Unreal Engine 5 Could Unlock a Bold New Future For Movie Animation

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

The recent State of Unreal presentation showcased the myriad of impressive games being built in Epic’s cutting-edge engine, including the near photo-realistic cinematic trailer for Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. It’s a cinematic that looks so good that it’s easy to imagine a whole MCU movie made with the technology.

That’s not a wild thought – Unreal Engine 5 may be best known as the software used to make games like Fortnite, but it’s also a fully-featured film creation tool. And that’s not a theoretical use of the technology, either; it’s currently being used by director Duncan Jones for his upcoming film adaptation of 2000 AD’s Rogue Trooper. Jones, of course, has plenty of experience with CGI, having rendered the world of Azeroth and most of its characters using computer-generated visual effects for his 2016 Warcraft movie. But WarCraft was built using cutting-edge Hollywood film tech, not an engine that’s widely accessible to any indie studio.

And so comes the big question: without the Hollywood-grade tools used by the likes of Industrial Light and Magic, will Rogue Trooper just be a feature-length video game cutscene? That’s a result nobody wants, including the people behind Rogue Trooper. “One of the key points was to make it very much not look like a video game,” says producer Jason Kingsley, the CEO of 2000 AD owner Rebellion Developments.

For the most part, video game graphics fall short of what we expect in movies, but thankfully a film made in Unreal Engine 5 isn’t limited to ‘video game graphics’. “We are not restricted to the optimizations that we have to do for computer games,” explains Kingsley, noting that Rogue Trooper doesn’t have to run in real-time at 60fps using the comparatively low power of an Xbox or a PlayStation. Instead, an animated film is pre-rendered, with each frame drawn by an industry-spec computer in a process that can take thousands of hours. This unlocks the full capability of Unreal Engine 5, which at its top end is able to produce much more impressive results than even a high-spec gaming PC can run.

“The simple fact is that it’s a very flexible, very powerful engine and the visuals get better and better all the time,” says Kingsley.

“Basically the idea of being able to synthesise a very visually sophisticated digital world to tell stories is really what it comes down to,” he explains. “There don’t appear to be many limitations with what the tech can do.”

It would be easy to assume that Unreal Engine 5 is being used for Rogue Trooper due to 2000 AD’s parent company, Rebellion Developments, being a video game studio. But this isn’t so much a case of a game engine being jury-rigged into a film rendering suite. Kingsley tells me that Epic, the company behind Unreal, is “very keen on having this technology used, in part or in whole, for making video, making linear entertainment, movies, TV, whatever it might be.” While Epic doesn’t have an active hand in producing Rogue Trooper, it has offered advice to the crew on how to use Unreal 5’s dedicated movie tools. In short: Unreal is an actively-supported film production suite, and its use on Rogue Trooper is an intended (if pioneering) use of the software.

It’s a very flexible, very powerful engine and the visuals get better and better all the time.

When it comes to actually using Unreal, Kingsley notes that “it shares similarities with making good top-notch, top quality cutscenes, but it also diverges quite dramatically as well in terms of the way you have to story tell.” Narrative methods and techniques across the two mediums naturally differ, but a film production can make the most of all the performance capture elements that Unreal initially adopted for use in video games.

“You can effectively capture the scene with a performance and then you can say, ‘Actually, we could have done with a cutaway there, or we could do with a reverse, or we could do with a close up,’ and then you can get that close up afterwards,” Kingsley explains. “You don’t have to say, ‘Well, we’re not on set anymore, so we can’t get it.’ And so it gives you a different level of flexibility.”

Of course, the software’s convenience and raw power only gets you so far. To ensure Rogue Trooper looks like a movie instead of a game, it has to be made by people who understand what a movie looks like. “We have cinematographers, we have movie lighting experts, we’ve got all the people with the qualifications to make the best possible movies,” Kingsley emphasises.

With the right artists in the driver’s seat, then, the promise is that Unreal can produce exceptional results. But why not just use the proven software that other Hollywood productions use?

“We’re significantly cheaper,” Kingsley reveals. “We’ve done it on an indie budget. We’ve by necessity had to manage the cash flow because it’s us making this, it’s not a big studio doing it.” He doesn’t disclose Rogue Trooper’s budget, but notes that it’s “substantially less than [Avatar] by a long way” while still being “a damn sight more than most people will earn in a lifetime.”

Of course, with an indie budget, animation was the only way Rogue Trooper could ever be made. “Physically building it would’ve been very doable, but you’d have to be one of the bigger directors to get the budget to be able to do it,” says Kingsley. “I’m sure Ridley Scott would’ve done a dramatically good-looking live-action piece if he was doing Rogue Trooper, but instead we’ve gone down this more scalable digital [route].”

The flexibility offered by digital animation means that things can shift and change as work goes on much more easily than it can with live action. That includes the art style, which Kingsley says hasn’t been “defined” yet. “It’s still up for discussion and I guess that will develop over time,” he says. “And this is the great thing about what we can do with the Unreal Engine, and the way we’re processing it with the audio motion studios and our own facilities. It can evolve as we realise what it looks like, what works best for the storytelling and the action.”

It might be the beginning of a new way of making high-fidelity movies at more modest budgets.

Whatever Rogue Trooper eventually looks like, though, one thing for certain is that it won’t just look like a digitised version of a live-action production. “We are taking advantage of the digital space so we can do more with volumetric fogging, for example, than you could in real life,” says Kingsley. This will be combined performance capture to ensure the actors’ “personal humanity” remains present within the Unreal world.

Things seem to be going well for Rogue Trooper, then. But could this novel method be viable for other projects? “This is a proper movie that we are making,” says Kingsley. “And yeah, it might be the beginning of a new way of making high-fidelity movies at more modest budgets.”

He points out the rumours of big studios going over budget with their own Hollywood productions, and how the realities of profit-and-loss business needs to be taken into account. “[Unreal] perhaps takes some of the shackles of limited budget off people who want to make something indie and creative,” he says. “I hope it does. I hope it’s the beginning of something really exciting.”

But even if Unreal doesn’t become prevalent in indie animation, Kingsley sees a future for it at 2000 AD. Since announcing Rogue Trooper, the company has been approached by a number of different people who want to work with the classic comics publisher. Kingsley admits that “we are not movie makers,” and that future projects will need such movie makers, and so Unreal may be the way forward to hire the talented crew needed to create a sci-fi epic on a realistic budget. And, with any luck, perhaps one of those will be a Judge Dredd film…

“With fingers crossed and a following wind, this could be the start of many more big 2000 AD productions,” he says.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.