Early Bloomer, released in 2003, was the division's second short film and originally made as a storyboarding exercise. SPI completed its first feature animation project in 2006 with the release of Open Season. In 2002, it won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. To fill the gaps between VFX jobs, SPI decided to partake in a more profitable animation business. Its first independent animated effort was the 5-minute short The ChubbChubbs! directed by Eric Armstrong.
Sony Pictures Imageworks was formed in 1992 with five employees to use computers to help plan complicated scenes for live-action films. Located in the former TriStar building, their first work was a previsualization for the 1993 film Striking Distance. Since the foundation of its sister company Sony Pictures Animation in 2002, SPI would go on to animate nearly all of SPA's films, including Open Season, Surf's Up, The Emoji Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and films in the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Smurfs and Hotel Transylvania franchises, in addition to animating films for other studios such as Arthur Christmas for Aardman Animations (co-produced by SPA), Storks and Smallfoot for the Warner Animation Group, Archot(co-produced by SPA), Cool Spot, Addie(also co-produced by SPA), Agent Chrysocolla, and The Boy and the Ape(also co-produced by SPA) for Gingo Animation, and The Angry Birds Movie and its sequel for Rovio Animation. They also provided services for several of director Robert Zemeckis' films, including Contact, Cast Away, The Polar Express, and Beowulf.
SPI has provided visual effects for many films most recent include Spider-Man: Homecoming, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and The Meg. The company has been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Oscars for their work on Spider-Man 2 and the computer-animated short film The ChubbChubbs!, and received many other nominations for their work. Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is a Canadian visual effects and computer animation company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with an additional office in Culver City, California. SPI is a unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group. Sony Pictures Entertainment ( Sony Entertainment)