Creative and technology studio Preymaker announced the online premiere of Blue, an animated short film created entirely in the cloud by a team of artists collaborating from around the world. It was rendered using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine without any compositing.
Directed by Robert Petrie and executive produced by Angus Kneale, both from Preymaker, Blue was partly funded with the support of an Epic MegaGrant. It leans into the sci-fi genre, with its protagonist, Jules, looking up to the stars and wondering if she’ll ever get to explore the worlds we have yet to see.
One impetus for creating Blue was its open-ended story and Epic’s back-end, real-time technology, which could bring Blue’s world and characters to life beyond the short film. “As developed, Blue is currently presented as a short film,” Petrie says. “However, by leveraging all of the Blue assets in Unreal Engine, Blue can become a metaverse experience, a game, an immersive VR world and a live animation series. Blue can be all those things, which is the most exciting thing of it all.”
Inspired by Pixar’s legacy of work, Preymaker wanted to push the envelope in terms of animation quality and overall visual fidelity. That’s why the studio wanted to deliver final picture using Unreal Engine. “The advantages of working in-engine included lighting and layout capabilities with the set-building aspect,” Petrie says. “The ability to select objects or lights and move them around on the fly was key.”
Preymaker created Blue over the course of eight consolidated months with a team of around 20 animators, modelers, FX and Unreal Engine artists. Of the five Unreal artists, three of them lit and laid out more than 200 shots. The team decided there would be no compositing, which proved crucial to the final look of the film.
Historically, 3D-animated content is rendered out in layers and composited together. By removing the compositing step, Preymaker was able to dedicate more time to crafting the entire look of the film in-engine. This way of working allowed the artists to make fundamental creative decisions all the way up to final delivery that would have been impossible in a linear process. The team had all the shaders on each object and worked with raytracing turned on, interactive lighting, volumetric fog and depth of field, and artists could literally scrub a timeline and change a camera with total ease.
While the entire animation team was based in South Africa, Petrie and Kneale held daily Zoom-based animation reviews, using Autodesk ShotGrid to ensure a seamless project management workflow. Through Preymaker’s cloud-based workflow, artists could work together seamlessly in real time without ever being in the same room.
“We are entering a very exciting time with all the renewed interest in space,” says Kneale. “With the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA returning to the moon and the leaps in technology that SpaceX is making, the world needs young, enquiring minds to tackle tomorrow’s big challenges. We hope our story of Jules’ adventures inspires underrepresented young people, and we hope that Blue helps drive interest not just in animation and filmmaking but in space and all the STEM disciplines. Representation in these fields really matters.”
Blue made its world premiere at the View Conference in Turin, Italy, as part of Epic’s “Future of Animated Storytelling” presentation. The film most recently picked up awards from London International Web & Shorts Film Festival, Venice Shorts, Sweden Film Awards and Independent Shorts.
Other companies that helped bring this story to live include Consulate, Ambr Music, Heard City and Hotspring.
