Hello! I’ve been chipping away at a personal project executed primarily in Unreal with a small team of collaborators. We’ve finally finished and released it, hope you all like it!
Ray Bradbury’s visionary novel, Fahrenheit 451, serves as an ever-relevant warning against a society built on censorship and anti-intellectualism. We endeavored to revisit this story as a short film created through the lens of contemporary science fiction design. What began as a personal project to explore character design and modeling expanded to a short 3D animation that brought together a team of passionate collaborators exploring the world of Fahrenheit 451 in the language of a film or tv series trailer.
Directed by: Seiji Anderson + David Weinstock
Voice Actor: Stephen Carlock
Original Score by: Glitchkase
Sound Design by: Sebastian Vaskio
Sound Mixing by: Sebastian Vaskio
Title Design by: Wesley Ebelhar
Title Animation: David Weinstock
Hard Surface Design: Seiji Anderson, Marcos Melco
Unreal Engine Artists: Seiji Anderson, Marcos Melco, David Weinstock, Ihsu Yoon
This one took a lot of effort Mostly UE5.5. Started off in 5.4 and migrated. Lot of great features have come out since; wish we could have utilized them on this project. Onto the next!
Hi @SeijiAnderson welcome back! What an interesting take on Fahrenheit 451. Your team did an outstanding job portraying restricted expression, heavy oversight and the silencing of voices. Those themes came through clearly and were very impactful. Were there any particular scenes that took extra effort to get exactly right?
thanks!! took a while to complete this one, but good to be back posting
I would say the toughest part was finding where our limitations were in terms of what types of shots were doable in engine, versus figuring out if we would have to render it in layers, or use a traditional DCC to manage memory loads.
While not all shots were rendered out of engine, we definitely set out to do so from the start. A lot of our biggest challenges were getting in caches into engine and workable. We ended up using ZibraVDB which helped a ton for being able to work with the animated smoke and fire assets more smoothly.
Otherwise, we chose Unreal because of the combination of speed and quality, and wouldn’t have been able to finish this on a reasonable timeframe otherwise.
We’ve grown used to the workflows otherwise in engine, a lot of which I had the pleasure to go through in UEFest Seattle! So this one was definitely a project that sprung off from many of the techniques we picked up on that project.
