“There’s AI, but there’s no AI in this movie,” director and screenwriter Duncan Jones says of his latest film, “Rogue Trooper.”
The topic came up as producer Stuart Fennegan talked about how he assembled a stellar voice cast for the film, including Aneurin Barnard, Jack Lowden, Hayley Atwell, Darryl McCormack, Reece Shearsmith, Sean Bean, Diane Morgan, Matt Berry and Jemaine Clement.
“We were really lucky that when we were filming, the SAG strike was happening right at the time, and obviously the big issue at that point, for lack of a better word, was the actors’ concerns about AI,” Fennegan says. “Obviously, being a British film, we were able to shoot under impartiality and contractually, no AI performance was used in the film.”
“We were really lucky because we had busy schedules and a lot of the actors who were supposed to be on other shows weren’t working, so we were like, ‘Hey, check out this animatic. Why don’t we do it in a crazy, different way by making an animated movie with Duncan Jones?’ And pretty much everyone was like, ‘Yeah.’ ”
Rogue Trooper, a film adaptation of the 2000 AD comic series created by Jerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, is produced by Rebellion and Liberty Films. It will have its world premiere in Annecy on June 22nd.
Jones and Fennegan learned a lot from their experience making Warcraft and wanted to make a CGI-animated film in the British indie price range. They took the lessons they learned from it and built on it. Jones wrote the script, “recorded all the lines for all the characters, and then worked with the team to put together an animatic for the whole project. So we were able to kind of iterate and figure out how to make it as we went along. And that’s what the final “I think that’s why we’ve been able to come up with a more bespoke, more indie pipeline, and, you know, we’ve been able to turn over 60 million studio movies into movies,” says Fennegan. “Indies have big budgets.” “We were blessed with the connections and partners at Rebellion. We all came together and said we thought we could figure it out as we went along. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Mr Jones said: “The old triangle of speed, quality, cost, we kind of knew that we could afford to sacrifice speed, we could afford to sacrifice speed, and it took us a long time to do that, but we were able to maintain quality and keep costs down.”
Nearly four years in the making, Rogue Trooper tells the story of Gene Infantry 19, the sole survivor (in physical form) of an invading force ordered to fight the Nords on a small, remote planet. He must track down the traitor who sold him and his fellow brothers, and is accompanied by three fallen squad mates whose personalities are preserved in 19 guns, helmets, and backpacks.
Hayley Atwell and Duncan Jones
Susie Allnutt
Although it’s photorealistic, Jones says he used “more animation than I expected.” He shot 16 pages a day for two weeks, with actors coming and going from what was essentially a black box studio. The original animatic became the touchstone for the project.
“We weren’t recording mo-cap of their bodies. We were just recording their faces and voices,” says Jones. “There are areas that are off-limits, so we kind of knew what the environment was going to be and where the scenes were going to take place, but we only used that as a reference for the witness camera, and when we actually did the animation later on, it was after we actually cut the film.”
Mr Jones continues: “There was actually quite a lot of hand-animation on this movie, so it was a true hybrid way of working where we didn’t have to worry about setting up all the motion capture for the actors.”
We also saved money. “Rather than having to process all the data because the cost of processing all that data would be prohibitive, we can extract it from the production pipeline and work on just focusing on human facial and vocal performance and animating only the parts that are needed,” Fennegan says.
When it comes to comic book adaptations, superfan Jones is very enthusiastic, comparing 2000 AD to Marvel and DC in world-building and storytelling.
“One of the interesting things about 2000 AD is that they took a very brave, proactive style with the artists that they used, and allowed the artists to really experiment with different characters in that environment and push things forward in interesting and artistic ways,” Jones says.
He says Gibbons’ War Machine served as a visual touchstone for Rogue Trooper. “I think it might have been a watercolor, like the actual artwork in the book. It was beautiful,” he says, adding, “But we were picking and choosing the magpie from all the different ideas that had come up over the years leading up to the comic book.”
Jones said “Warcraft” wasn’t a hit IP with a rabid fan base, but there was one good thing about it. That means the people who made it loved the IP. The same goes for Rogue Trooper. “Artists like Steve Trumbull, the film’s production designer, loved Rogue Trooper, and they brought in artists who had actually worked on[the comic books]to do concept artwork and design work. So I think the fidelity of this film came from the fact that everyone who worked on it artistically had a real love for the material.”
There were things to consider when implementing an indie animation feature that seemed expensive. “We started out with the idea of creating a theatrical-quality animated film in Unreal Engine, and then, probably about two years into the process, we realized that while it’s a great tool, we weren’t really at that level right now. So by version 5.3, we were set on it,” Fenegan says.
They realized they weren’t equipped with the tools to achieve the look they wanted. So, after two years of production, they “moved on from Unreal” and used traditional animation software like Maya. “Then it ended up being re-rendered in Unreal Engine. So I think the biggest hurdle was literally us realizing, ‘Wait a minute, our original plan for making this movie is not going to get us where we need to be,'” Fennegan says.
They don’t have a distributor yet and are working with CAA to find a distributor.
“We couldn’t be more excited to be premiering at Annecy, which is clearly the greatest animation festival,” says Fennegan.
It seems natural to have a sequel or even a series.
Jones is focused on the here and now. “We’ve put a lot of effort and a lot of time into this. We want to make sure this movie gets in front of an audience. As an indie movie, that’s scary because there’s no studio that can reliably release the movie. We’re at a stage now where we need to find a way to get this movie as much attention as possible.”
