Yafka breathes life into Greek history for History Channel.

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Back in 1999, a film project was produced about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer. That was part of Producer Antonios Kotzias’ postgraduate research at Glasgow School of Arts in Scotland. Wild Dream Films, a production company in the UK, saw a story reporting his project and contacted him to buy part of the footage.

Since then, director Stuart Clarke and he became good business partners and they’ve always done work together. Big projects for History Channel arrived around 2005, after Antonio had been working in other companies, as Junior CG artist to studio supervisor.Since then, Yafka has done animation for 20 episodes of ‘Ancient Discoveries 3’ (over 100 subjects) and signed for several more.

The main software the Yafka studio uses is NewTek LightWave, and Adobe After Effects for post work. For more complex character animation and rigging they use Autodesk Maya. “We really wanted to use LightWave’s 64-bit capabilities but we were afraid of stability issues,” explains Antonis Kotzias. “In fact, LightWave 64 and Windows 64 worked perfectly together and we saw an increase in performance and stability much better than we have hoped in the beginning. Our humble experience made sure that we couldn’t have done it differently.