[MUSIC PLAYING]
JONAS MANKE: Making fantasy was always
something that excited me because you can make people
perceive an entire new experience.
My name is Jonas Manke, and I'm the solo developer of Omno
and the founder of Studio Inkyfox.
Before I started with the production of Omno,
I was a character animation artist for roughly 10 years.
And I was working mostly in the film and television industry.
Initially, the Omno figure was just a test rig for me
to see how animation works within the Unreal Engine.
And I felt like that little character deserves some more than just
being ripped apart and pulled on.
So I created, just for myself, as a learning experience,
a little landscape around him.
It took, roughly, half a year or so until I had something on my hands
where I felt like this looks kind of cool.
And it took another eight months or so
until I decided to not pick up any further animation jobs,
but instead go full time on Omno and see where the journey goes.
For me, as a solo developer, there's no one
you can bounce your ideas with, right?
You can't get feedback on everything instantly.
There's no team that taps your shoulder
and goes, like, just keep moving.
When you're in doubt, then basically the entire production is stuck.
The MegaGrant gives you the morale boost
and gives you a true indicator that you're
working on something that's promising and that is worth it to pursue
and that someone's believing in you.
That's a message with a really big impact.
ALEJANDRO DAVILA: Growing up with fantasy stories and fairy tales
and mythology, I'd always been wanting to tell stories.
So I set on a quest to do that.
My name is Alejandro, and I am a producer here
at CONICAL Studios in New Zealand.
And we're working on a game that spun out of the Epic MegaGrant
project called The Green Fairy.
BRAD THOMSON: When we started, we just
had this one simple goal of bringing a whole lot of creatives
together to make The Green Fairy, a virtual reality
movie about this character.
And we just wanted to dive into that content more
and tell more about the green fairy and more about this fairy world.
ALEJANDRO DAVILA: We were able to try out virtual reality.
Then we moved on into augmented reality
and then into like video and animation.
And it started to become this really cool transmedia project.
And it's all an evolution of this green fairy IP
that we started out with.
BRAD THOMSON: I think the MegaGrant allowed us to explore
this fairy world a bit more.
We took our original theory project to a very next level.
And it allowed us to bring up the quality like tenfold.
So it ignited that passion, that we were like, with a bit more money,
imagine what else we could do.
ALEJANDRO DAVILA: The Epic MegaGrant really
helped us pave the way to the seed funding
that we received for CONICAL to start working on our ultimate fairy
project, which is this video game.
BRAD THOMSON: It's given us the opportunity
to create a video game studio and do something
that we're passionate about.
Without that, I don't think we would come this far.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Being a husband and wife team
has shaped Snacko in many ways.
And we've grown really close to each other as a result of it.
I'm Jordan.
ERISA LIU: And I'm Erisa.
And we both make up Bluecurse Studios,
and we're working on our first game, Snacko.
So this all started, I had one cat, Mikan.
And then when we met, we adopted another black cat together, Momo.
And those two kind of became the base of Snacko.
[CAT MEOW]
And then we got four more cats somehow.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: [LAUGHS]
ERISA LIU: And so now we have six cats.
[CAT MEOW]
JORDAN GONZALEZ: When this project started,
we were at a pretty stable place in life.
I was a full-time software developer making a pretty decent salary.
And you were just about to go into the games industry on your own.
And then we kind of said, you know what, we're not going to do that.
Let's do the hardest thing possible.
[LAUGHS] And then--
ERISA LIU: Let's have no income.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, let's have no income
and then try to get people to trust in our vision.
But I want to say that the MegaGrant came at the perfect time for us
because it was like there was a lull of activity and opportunities
for the game.
And we were kind of getting demotivated or scared a little.
ERISA LIU: When we got the MegaGrant, we got emails back again
from publishers or people who wanted to support the project.
People started taking it more seriously.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: They did.
ERISA LIU: So that sort of confidence boost from Epic Games,
saying that all scales of production are valid
and all ways of going about video game development are valid,
was a huge help.
NILDO ESSÁ: Hi, my name is Nildo.
I'm the owner of FX Animation Studios.
And right now we're working on what will be the first animated feature
film coming from Mozambique, called Kibwe, which is
part of the Troublemakers project.
Kibwe is a project that's being done mostly by me and my wife.
And our idea to make this project came
because we felt that there was a need for local content.
- Ahh!
NILDO ESSÁ: Our local TV station would mainly show us content that
comes from abroad.
And we felt that our kids needed something
that they would be able to identify themselves with.
We tried our best to make our characters look
as African as possible and as Mozambican as possible.
HALIMA ESSÁ: We don't want this movie to be just made in Mozambique.
We would like for it to be made in Mozambique by Mozambican people.
NILDO ESSÁ: Most productions that are done here are basically done with
the help of foreign investment.
And that can, most of the time, compromise
the vision of each project.
And we don't want to have that compromise.
- Whoa.
- Wow!
- Wow.
NILDO ESSÁ: Receiving the Epic MegaGrant was a light at the end
of the tunnel.
It allowed us to tell the stories as we envisioned them too.
And this, for us, is very important.
We want to be able to put Mozambique on the map.
And we want people to know where we are and who we are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]