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JEROME CHEN: What was really exciting about Love Death
and Robots was basically Tim Miller, the producer,
was creating a sandbox for animators
to explore creatively without trying to fit into a franchise
or fit into a particular audience.
And he basically picks all the short stories.
And then you're allowed to run with quite a bit of freedom
within that framework.
And that was obviously really exciting for us.
In Vaulted Halls Entombed, it's a military store,
basically soldiers meet creature and have
to fight for their lives.
CRAHG MCPHERSON: So Doug Oddy approached me and said,
we're going to do this thing.
It's got Cthulhu in it.
And I said, I'm in.
And then he said, photorealistic humans.
Multitudes of swarming flesh-eating insects.
And he said, and we're going to do it in Unreal Engine.
And I said, I don't know what that is.
So let's get into it.
Let's try it out.
JEROME CHEN: I've been intrigued by real-time filmmaking
for many, many years, even prior to the advent of Unreal
and other types of technology like that.
And I was looking for an opportunity
to do something creative using real-time.
I saw the episode for LDR as a perfect opportunity
even though we had no prior footprint for Unreal
at the company.
It was a leap of faith.
It's going to be hard.
There's no roadmap.
There's probably no parachute.
I love those kind of challenges.
I love going into a project where you may not
know how you're going to do it.
You have to have enough confidence and maybe enough
self-delusion.
If you get to work on something like this once in your career,
then you're lucky.
What I found to be really exciting about this workflow
was the fact that in pre-production,
when you're building assets that you're
going to be using in layout, those
are the same assets that are going
to end up in the final piece.
They just get progressively better through the process.
DOUG ODDY: We built an entire 15-minute piece as a framework
to work from within two weeks.
Next step would be to take that up and raise
the level of the entire piece all at the same time
right up until the shoot.
JASON GREENBLUM: We were showing blocking.
We actually got feedback from the clients.
They were like, uh, did you spend all your rendering budget
on your assets already?
JEREMY SIKORSKI: Working inside of Unreal
flips the script a little bit.
Our asset artists become world builders.
And they are able to pick and choose
from the Quixel library or other libraries
that we have available.
The fidelity that's available to you at the click of a button,
it's incredible.
It's amazing.
And it allows ideas to happen organically.
And you can explore.
DOUG ODDY: You're just not focused on turntables anymore.
You're seeing things live in the shots as they are meant to be.
And you get swept up in the story.
You get swept up in the capacity to change it and shape it.
It's pretty liberating.
JEROME CHEN: The performance capture process, we
prepared Unreal assets that could be played on monitors,
tracked with the camera in real-time,
where then the actors could then see themselves
in the body of their avatars.
And then they would know as they're
walking through a tunnel, for instance,
the curve of the tunnel.
They actually would maybe crane their head and kind of peek
around the corner.
But in the set, what they're really seeing
is just a bunch of polls indicating
the volume of the tunnel.
And that's vital for helping performances.
Usually, it takes a week or so before I can get the data.
I have to actually order the data
and be very specific about which takes
I like so that they can process the body motion capture first
so that we can begin the process of doing layout.
CRAHG MCPHERSON: Normally, we try
to make our first edit with cuts from the video footage, which
is this mix of 2D storyboards and video footage of actors
running around on a soundstage with tights.
And it feels a million miles away
from what your project is going to look like.
With Unreal's involvement, you get the tape recorder clips
almost right away.
You've got characters interacting
in your environment.
And you can place cameras on them.
You get the eye lines figured out,
or what your cutting pattern looks like.
And that's going to inform how you make your mocap selects.
Now you're making your cut with footage
that looks like the footage in the final project.
DOUG ODDY: We can't say enough about MetaHumans.
The project was very ambitious.
It was doing six characters, human photorealistic characters
in Engine for 15-minute short, all of them with dialogue,
many of them with various degrees
of mutilation and complexity.
JEROME CHEN: In our early discussions with Epic,
they showed me an early version of the MetaHuman demo, which
was basically almost pre-beta code.
It was super impressive.
CRAHG MCPHERSON: Definitely one of the most
time-consuming and resource-intensive things
we do is build face rigs.
They're incredibly resource-heavy,
lots of iterations.
There's a ton of bespoke work involved in that.
So when we knew we had the prospect of MetaHuman,
we thought, yeah, let's lean on these guys
and see what they can deliver for us.
We ended up using them for three of our six human characters
that have face rigs.
And the rigs are as powerful as any rigs we're using right now.
JASON GREENBLUM: It's a real game-changer.
It is something that allows you to not
worry about the details of that aspect of it
and you can focus on the storytelling.
DOUG ODDY: Real-time technology has
started to blur the lines between what was otherwise
weeks and months of rendering to get the final product.
Once you've got your environments laid out,
your sets are lit, everything is looking good,
your performances are in there, the animation's in there,
you can rework the entire film in a day or two,
like every shot.
JEROME CHEN: When you get used to doing
real-time decision-making, the quality of the work
is always better.
So that edge that the Engine gives you is incalculable.
It's easy for me to say that I don't want to go back.
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