Ever since he worked on The Matrix franchise more than 20 years ago, director Kimble Rendall has entertained the possibility of using a game engine to make an entire film.
That is now possible due to technology like Unreal Engine, which Rendall hopes to use to make his next project Age of Beasts, intended as both a film and a game.
Unreal Engine developer Epic Games has given the filmmaker, best known for feature Bait 3D and Guardians of the Tomb, a grant to develop a teaser, which it has launched today as part of #EpicMegaMondays.
Inspired by a short comic called Beast of the Beast, Age of Beasts is an action-based, dystopian tale, set after 2090 when 90 per cent of the human population have been wiped out. Those who remain alive are split between a wealthy elite, who live in cities in the sky, and an underground underclass of ‘wanderers’. A mutation has also turned some humans into beasts called Thiriomorphs.
At the heart of the story are a mother and son, who live underground; the mother finds a way for her son to escape before she dies. As an adult, the son joins the military and has to travel back underground after an explosion at the base, where he encounters the beasts and the memories of his life before.
Rendall has been exploring the capabilities of Unreal Engine with Alex Proyas’ Heretic Foundation in Sydney, with a view to making the feature film using the software and creating assets for the game simultaneously.
Heretic helped to do the VFX for the teaser trailer, while Spectrum Films did the soundtrack. The sound designer was Cate Cahill, Jason Fernandez the composer and Robert Taylor did the voiceover.
Rendall worked as second unit director on The Matrix franchise, for which the films and game, Enter the Matrix, shared assets and were shot simultaneously; the game included one-hour of live action film footage.
Ever since then, Rendall has been interested in how the process could be reverse engineered to see a film created from a game engine. He’s followed the development of game technology, believing today that he can do “exactly what we were doing on The Matrix, but virtually”.
He’s set up company Delinquent Studios, with focus on original IP, through which to develop projects that suit both games and films, including Age of Beasts.
After working on the film script for Age of Beasts for a number of years, Rendall’s next steps are to team with a games company to develop the the games script, and to find investors.
“For a lot of films, I couldn’t understand, ‘Why isn’t there a game component than this?’,” he tells IF.
“The game industry is booming. Why wouldn’t you tie these worlds together?”
Separately to Age of Beasts, Rendall, who is also co-founder of both Sydney punk band The XL Capris and The Hoodoo Gurus, is working on a Tim Burton-esque animation project for Delinquent Studios, as well as a more traditional, live-action film in the vein of The Big Chill.