We are bringing an exciting adventure series called The Young Leif Saga to screen, using the Unreal Engine’s unique capabilities and Artineer’s NPR render engine Flair. An epic journey with a unique look!

THE GOAL

The goal of this project is to create an amazing pilot and pitch for an animated series called The Young Leif Saga.

Armada has been making great strides on pushing this IP forward. We have the story and our partners at Artineers can help us get to the look. We are requesting the financial backing to bring this story to life.

We will produce a 9-minute animated short called “Not Alone” that will introduce the main characters, the world they live in, and give the viewers a taste of this adventure-packed series.

This pilot episode will allow us to develop a work-flow and pipeline within The Unreal Engine to be used for the series. We plan to use Engine as the main hub of production: Layout, Rigging, Animation, and Rendering.

Synopsis

Our story begins in Iceland in the year 980. An old Germanic slave, Thyrker, accompanies his master’s young son, Leif, back home from a large festival. Leif’s family homestead seems to have been deserted, which leads to the two splitting and going their separate ways. Soon after, an attack on the homestead has our heroes questioning their choices…

Production overview

• Projected Runtime: 9 Minutes
• Projected Shot Count: 140-180 Shots
• 4 Characters
• 7 Sets / Locations
• Contains Smoke, Water, Cloth, Hair, and Fire FX

The art direction for the “Not Alone“ short, and then the
series, would be based the development of a unique flat
textured art style. Tightly fitting at the crossroads of concept art and illustration, we will be pushing the art in the
following direction:

• Strong compositional cinematic structure

We do believe is working every shot to it maximum story
telling potential while keeping a strong visual and structure.

• Flat textured look and feel

Far from the smooth 3D aesthetic, we find that the harsh
Viking world and era is very well represented by this
strong textured look. We feel this visual language allows
to move back and forth between 2D and 3D production
approaches, allowing us maximum of flexibility to achieve
the desired look.

The development of the environments is such an important part of getting this story right

To replicate this look and feel, we would partner up with non-photorealistic rendering specialist Santiago Montedesca, Ph.D. and his team at Artineering using the render engine Flair. We can fine-tune this engine to arrive at the specific 2D look, while utilizing Unreal’s 3D tools.

Flair is a node-based realtime graphics engine for stylized 3D computer graphics. Their ambition is to become the go-to software/plugin for post-processing in realtime across 3D applications.

Currently, post-processing pipelines need to be scripted or hardcoded into graphics engines. This makes them difficult for non-technical artists to modify, or even create in the first place. Setting up post-processing pipelines becomes exponentially harder with stylized/non-photorealistic graphics. These require complex, interdependent operations.Artineering is solving this issue and is bringing artists the ability to completely modify the look of their 3D renders in realtime, complete with accompanying artist-friendly toolsets.

In 2022, Armada created the award winning animated short “The Moon Followed me to Falmouth“. Directed by Joël Gibbs, Armada’s team harnessed Flair’s power to bring to screen a heartfelt story, with a unique look.

With a desire to bring a new creative style and story to life, Armada and Joël Gibbs are pushing once more the collaboration with Artineering!

Several aspects to the Unreal Engine have pushed us to consider it the best candidate to bring this series to life!

Art Direction and Tools

We hope to be able to get 95% of the look of the series directly in UE without having to outside of it for any considerable post production. With Unreal Engine’s strong realtime toolset supporting Flair’s render engine, we think we will be able to art direct the look directly in-engine.

We would like to combine, as much as possible, the building of the final frame in one place, so that all the artistic choices can be made at the same time. Having to anticipate and predict what the next stage will bring to the frame can leave room for misinterpretation or misplaced assumptions. Traditional productions rely on the compositing stage to increase the speed of iteration to achieve the final look. We believe that we will be able to achieve our look within one toolset, avoiding the need to jump to another software.

1. Set Building R&D

This adventure takes place in multiple environments across Iceland/Northern Europe. We plan to approach set building in UE with assets the same way we would build a level. Simple topology and the use of scattering techniques would help build the base.

2. Shading / Lighting

We plan to use Artineering’s Flair to help us get the 2D look in-engine. Our experience using it in Maya was great, and we expect that its UE implementation will be even better!

3. Rigging/Animation R&D

With over 20 years of experience in rigging, from the days of Lightwave, to Softimage, and now Maya, our team has developed great tools and workflows, and we would love to explore moving our rigging into Unreal. If possible, leading directly into animating in Unreal as well.