…and efficiently covering Christmas, New Year and the upcoming Chinese New Year all in the one beautiful piece. Thank you Makoto! Check out more of Makoto’s super sweet artworks…makocchi-desu.blogspot.com

Like something from a Harry Potter film stands our new home at Adelaide Studios. Photo courtesy of Tricia Watkinson for Adelaide Now.

The building, once Adelaide’s most revered mental health hospital (I saw first hand the old electro-shock therapy gear once used there on my first tour of the building), has received a $48 million facelift and fit-out. The new construction at the rear of the building holds two huge new sound stages and a Dolby Mixing Theatre amongst other expensive toys. Soon to be the site of a bunch of TV series and film productions taking place in the new facilities, the building is also home to the South Australian Film Corporation, a number of independent production companies, the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival and now PRA.  NB. I apologise in advance to the other tenants for the state of the shared kitchen on level 1.

An Artists Impression of the Lunatic Asylum in 1890.

The building was known as the ‘Parkside Lunatic Asylum’ when it first opened in 1870 up til 1913. The fact that its name once had both the words ‘Lunatic’ and ‘Asylum’ in it is pretty impressive. I wonder when today’s terminology of ‘Mental Health Consumer’ will be considered politically incorrect?

Oh, and about the haunted thing… apart from a creepy sounding howling wind that happens every now and then caused by some open windows and unsealed office doors, we haven’t felt anything creepy at all. In fact, we’ve got twenty crew working across three bitchin’ projects right now so the place is buzzing with creative industriousness.  Haunted shmaunted!

It is a great place to be working and we look forward to sharing with you early in 2012 some of the work that’s being concocted within the one-metre thick walls of this beautiful structure here in Glenside.

With Halfbrick (the creators of the iphone smash hit Fruit Ninja) recently making a partial acquisition of PRA we now have the support, creativity and experience of their team behind us. From here we will work on bringing inspired and engaging animation to audiences through multiple channels. This includes games; which we are without doubt an integral part of the entertainment spectrum. We are pumped about the future with Halfbrick.

We will continue to serve new and ongoing clients in advertising and games – our mission of bringing inspired and engaging animation to audiences applies also to the TVC’s, cinematics and trailers we produce.  This will still be our core business focus.

Stay tuned for the game trailer we are working on with Halfbrick for their next instalment in the Barry Steakfries saga…Machine Gun Jetpack.

Some excerpts from the press release release below…

“This is an important step for Halfbrick. We see their [PRA's] narrative focus as an incredible resource for creating new and truly compelling IP. Between PRA and Halfbrick, there is barely a screen we can’t reach,” said Shainiel Deo, CEO of Halfbrick.

“The Halfbrick team has built a culture that fosters creative brilliance and simply breeds success,” said Sam White, CEO of The People’s Republic of Animation. “We are very excited to be a part of Halfbrick, both to work with them to create exciting new gaming IP, and to continue to establish PRA one of the world’s leading animation studios.”

Full press release here.

We conceived and produced three bumpers for the game launch: Inky Ladies, Inky Dysfunction and Prismas Got Talent.

de Blob 2 - Inky Ladies

For all of you who haven’t yet checked out the recently released de Blob 2 game it is available now on just about every platform you can think of.  Shake that inky maker!

Nick is never short of an opinion and always seems to have his finger right on the pulse of the industry here as well as the wider international games development scene.

While we’re on the topic, I’ll post up some of the bumpers we produced recently for Bluetongue Entertainment and THQ in the lead up to the de Blob 2 release shortly…

Thanks to Kotaku for the interview.

We finally have PAL and NTSC versions of the standard def DVD’s for The Cat Piano available via Kunaki here.

The DVD features all the same special features as the Limited Edition Blu-ray but the Standard Def DVD’s aren’t signed. They will suit those of you who haven’t jumped on the Blu-ray train as yet.

Cheers!

The Limited Edition Cat Piano discs are available from here.

While we offered to sketch out one of the winning ideas one of the entrants, Daniel Shepley, saved us the trouble. I’ve included his ideas below….thanks Daniel.

Some of the other ideas offered by our readers included:

“The A-Corgi-On” from Will Spartalis:

One end of a simple accordion/concertina is strapped to the rear end of a male Welsh Corgi in heat. The musician merely stands next to the Corgi, presents his/her leg, and waits for the inevitable hump. The repeated vertical movement of said Corgi suspends and compresses said accordion, creating a monotonous hee-haw of passionate musical beauty.

“The Panda-Tamba-rine” from Levi George:

Fans of music, prepare yourself for the awesome musical power of the Panda-Tamba-riene! How does this note worthy piece of percussion work? Essentially it looks like a normal tambourine. In fact, it is exactly a tambourine, with one important difference! Instead of using your hand to hit the tambourine like a common chump, you just hit the tambourine over the head of a panda to make those zils sing! And the Panda will probably moan or something.

“The Mar-stomp-ial” from Jonathan Draysey:

Combining “Stomp” the performance art with famous Australian marsupials – it’s so much more than an instrument. For instance as the performers slam their feet onto the stage they scream in pain as the quills of the live echidna’s pierce their flesh – the poor marsupials themselves provide an entertaining backing track as they too join in the chorus of pain.

At the time of writing the previous newsletter, I didn’t realise that one of the sections cut from the original ‘Cat Piano’ poem by Eddie included reference to a few twisted intruments. Here’s the paragraph below that didn’t make it in the final. (Imagine a Nick Cave narration while reading…)

And what shall we discover there?
Uncovering plans too horrid to bare
An awful orchestra of abominable instruments;
A cobra flute, a lobster lute
A mouse organ and monkey drums and a pair of Armadillo maracas,
A tuna tuba, a tiger trombone
Even an alligator gramaphone.

Also, Daniel Shepley (the artist featured above) also has a couple other things online for you to check out.

He just entered an animtion for the ‘make your own doritos ad’ competition so please help him out with a vote. It’s called “The Bad Comedian” and you can find it at: www.doritos.com.au

Oh yeah, and he also has some t-shirts up at:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/chknman

Thanks everyone for your replies. DVDs are on the way to the winners!

To pick up a free DVD of PRApaganda, we asked our readers to tell us ‘What is the one word that best describes The People’s Republic of Animation to you?”

It was a fairly light-hearted exercise (thanks to all those who replied) but we did get an interesting perspective on what our readers thought about us.

Some of the responses were:

PassionatelyHandcraftedWithlove

Fearless

Inspirational

Passionate

Vivificative (very creative Josh Z!)

and in a strong George W Bush/Texan drawl:  “our closest friends and allies”

I have to admit, my personal fave was:

Remaginary (Definition: The sensation of viewing something from ones’ own mind, as if from the personal subconscious, and feeling as though one is recalling the wonderful memory of a dream – yet with the secure knowledge of having never witnessed anything quite like it ever before. )

Some of the more tongue-in-cheek (I hope!) answers were:

Gay

Media Sluts

So I guess that makes us a fearless and inspirational bunch of gay media sluts?

Seriously though, it was great to get some humour in the responses. We know a lot of you pretty well and that is what we’re trying to build – a direct, close relationship with our audience. So close, in fact, that we can poke a bit of fun at each other.

We hope you, our audience, will always feel free to tell us honestly what you think about our studio and our work.

For those that submitted a response, your DVD’s are on the way folks. Enjoy!

If you missed out on the promotion feel free to comment here on this post as to how you’d describe the PRA.

Subscribe to ‘Pravda’ here if you would like monthly email updates from the PRA.