 Animation for Africa
By Theo Boshoff
South Africans are creative and resourceful, which is why animation studio Character Matters, with Microsoft technology, has created SA’s first animated 3D movie, which will hit our screens before the year is out.
The movie is called Lion of Judah and is currently being finalised for the big screen using a whole host of supercomputers supplied by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.
The movie is based on a Bible story and sees a group of farm animals banding together to save a lamb from slaughter.
 Because of the huge amount of data it takes to make such an animated movie, technology plays a huge role in seeing it come to fruition. Not only because of the storage of data, but also because of the processing power needed to render each and every image.
In a virtual production such as this, everything is captured as data and with Lion of Judah, over 25 terabytes of information needed to be stored and processed.
The CHPC worked with Microsoft South Africa to install a bank of Windows HPC Server machines to be able to work with Character Matters’ format.
Through this collaboration between the creatives and technology, we can now be proud to show the world our local talent and, hopefully, there will be more to come.
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