UK’s animation production company Snafu Pictures and Serbia’s Bauk Pictures have penned an agreement to co-produce a new animated sci-fi feature Beckoning.
The film’s synopsis reads: A shipwrecked astronaut fights for survival, amidst a medieval witch-hunt. Beckoning is a gritty sci-fi genre film, where the past and future collide, exploring themes of redemption and motherhood, that will break the mould for an animated feature.
Beckoning will be one of the first features to be shot entirely using motion capture and leveraging the technological advances in Unreal Engine and MetaHuman and getting financial and hardware support from AMD.
The production will be structured as a European co-production with filming and animation taking place in the UK, Serbia and Spain. Lead producers Paul Schleicher and Dan Dixon have experience in producing animation and VFX for film, TV, games and advertising, as well as award-winning live-action genre shorts.
Dixon said, “We’re thrilled to be launching our feature slate with Beckoning as a lead film. It resonates with all of the components we look for in a project; stylistically brave, creator-driven, and underpinned with a depth of storytelling. All of this makes [director] Sava a standout voice for us to collaborate with.”
Writer-director Sava Živković will helm the project. Živković’s credits include dozens of video game cinematics with some of the world’s biggest titles and studios as well as a catalogue of independent shorts like Irradiation, which landed over three million views on Short of the Week.
Živković shared, “What excites me the most about Beckoning, is the very personal and intimate character exploration of the lead character, Morgan, juxtaposed with the epic sci-fi setting of the future meeting the past. The film explores what makes you a parent or guardian, along with themes of motherhood, loss, and how the skeletons from our past can take hold of our present.”
The companies will jointly launch the film at Berlinale this week via the Jets Initiative, which will see the project pitched to potential co-production partners and other backers.