Zombie Army - Legion of the Dead

Was great experience directing "Zombie Army - Legion of the Dead" with the Team at Rebellion Film and VFX studios. Kudos to the awesome games division for providing the AAA character, level assets and audio. It was such a great sandbox and world in which to build our cinematic.
Jason Kingsley wanted us to explore the potential of creating more traditional linear stories or episodes set with the worlds of Rebellion owned IPs, such as the Zombie army franchise. Being able to utilise and repurpose all the amazing game assets, we chose to use Unreal Engine due to its advanced sequencing tools, also Unreal would become a core tools for previz and content creation for Rebellions new Film and VFX department.
At the time of production we where using Unreal Engine 4.24 (pre raytrace) , but we wanted to see how far we could push the visual fidelity of the final picture output, with the aim of getting as close to a high end offline cinematic as possible. Realtime Uk had just provided a great trailer for Zombie Army 4 and this was the perfect benchmark comparison for us to aim for.
The small start up team we had at Rebellion at the time had very mixed skill sets so myself and He Sun Decided to build a workflow that involved leveraging as many of those skills as possible. We made a wish list of features we wanted to include that would test us both creatively and push our TD's to come up with technical solutions that would lay the groundwork of rebellions unreal pipeline.

We chose to use a hybrid pipeline of unreal for shot creation and rendering with a heavy emphasis on Nuke compositing to add the final layers of polish to the shots. We also wanted to incorporate, rigid body simulations and explosions simulated in Houdini into our sequence. We also wanted to incorporate some matte paining and projection techniques with some establishing shots in order to push the cinematic quality in an efficient way.

As a Director it was very liberating to work with the sequencing tools in Unreal, being able to control the cameras, animation, composition layout and lighting all in realtime is an amazing experience. It encourages iteration and experimentation as the results are so immediate. Also the ability to build an edit with a master sequence in unreal was extremely useful when building the overall pacing of the sequence. Although quite short we wanted to build some changes of pace in the sequence to help build tension. A clear start, middle and end that concludes with a teaser for more to come. Adiomotion provided the mocap services and really made things work despite being in the height of the Covid Pandemic. We managed to find husband and wife mocap performers for the sequence that i was able to direct in person, due to the size and social distance management provided by the audiomotion team.

Working with unreal with a team was also very efficient, after an initial layout, camera and mood had been established. Environment artists, lighters and animators could all push the shots to final.

Thanks to Chris and Jason Kingsley, and He Sun for the opportunity. And of course the great team at Rebellion.