Unity Game Engine Just Democratized High-profile Film Making

Over a year after the robot sci-fi flick ADAM was unveiled by Unity Technologies, the company announced the coming of the next two installments of the short film franchise, which will once again be made through the Unity game engine.

The next two Unity game engine films, ADAM: The Mirror and ADAM: The Prophet, will be directed by the Academy Award-nominated director Neill Blomkamp of District 9. The two new stories will be based on the mythology revolving the first Webby Award-winning short film ADAM.

These two projects only mean one thing for Unity Technologies: the Unity game engine could be used to democratize not just game development, but high-profile filmmaking as well.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Blomkamp expressed his admiration for ADAM, which was originally made by Unity to showcase the cinematic capabilities that the Unity game engine platform has to offer to young and aspiring movie makers and animation creatives.

The succeeding Adam film installments will be created and produced by Blomkamp’s and Chris Harvey‘s (Tron Legacy, Zero Dark Thirty, Chappie) Oats Studios in Vancouver using the latest version of Unity 2017. According to reports, the two short films will “showcase the power of working within an integrated real-time environment – empowering the team to build, texture, animate, light, and render all in Unity to deliver high-quality graphics at a fraction of the cost and time of a normal film production cycle.”

The Power of Unity 3D Game Engine: Bringing ADAM to Life

ADAM tells the story of a human whose brain has been erased and imprisoned in a robotic shell. Sounds familiar? It would if you’ve seen Chappie. Apparently, the hero of the film was expelled from a walled city with a crowd of his fellow prisoners. Later on, the cyborg realized that he was exiled in a post-apocalyptic world.

At the Game Developers Conference in 2016, Unity’s Swedish demo team used ADAM to demonstrate the power of the Unity game engine 5.4 and in the words of Harvey:

“It blew people away, not only because it was visually fantastic, but the story was super intriguing with a massive cliffhanger.”

Blomkamp echoes the same sentiments and his excitement with directing the succeeding Adam films. He said:

“Ever since I started making films I’ve dreamed of a virtual sandbox that would let me build, shoot and edit photorealistic worlds all in one place. Today that dream came true thanks to the power of Unity 2017. The fact that we could achieve near photorealistic visuals at half of average time of our production cycles is astounding. The future is here and I can’t wait to see what our fans think.” 

The second installment, ADAM: The Mirror will follow the amnesiac cyborg hero on its dangerous trek from the walled city to a refugee outpost where it will find a clue to its identity. The Mirror will be released today at the Unite Austin 2017 Keynote Recap in Austin, Texas.

Later this year, Oats Studios will release the second installment, ADAM: The Prophet on their YouTube Channel. The third episode will reveal an opposing tribe of survivors, humans and heavily armed.

According to Venture Beat, the two films are not financed by Unity but only serves as a stage to showcase the power of its Unity game engine to render movie-like graphics in real-time. Blomkamp said that the Unity 2017 saved them a lot of production time and other work.

“Some of the films are going to be too expensive to shoot as live-action films, and those things can be made with Unity. I think of the bar in Cheers [the comedy TV show], where you always return to the same place and shoot a new show.”

Unity Technologies started focusing on making films around four years ago.

“We foresaw the evolution of the game engine in terms of how quality would bring it to a level where it could be used in film,” Vice President of research labs at Unity, Sylvio Drouin said in an interview. “Film needed to become more interactive and games needed better quality.”

Watch ADAM: The Mirror below.

Do you believe that Unity Technologies could pursue its goal of democratizing film and game making through its Unity game engine? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!