This project requires a lot of people to work on it, and costs are much cheaper in China. For the staff it is very unusual and challenging for them to work on this project – before, they had been doing work on local productions."

The studio's next venture is also an offbeat concept  which will be brought to life through the skills of animators. Panshel's World is a 52-episode television series about a flying panda, a co-production with a French company.

The people behind GDC are Raymond Neo and his brother Anthony, a Hong Kong lawyer and former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

In a short time, the company's Institute of Digital Media Technology in Shenzhen has been established as the  largest studio of its kind in China and one of the biggest in Asia. Last year, the company started to establish another training centre in Shanghai with a capacity to provide training to 160 digital artists. The company intends to franchise its training operations to other cities in China and Malaysia.

With its latest release, it is also set to become a name known worldwide as a 3D animated movie pioneer.

More details in High-level FILMART ready to roll and FILMART. 

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