Today it was announced that John Carter has been nominated for the 40th Annual Annie Awards for the Animated Effects in a Live Action Production category

Antony Hunt, managing director of Cinesite – “Congratulations and well done to everyone at Cinesite for their outstanding work to deliver Cinesite’s most complex and creative work to date.”

Cinesite created the majority of the film’s environments, including the opposing cities of Zodanga and Helium, the Thern Sanctuary, as well as a massive air battle.  Animated effects feature heavily in Cinesite’s work, including the Thern energy effects, destruction, atmospherics and CG crowds.  Cinesite worked on over 800 visual effects shots and the stereo conversion of 87 minutes of the film, as well as populating the environments with CG crowds and hundreds of CG props.

With director Andrew Stanton’s brief ”somewhere between organic and mechanical” and “Something that has never been seen before” Simon Stanley-Clamp led Cinesite’s work on Thern, the mysterious power controlled by the Thern priesthood which appears in various guises throughout the film.  Thern took a full year of development time to evolve and is most impressive in the Thern Sanctuary, a huge cavern where its scale, depth and complexity can be fully appreciated by the audience.

The Annie Awards honour excellence in the field of animation and will be presented by the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood. The 40th Annual Annie Awards will be held on Saturday 2nd February 2013