Atlanta talent creates animated epic 'Delgo'

During the creation of "Delgo," Marc Adler's team of animators, designers and computer whizzes — a pool of Atlanta's high-tech talent — started getting poached by big Hollywood studios.

"We were new and made the mistake of putting the latest bits of the film online every day, with our real names on it," says Adler, 36, of the "digital dailies," which were designed for in-house collaboration but, once open to the public, offered a peek into the making of an animated feature-length fantasy adventure.

Opening Friday on 2,000 screens across the country, "Delgo" was created, produced and distributed by Adler's Fathom Studios, a local upstart independent. The hope is that the film's artistic and commercial success provides the critical mass to sustain Atlanta's budding animation industry.

The film is part "Romeo and Juliet" (played by reptilian humanoids), part "Lord of the Rings" epic in which one civilization flies like hummingbirds and the other wields an invisible Jedi-like force.

Despite having his best staff hired away, the dailies on the delgo.com site were receiving a half-million hits a month, which led to coverage from CNN, film blogs and others.

"It was brilliant as viral marketing," Adler recalls, "but terrible for making a film." So they began hiding everyone's identities online with high-falutin' aliases. Adler tagged himself "Sublime Patron of Dreams."

That's not from a lack of modesty: "Delgo" is Adler's fantasy come true — as writer, director, producer and chief cheerleader for a project he's thought about since he was a kid running around with a cousin and an 8mm movie camera.

A local team

With an infectiously boyish grin, and dressed neck to toe in black, save for sporty white ankle socks, the native Texan speaks rapidly and eagerly ticks off the movie's advance praise, including the popular-vote award at Brazil's Anima Mundi 2008 animation festival.

But if the film's a hit, Atlanta's rising creative class should get its share of the credit.

"We're completely segregated from Hollywood," Adler says, except for the film's celebrity voices — Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Burt Reynolds, the late Anne Bancroft and others. The stars were hired to fill niche-marketing to different demographics. Adler explains how it works: "Kelly Ripa speaks to 'moms,' Val Kilmer was Batman, Eric Idle says 'comedy.' "

For everything else, he recruited a team either trained or working locally, from Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia Tech and smaller digital outfits. The drama department of North Atlanta High School pitched in, too, lending young actors to run scenes in real-time, to help the animators draw more lifelike characters.

Atlanta-based Cartoon Network offered advice along the way and will get rights to "Delgo" after its initial theater and DVD releases.

The near-term goal, if "Delgo" is a commercial success, is to plan sequels and other films. "It's impossible to uproot people from L.A. to Atlanta to make a film, unless you've got several in the works. Atlanta can be the next incubator for ideas and creative talent," Adler enthuses.

A years-long project

From a family of artists and art dealers — Samuel Koontz, his uncle, sold Picasso's work in the U.S. — Adler moved to Atlanta as a business major at Emory.

In 1991, he started a Web-development consulting company from his dorm room. By the time he finished an MBA, he had 30 employees and had snagged Fortune 1000 companies as clients, including Pepsi, UPS and Yahoo. Macquarium Intelligent Communications, his firm on Peachtree Street just north of Midtown, still employs several of his old classmates.

"I'm not an artist but art, technology and commerce have been my whole life," he offers. "When my cousin was diagnosed with cancer, I decided to take this storyline we'd developed and invest in it and make it real."

Kay Beck, director of Georgia State's Digital Arts Entertainment Lab, has been a consultant to Adler on the "Delgo" project since 2000.

Beck notes that in today's market, theatrical releases are essentially "big advertisements" for all that follows. "Marc's hand has been in every aspect [of 'Delgo']. He's got cleverly designed merchandise — lunchboxes and action figures — and he's planned to do well in the foreign markets and on DVD, where the profits can be three times as great."

Benn Konsynski, an Emory professor who specializes in the intersection of business and technology, sees "Delgo" — billed as the first full-length animated feature made by Georgia-based talent — as a major step in building the regional animation industry.

It starts with a story

It might not be so easy.

Maureen Furniss, a film animation historian who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, hasn't seen "Delgo" but cautions that it's rarely the glitzy technology or business model that attracts a huge audience — what counts is telling a compelling story.

"People will see an animated film from a studio they know — Disney and Pixar — but it takes a really strong and unique story for a small studio to break in," she says.

" 'The Triplets of Belleville' was weird from an American perspective, with ugly characters and no chance for merchandise tie-ins, but it won an Oscar and was hugely successful.

"In every case, the technology is forgotten after a few minutes and it's the story that people hang onto."

Still, as Konsynski frames it, "The uniqueness here is the democratization of the industry.

"With changes in technology, a small indie film studio can make a product that's every inch as well-crafted and [focus-group] tested as anything from a big studio."