March 26, 2008--The audiovisual production company Orbita Max started filming March 8 in Namibia for the first Spanish film shot entirely in 3D for giant screen theaters, digital theaters, and conventional 35mm theaters. The film, with the working title The Magic Tale, tells the story of a girl’s fantastic travel to Africa, where she interacts with other children, wild animals, trees, and plants that show her the way to the world of imagination and to the meaning of life.

The film is produced and directed by producer and journalist Jordi Llompart, who is collaborating with director of photography Tomás Pladevall, director of stereoscopic photography for giant screen films William Reeve, and visual effects and post-production director José María Aragonés. This will be the first Spanish 3D feature film shot entirely in real stereoscopic images using two simultaneous cameras in order to reproduce the vision of the right and left eye, and not generating the image with computers.

In the first phase of the shooting, scheduled from March 8 to May 18 in Namibia and South Africa, there will be 100 professionals, more than 250 extras, and diverse wild animals like elephants, lions, lynxs and cheetahs, some of them specially trained for the film sequences. Other characters in the film will be created and integrated to the stereoscopic real image with sophisticated animation techniques.

The Magic Tale is a film inspired by the book The Heart on the Sand by Jordi Llompart. The film is meant for all audiences to be enjoyed in a 3D theater where the viewer will feel totally immersed in the action. The locations of the film will be Barcelona and different natural parks of great beauty in South Africa and Namibia. The main characters are the Namibian children Eva Gerretsen (10 years old) and Raymond Mvula (12), and the film also includes Spanish actor Adrià Collado, South African actor John Whiteley, and the Spanish top model Verónica Blume, for whom this will be her first feature film.

The shooting in South Africa and Namibia will be during March, April, and May, and it will be followed by a shoot in Barcelona next summer, with dates still to be determined. The film, however, won’t be released until the end of 2009, once the long postproduction process is finished. The postproduction includes the insertion of animation and visual effects in collaboration with the animation company Entropy Studio from Zaragoza (Spain).

Orbita Max released in February 2005 the blockbuster film Mystery of the Nile, the first Spanish-produced giant screen film, which documents the first complete descent in history of the Blue Nile. Mystery of the Nile, co-produced along with MacGillivray Freeman Films, has taken in more than $38 million USD, had 6.5 million viewers, and received many international accolades, including Special Achievement, Best Photography, and Best Soundtrack at the 2005 Giant Screen Theater Association Awards and The Grand Prize, The Youth Prize, and The Public’s Choice Prize at the La Géode Large Format Film Festival in Paris, being the first time in that festival’s history that one film was awarded up to three prizes.

If Mystery of the Nile was a milestone in Spanish cinematography for being the first production in the country for giant screen theaters, The Magic Tale expects to follow the same path of innovation and success. This film, though, widens its exhibition to other markets such as digital cinema, which is growing all over the world, and incorporates spectacular 3D as the main attraction factor against the competition of television, DVD and illegal downloading of movies.

For the financing of the project, Orbita Max has teamed up with different production and investment partners, all of them Spanish, including the investing societies Invercartera, Inverpyme and Més Films, and the co-producers Apuntolapospo and Televisió de Catalunya. Orbita Max, the project’s leader, is an audiovisual production company created eight years ago by Jordi Llompart and is jointly owned by Orbita Report, SL and RBA group. The film also includes the support of the European MEDIA program, the Spanish Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) and the Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC).