Enhanced Intelligent Animation Capabilities

Year Of The Fish uses Studio Artist's unique intelligent auto painting capabilities to give the film a flowing organic look, best described as “a painting brought to life” that stylistically sets itself apart from previous rotoscoped movies. Using Studio Artist also allowed the animators to accomplish with 3 people what would normally employ 40 full-time artists. The low-budget production was created on four Apple G5 computers using Studio Artist at a tiny fraction of the cost of the typical animated feature length film.

Writer/Director David Kaplan was able to sample the color palettes from artists such as Van Gogh and Cezanne using Studio Artist's auto-color palette capabilities and then apply these color schemes to the Studio Artist auto-rotoscoping paint process. "This gives the film a richness and depth unusual to animated fare," notes Kaplan, who is making his feature film debut. Kaplan also used Studio Artist's Supersizer Interpolator and Warping capabilities to up-size paint animated digital footage to a final high resolution frame size and aspect ratio for the final high resolution cinematic feature film.

Kaplan’s screenplay is based on a 9th Century Chinese variant of Cinderella - the oldest known version of the story. The movie stars Tsai Chin (Memoirs of a Geisha), Ken Leung (X-Men: The Last Stand), Randall Duk Kim (The Matrix: Reloaded) and newcomer An Nguyen. It was produced by Janet Yang (The Joy Luck Club) and Rocco Caruso (Judy Berlin). Mr. Kaplan is a New York based filmmaker who has made several award-winning short films, most notably Little Red Riding Hood, starring Christina Ricci.