History
Platige Image was founded by Jarosław Sawko and Piotr Sikora in Warsaw in 1997. The two met in an MBA degree program. They raised start-up capital by selling 300 studio lamps of their own design. The company debuted with VFX work for Justyna Steczkowska's music video, Niekochani (1997). The studio redesigns the visuals for TVP1. Platige received the Golden Eagle Award in 1999 for the redesign. The VFX work for Quo Vadis, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, led to Platige making a special software solely for the purpose of automatic cloning of characters that were to populate the Roman Colosseum depicted in the movie.
In 2004, Platige moved into its new headquarters at Racławicka 99 in Fort Mokotów, one of the forts comprising Fortress Warsaw, a ring of fortifications constructed in the 19th century.[27]
Two years after The Cathedral, Tomek Bagiński released Fallen Art. The short received the Jury Award at the SIGGRAPH festival and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award in the Best Short Animation category. Ça Ira, an opera by Roger Waters, had its world premiere in Poznań in 2006. Platige was commissioned by the opera's director, Janusz Józefowicz, to create the visuals for the performance. The resulting two-hour-long animation, composedw of archival footage and animated sequences, was used as the digital set design for the performance. In 2007, Platige released Ark. The movie was shot using MILO Motion control, a system that combined realistic set designs with computer animation.[28] Ark was screened at multiple international movie festivals.[29] In 2009, Rafał Wieczyński's Popiełuszko: Wolność jest w nas and Andrzej Wajda's Katyń were released. The Danish production house Zentropa commissioned Platige Image to do the visual effects for Lars von Trier's Antichrist.[30]
On December 14, 2011, Platige became a publicly traded company by entering the NewConnect stock market. On the day of its stock exchange debut, the price of Platige shares went up by 32.1 percent. A year later, the price of Platige shares (identified by the PLI symbol) has risen by another 76 percent.[31]
In 2012, Platige Image teamed up with Brazilian advertising director Jarbas Angelli and his agency in São Paulo. That same year, Platige produced a cinematic for the game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.[32] Platige premiered their largest film project yet, The Hero and Message, during Qatar's National Day celebration on 18 December 2012. This 25-minute animation was created in just six months and consisted of over 500 shots, made for Qatar's government agency. The studio released another cinematic for CD Projekt RED's game, Cyberpunk 2077, in January 2013.[33] In 2014, Platige Image released their first in-house mobile game and the start of production on the feature-length animated film, Another Day of Life.[34] Platige worked on a Nike promo featuring Cristiano Ronaldo[35] and the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Ambition spot.[36]
The COVID-19 pandemic led Platige to focus on graphic design projects for the gaming industry, including producing cinematics for the Call of Duty series in collaboration with Activision. The company is also developing a strategy for the next 5 years,[37] which includes plans to expand into the US and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) markets, among others. During Platige's 25th anniversary, Platige prepared a 9-minute film as well as 60, 30, and 15-second commercials.[38] The company also produced commercials for Qantas.
