Cinesite has released “Beans”, their first short animated film online today! The film, which showcases the company’s creature animation skills, will be circulated widely via social media from today.

Managing Director Antony Hunt says, “Over the past few months, we have been looking at ways of developing and showcasing the skills we have in-house.  Animated content is a business area which we have been interested in for some time, as part of our organic growth strategy.”

A short film with an unexpected ending, Beans was directed by Animator Alvise Avati and produced by Cinesite’s Animation Director Eamonn Butler.  It was created by a team of Cinesite modellers, texturers and FX artists.

Beans is set on the surface of the moon.  Astronauts proudly plant a flag before a terrifying alien suddenly appears, hunting down and destroying each of them.  One man is left.  Will he conquer his fear and evade a sticky end?

Cinesite has a strong, twenty-year reputation for creating world-class visual effects.  Recent and forthcoming work includes 300: Rise of an Empire (Warner Bros.), The Monuments Men (Columbia/Fox), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Paramount Pictures) and World War Z (Paramount Pictures). As you would expect, the short features high quality modelling, texturing and technical effects, but most importantly, it demonstrates the world-class standard of their animation team.

Eamonn Butler, said, “Creating our own content gave us creative control and proved to be an invaluable way to show what the Cinesite team are capable of.  I see shorts and in-house projects like this as essential to our creative development and it’s something we are committed to.  We’ve had a lot of fun making Beans and I hope that people have as much fun watching and sharing it.”

Alvise Avati – Director

Alvise wrote, directed and was an animator on Beans, the latest of several short films he has conceived and created.

Italian by birth, Alvise studied art at the Liceo Artistico Donatello in Rome.  He soon became interested in animation, having inherited a passion for storytelling from his father, Italian film director and producer Pupi Avati.  After getting his first break at Weta, as animator on King Kong, Avatar and other titles, he moved on to ILM in San Francisco for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, before moving to London.

Eamonn Butler – Producer

An internationally renowned animation director, Eamonn is equally at home in visual effects and character animation.  Working in the US for ten years with Walt Disney Feature Animation, his credits included Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur, Reign of Fire and Chicken Little.  Since moving back to the UK his visual effects credits have included John Carter, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, Paul and the forthcoming Tom Cruise sci-fi action film Edge of Tomorrow.