>> The Jim Henson Company is a production company
where all of our productions have an element of fantasy,
world creation, character creation.
>> We are innovators in puppetry and animatronics and real time
animation.
Virtual production is not new to us.
We have been doing this for so long.
>> For us, the whole idea of 3D digital animated characters
that can be performed literally came in 1994.
So that's sort of put us way ahead
of other companies on that very specific approach.
We had been using our proprietary viewer
to visualize our animation and we'd
been working with that viewer since 1995.
All that mattered to us is we needed real time feedback
in order for the performers to know what they were doing,
because puppeteers don't feel a performance,
they see a performance.
Yet we never really got to a point
where the viewer was good enough to broadcast the image.
By teaming up with Unreal on a live action set,
we can produce finished 3D animation
that can then go to editorial and be completed
in the same way that you make a live action production.
>>Or do we...?
Yes, we do!
It's Earth to Ned!
>> Earth to Ned is one of our latest TV shows
that's currently on Disney+.
It's about aliens who were sent to Earth for an invasion,
but they became obsessed with pop culture.
And then they decided to create a talk show and interview celebrities.
>> It's going to feel like an American late night
talk show.
But it's hosted by aliens.
And it's and it's Ned and Cornelius and they're animatronic
and all of their little quad helpers that are around them.
And then, Betty, who's the artificial intelligence.
So the biggest challenge with Betty
was the fact that I wanted her made of electricity
and she needed to be able to appear and disappear and talk
and interact with the characters.
>> AI's don't dream.
That's for lesser beings.
>> And it all needed to happen in real time on camera
with no post.
Unreal allowed us to use our award winning puppet controls
to interact in a virtual world that's in stunning quality,
and a high frame rate without any latency.
Unreal gave us all those complex materials,
the particles, all the effects that we needed to
perform and animate in real time with that engine.
>> Get this down.
>> Movie tips! >> Get his keys to success.
>> Oh, OK.
I was busy trying to--
>> The guests were really excited when they came on and realized,
oh, she's really going to be there
because I think people assumed it
was going to be a post effect.
>> I'm Darcy.
>> I know who you are.
>> That illusion was complete for the guests who were there.
They couldn't see any puppeteers.
They just saw Ned and they saw Cornelius and they saw Betty.
>> Make sure you grab a gift bag on your way out.
>> And it's fabulous when that happens.
>> We decided to test a different character.
We wanted to take a creature design that we do here
at Henson and see how far we can push not just the performance,
but also make it look believable.
And we're going to continue pushing those limits,
you know, to see how far we can take that character.
>> And if we can start delivering our animated TV shows,
our full 3D animated TV shows with a higher and higher
and higher percentage of the shots
requiring no post-production pipeline,
then obviously, the efficiency of the production skyrockets.
And with Unreal, we can get a much higher quality
image, a finished image.
We can get to a finished image in real time.
And we couldn't do that.
We couldn't do that without Unreal.
We tried. We tried it for a long time.