Platige Image: Unappreciated Animation

Platige Image is an award-winning post-production studio founded in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. Specialising predominately in commercial production, they focus on creating advanced animation and quality special effects for films.

One of their more notable works includes Andrzej Wajda’s Oscar-nominated film Katyn, for which they did the special effects. Telling the story of the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which Polish citizens and prisoner of war officer’s were ordered by Soviet authorities to be mass executed, Platige were responsible for retouching over 160 scenes, which entailed around fifteen minutes of film footage.

Recently, the studio has done a considerable amount of editing on the films of Lars von Trier. At the beginning of 2009, they began working on over eighty takes for von Trier’s Antichrist. This project, led by Jakub Knapik, proved to be a great challenge, as they were working directly with von Trier who was incredibly meticulous about each individual detail of production. Often unhappy with the way the team had edited a scene, it became a long and laborious process, but one whose success is clearly evident in the film’s captivating images. Not only this, but the effects they were working on were far removed from the explosions and very in-your-face style predominant in Hollywood, instead focusing on an unusual blend of subtlety and horror. The influence their work had on the final version of Antichrist is considerable.

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Taken from SubtitledOnline, published online Wed Dec 7th 2011.