Lionsgate Checks Into Animated Hotel
Habbo Hotel, the immensely popular virtual community created by the Sulake Corporation in 2000, has released their slate of animated shorts. Sulake, along with Lionsgate, pulled together 10 animation studios from around the world and challenged them to write a short story taking place in the Habbo world. The 10 resulting shorts were produced in Flash, traditional and 3D animation.
Funbag Animation, Bardel Entertainment, World Leaders Entertainment and Copernicus Studios all took part, and you can view their work at the Habbo site now.
If you go through the voting process, you’ll see that Habbo and Lionsgate are aiming for something much bigger than 10 shorts. It appears as if they’re going to be offering a pay-per-view or subscription model to view shorts, or even long-form entertainment. Shorts I buy – but longer than 5 minutes? Unless you’re talking Harry Potter episodes, I’m not sure if we’re there yet.
