PRODUCTION. BRAVE CREATURES
What came next is Brave Creatures , a seven-minute teaser – hopefully for a longer-form series – set in the heartlands of Elysia. The world is on the brink of war, so the protagonist, Aja, risks all to reach a mysterious source of power. “This piece is the coming together of lots of strands – what I can do as a creative person, the things that inspire me and if we could wade into that territory,” Valdez says. “Also, there’s a big question about cost right now, as there’s been a massive reset since the pandemic. The streaming- war bubble has burst, so it’s good timing in terms of figuring out clever ways to use tech to accelerate and expedite creative processes. There’s always a question with scripts: ‘Can we do this? Financially can we make this idea?’” Funding aside, Valdez opines that it’s also a good time to make rich, engaging work in animation for broad audiences, and not just children. “There’s a vast spectrum of work aimed at children, or very mature stuff that’s inappropriate for kids – but not much in the middle. That’s the space I’m interested in exploring. We’ve been trying to take game technology and create an experience that lends itself to creativity.” Traditionally, using computer graphics software could be slow and cumbersome,
OSCAR WINNER Valdez was previously awarded an Academy Award for his work on the VFX in 2016’s The Jungle Book
the immersive feeling of being in spaces, which is critical to set design, blocking your action, working out where your camera positions are and so on. So, there’s a lot that comes together with that technology. It’s very filmmaker friendly.” Nevertheless, making a film of this calibre isn’t as easy as Valdez might make it sound. “It’s still very technical and takes a bunch of very clever people to set it up and run it for you – it’s not as if the average filmmaker can just download this tomorrow and make a whole movie on their own”. He says some aspiring animators watch experts on YouTube and fall for the illusion that the process is an easy one. “The people they’re watching have a foundation of being very comfortable
due to the reliance on specialists and multiple pieces of software that specialise on different parts of the process. Valdez explains how Unreal Engine “brings it all under one roof” for filmmakers. “It’s a rich tool set,” he says. “As a filmmaker, you go: ‘Oh yeah, there’s light and atmosphere and the lens feels like a lens when I look through the camera in that tool’. You can also use VR headsets, because the engine has the horsepower to drive them. That means you can get
“At first I wanted it to feel like a normal-size camera operator was on the ground filming tiny people, but that’s actually quite distracting to watch”
TOOLS OF THE TRADE Unreal Engine provides a suite of filmmaking mechanics that make it an end-to-end solution for rendering movie-grade content
54. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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