Sony Pictures Imageworks and The Foundry Share Technologies

CULVER CITY, Calif., Nov. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Pictures Imageworks, the
award-winning visual effects and animation company known for the innovative
digital production tools it provides to its artists and filmmakers, and The
Foundry, a leading developer of visual effects (VFX) software, are embarking
on a reciprocal technology sharing relationship to mutually advance the state
of the art in visual effects and digital production.

In this unique collaboration, The Foundry acquires access to Sony Pictures
Imageworks' highly regarded 2D/3D lighting technology package, Katana, with
which they will be able to collaborate on future developments. As part of the
collaboration, Sony Pictures Imageworks adds The Foundry's industry renowned
compositing software, Nuke, to its existing stable of the company's plug-ins.
Katana is a production-proven toolset that has been used by Imageworks to
facilitate their award-winning VFX work on films such as the Spider-Man(TM)
movies, Superman Returns, I am Legend and, most recently, G-Force,Cloudy with
a Chance of Meatballs and the upcoming Alice in Wonderland. Nuke has most
recently been used on such films as District 9, Transformers, and Terminator
Salvation.

The agreement also involves close cooperation going forward. The two
companies will work together to ensure the successful use and integration of
each other's technology, and exchange updates and new discoveries.

"Artistry enabled by cutting-edge technology is the cornerstone of our
business," said Randy Lake, executive vice president and general manager of
Sony Pictures Imageworks. "This creative relationship with The Foundry brings
great technologies together and places powerful production tools into the
hands of artists."

"Imageworks is taking a far more open approach to its technology. Sharing
software with a progressive company like The Foundry is an important step for
both of our companies," said Rob Bredow, chief technology officer of Sony
Pictures Imageworks. "First, it enables Imageworks to provide the best
compositing tools to our artists today by adopting Nuke widely into our VFX
and animation workflows. And second, The Foundry has a proven track record of
taking production proven software and turning it into industry-leading
solutions. We're looking forward to collaborating with The Foundry to help
create the next generation of tools leveraging the best of our mutual
technologies. We are expecting great things from this relationship to give
artists the tools to create even greater imagery."

Bill Collis, The Foundry CEO, said, "It's highly unusual for software or post
production companies to share technologies and that's what makes our new
relationship with Sony Pictures Imageworks so special. There are some exciting
ideas we can explore over the coming years, building on Imageworks' Katana
technology and The Foundry's customer-driven product focus for Nuke to deliver
the next generation of compositing software. Sony is obviously a highly
respected player in the industry and the fact that they are implementing our
software, and collaborating on future products, is a huge compliment. We are
looking forward to working with Sony, and to seeing what fantastic results we
can achieve together."

Imageworks continues to aggressively advance the company's artist capabilities
and core technology, optimize its production pipeline and processes, and
foster broad-based adoption of formerly proprietary tools.

In June, Imageworks named Rob Bredow, one of the industry's leading visual
effects supervisors, as its Chief Technology Officer. Bredow, who was most
recently the visual effects supervisor on the hit animated movie Cloudy With A
Chance Of Meatballs, brings practical experience and artistic perspective to
this new role. He has been instrumental in optimizing the production pipeline
and improving the company's color, lighting and rendering processes.

The Katana software is an integral component of this strategic partnership
with The Foundry. Katana is a tool developed at Imageworks to aid artists in
look development, lighting, rendering and compositing of digital imagery.
Rather than defining a rigid pipeline for these tasks, Katana provides a
framework for building custom tools tailored to the unique needs of each show.
In development since 2004, this approach has allowed Imageworks to remain
"cutting edge" when "cutting edge" is a constantly moving target. Through the
Foundry relationship, this technology can now become available to the
industry.

In August, Imageworks launched five of its technologies into an open-source
development program. The program initially includes OSL, a programmable
shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya
Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database
migration tool, and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

ABOUT SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS
Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is the Academy Award® winning, state-of-the-art
visual effects and animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions. The
Imageworks production environment supports live-action visual effects and
character animation, all-CG animation, Imageworks 3D stereoscopic, and
Imageworks Interactive, a full service creative group that produces websites
and supports digital marketing for the studio and outside clients.

Imageworks' achievements have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences with Oscars® for its work on Spider-Man(TM) 2 and the CG
animated short film The ChubbChubbs! In 2008, Surf's Up was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2007, two of Imageworks' projects,
Superman Returns and the all-CG animated feature Monster House, were nominated
for Academy Awards in the Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects and Best
Animated Feature respectively. With those two nominations, Imageworks became
the first studio to be recognized in the same year in these distinct areas, an
indication of the diversity and quality of the company's capabilities. Other
Oscar® nominated projects include The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The
Witch and The Wardrobe, Spider-Man(TM), Hollow Man, Stuart Little and Starship
Troopers, for a total of ten nominations.

Imageworks' most recently completed projects include Cloudy With A Chance Of
Meatballs, G-Force, and Watchmen, Upcoming projects include 2012, Alice In
Wonderland, and Cats And Dogs 2.

Imageworks maintains operations in Culver City, CA; Novato, CA; Albuquerque,
New Mexico and Chennai, India.

Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is a division of Sony Pictures Digital
Production Inc.

For more information, please visit www.imageworks.com.

For further information, please contact: donlevy@sonypictures.com

ABOUT THE FOUNDRY
The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image
processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video
post-production.

The Foundry has a well-established client base that includes leading visual
effects facilities worldwide, such as Warner Bros., The Moving Picture
Company, Weta Digital, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Digital
Domain. It is at the cutting edge of software development, marketing and
sales for visual effects compositing.

In June 2009, The Foundry announced a management buyout for an undisclosed sum
led by Advent Venture Partners. Advent backed The Foundry's management team,
led by CEO Dr. Bill Collis and the original founders.

The Foundry is highly profitable and has more than doubled revenues in the
last eighteen months to $10m. Advent's support permits the company to continue
expansion plans that have seen staff numbers more than double from 20 to over
50 in the past two years.

The Foundry's products support a wide range of award-winning host platforms
including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS,
Baselight, Film Master, Nuke, Scratch, Shake and Final Cut Pro. In 2007, the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Scientific and Technical
Achievement Award® to The Foundry's development team for the Furnace image
processing suite. The company now holds two products with AMPAS Sci-Tech
Award® winning technology including high-end compositing system Nuke.

The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For
more information please visit : www.thefoundry.co.uk

SOURCE Sony Pictures Imageworks

Cordelia Meacher, +44 (0) 7961 311080, cordelia@if-communications.com, for
Sony Pictures Imageworks