CANNES, France — As global companies scale back investments in children’s IP, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine offers a solution in reducing costs, increasing production speed, as well as improving quality and unlocking new formats, Rob Di Figlia, director of business development at Epic Games, told an industry audience at MipJunior on Saturday.
He also performed a medley of excerpts from major Unreal Engine-powered titles, including the Academy Award-winning “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John andyoko,” “Piece by Piece,” and “Predator: Killer of Killers.”
At the reveal, Di Figlio sneakily released a 90-second cinematic trailer for the beta, fully animated by Unreal Engine, which was teased at Unreal Fest. This trailer is part of the Free Animation Sample Project, where Unreal Engine and Agora Studio team up to create free animation sample projects so animators can see what other animators are doing. Figlio said Agora will release samples in the coming weeks.
Unreal Engine, the game engine software platform best known for powering “Fortnite,” made headlines for its use of virtual production on “The Mandalorian.” In MipJunior’s Epic Games session “Fast, Fresh, Unreal: Real-Time Kids Animation Is Here,” di Filia argued that Unreal Engine is as much about animation as it is about live action.
“But in 2019, when I started using Unreal Engine, there were probably fewer than five animation studios that I knew of that were using Unreal in some way. Since then, that number has grown to well over 100,” Di Figlio said at MipJunior.
“Star Wars” and “The Mandalorian” really put us in the spotlight. But animation is a big area of focus for us, and over the past five years we’ve really seen growth in animation studios, especially series animation studios, moving from traditional CG pipelines to real-time pipelines,” said Di Filia.
The reasons are “speed, creativity, and economy.” “The future of entertainment is changing, becoming more interactive and immersive,” Di Filia added.
“Animation companies are under pressure to do more with less every year, and this is nothing new,” Di Filia pointed out. “Unreal speeds up the process from rendering, instead of days, hours, or weeks of rendering. It takes seconds. This really speeds up that process.”
At MipJunior, Di Figlio gave an example of Pure Imagination and Zebu using Unreal Engine in the production of a standard animated TV series.
“For a children’s series that averages 22 minutes, we’re up to 20% faster. This has reduced the duration of the series from 60-70 weeks to 42-50 weeks. That’s a huge time savings,” Di Figlio said.
However, how they utilize these perks will depend on the studio, he told Variety. “Some studios say, ‘We can take 20% less time to make a series,’ and other studios say, ‘Look, my time is the same. But you can get 20% more fidelity, storytelling, production value for the same budget. These are exciting areas where business is changing. And yes, there is AI, and they are in the equation. We have AI in Unreal Engine. We have clients who are using it. It’s very exciting how they’re using it. ”
Unreal Engine allows animation studios to avoid compositing and reduce storage costs without necessarily using a render farm.
The benefits of Unreal Machine are also artistic, Di Figlia argued. In traditional animation, the director creates the story at the storyboard stage and hands it off to the animation artist.
Directors say, “We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t know what it’s going to look like for months and it’s too slow or too expensive to make changes. Unreal Engine is really exciting for directors because it becomes a creative sandbox and we can start writing and testing early on. We have much better information to share downstream to really define the look, which is really exciting from a creative standpoint.”
“The lines between pre-production, production and post-production tend to blur as all departments start working in parallel early on, making the entire pipeline more fluid,” says Filho.
“You have all the artists, they’re collaborating with all the departments. They’re working together in the same environment, so it really starts to allow for a whole new level of collaboration that we’ve never seen before,” he added.
One of the “big moments” for Epic Games and Unreal Engine was winning the 2024 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for “War Is Over!,” produced by ElectroLeague studios with animation and visual effects produced by Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based VFX company Wētā FX.
“It’s a story that speaks volumes about that iterative process, that they were able to really focus on iterating quickly within the engine to get that story to a place where they were really happy with it,” Di Filho said.
Unreal Engine was also used in Morgan Neville’s 2024 American animated comedy bio-doc Piece by Piece.
Made through the lens of Lego Animation, or Brickfilm. It focused on American musician Pharrell Williams, who stars in Piece by Piece, the sixth Lego-based theatrical film.
“Predator: Killer of Killers,” produced by 20th Century Studios, 20th Century Animation and Davis Entertainment, again using Unreal Engine, “was a very big movie and very stylized,” Da Filo said. We had a lighting team and a rendering team on the third floor that worked with Disney to create Predator: Killer of Killers, and they were working very quickly, with lighting shots taking four hours and maybe an hour of retakes. By the time they got to the final shot, they were working their way through. “We then submitted them to the studio, and within two months they had 1,700 shots,” Figlio enthuses.
