My good friend, former co-worker and animator extraordinaire, Matthew Peckham (EpicGames Name: matthew00369), quit his job and lived off his savings for a year all to chase a passion project he once had.
He quotes:
“Back in 2011 I made a series of 2D Minecraft animations called CHUNK, and though I wanted to keep working on them, I lost my spark after my mum passed away. More than a decade later, and after 6 years working at a big youtube animation company, I finally decided to finish what I started. I quit my job and lived off savings for a year (and a lot of ramen), to finally see the project through.”
Throughout this project, Matt was a one man studio. He did everything from the script, storyboards, animatic, layout, modelling, rigging, texturing, animation, Unreal sequencer, editor, rendering and post-production including in-engine and out VFX and SFX. Seemingly the only help he had was with the music (and maybe a few tutorials here and there).
To make this all the more impressive, whilst he had a little bit of experience in Unreal, he never really did extensive work within the engine during his former role at the Youtube animation studio. It is safe to say that this project was basically a zero-to-hero journey with Unreal.
UE5 played a massive role in making this dream a reality. The advances in lighting and real-time rendering was crucial to his pipeline, allowing for quick iterations and even quicker QA passes and tweaks.
He has given me permission to post this so here I am, wanting to share this masterpiece with all of you and, through him, tell you to never give up on your passion projects or dreams. A little bit of work each day brings you one step closer to completion.
With great passion and determination comes great results and even greater gratification.
Check it out here:
