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Real-Time Shorts

 challenge

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Real-Time Shorts

 challenge

Extraordinary times can inspire an extraordinary creative response.
30 days produced 30 incredible real-time shorts.
Individuals and teams working remotely from around the world.
MacInnes Studios supplied the Unreal characters + scene files, real-time filmmakers suppled creativity + vision + skills.
An illustrious panel of judges picked the best.
Fuck COVID!
winner
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Winner: Nemosyne

by Kevin Stewart & Luc Delamare

Kevin Stewart and Luc Delamare are both live action Directors of Photography with a background in visual effects. They share a passion for translating their photographic skills and lighting knowledge to the virtual production space and hope to one day bring high quality visual storytelling to any flavor of virtual production be it live-action mixed media, video games, or CG animations.

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1 year full commercial 

studio software licenses

$5,000

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Perpetual Virtual Production Software Licenses

finalists

Finalists

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1 year full commercial 

studio software license

$250

UE4 Marketplace 

store credit

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1 Year Virtual Production Software Licenses

Machine Junkies

Martin Smekal

Martin Smékal put together a team of friends and colleagues at vfx studio UPP Advertising in Prague. They were in a process of building a virtual production department when he saw the RTSC announcement and thought it would a great opportunity to dive into Unreal and figure out new tools and workflows. The core team was 3 people. Tomáš Barvík took care of character's preparation, FX and overall unreal collaboration workflows. David Dvořák worked on props, environments and modeling. They had additional help from other people in the studio with mocap, voice overs, SFX, etc and took advantage of their in-house mocap room with xsens suit and virtual camera setup. 

Alvaro is from Santiago, Chile, and lives in Paris, France. He is  the co-founder of Virtuals, a platform dedicated virtual experiences and virtual production.

I'm not a 3D artist and I have little hands-on experience, though I have learned the basics on my own.

 

"As someone who has studied (too much) film and history before venturing into the business world, I have long wanted to pursue a creative career. I see virtual production as the opportunity to do just that and to turn my stories into short films and perhaps more, should someone find them interesting."

Le Dormeur du val

Alvaro Lamarche Toloza

Veronica Flint is part of Quixotical, an interactive and immersive content creation studio specializing in real-time cinematic and story-driven content.  Based in Los Angeles in the heart of Frogtown, Quixotical is known for creating the virtual reality cinematic story called The Chimerical Era.

Chaos Trigger

Veronica Flint

Runners-up

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1 year NFR 

studio software license

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$250

UE4 Marketplace 

store credit

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1 Year NFR Live Client software licenses

Kat Harris is an Engineer and Technical Designer at Magnopus based in Los Angeles, CA. She mainly focuses on creating Mixed Reality experiences for multitude of devices. Before Magnopus she was a Technical Designer at Microsoft for the Mixed Reality team working on Azure Spatial Anchors and the open source Mixed Reality Toolkit. Kat has been a Unity developer for 9 years, and this project was her first 'real' foray into Unreal. Although mainly focused on the technical side of creating immersive experiences Kat has been in love with storytelling from a young age and strives to combine both to make interesting and creative experiences. 

A Witch and a Bullet Good Timing

Kat Harris

Predation

Umar Garcia Tariq

Umar Garcia Tariq is a Filipino-Pakistani film director and cinematic designer currently based in Dubai. Started off making machinimas using various video games which later resulted in taking up filmmaking seriously. While exploring various pipelines for animated films the RTSC challenge came up and that was the motivation needed to play in Unreal Engine for the first time. So, after two-weeks of figuring out Unreal especially the new sequencer tool and the amazing HQ assets with mocap data, my animated short film “Predation” came to life.

Student Award

Jumai Yusuf and Alexa Velasquez are both MFA Film & TV Production students at USC. Jumai and Alexa have producing animated films but neither had tried animating ourselves before participating the the Real-Time Shorts Challenge. The RTSC gave them the time and motivation to learn a completely new skill; they both downloaded Unreal only a week before the challenge started! Inspired by Grace character and her beautiful dance provided by MacInnes Studios, the ideas immediately started flowing and they used the 30-day challenge to build an expansive science-fantasy world that pushes our imaginations with the infinite possibilities of Unreal, all on a student film budget.

Heartsease

Jumai Yusuf & Alexa Velasquez

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Dominic is an filmmaker with no prior experience in graphics or 3D. Producer Luc Schurgers wanted to test Replikant and see if it was possible to have him make a film with only 30 minutes of explaining. He worked on it for 3 days and his girlfriend did the voice over.

Lil Nightmare

Dominic DeVore

Threshold

Dylan Wainwright & Juan Paulo Mardonez

Juan Paulo lives in Santiago Chile and has a small company specializing in animation and visual effects and Dylan lives in Portland Oregon and has a background in writing and filmmaking. Both assembled teams in their respective countries for the Challenge and successfully worked together remotely. Despite the challenges of learning a new technology and it’s workflow and the complications created by Covid 19, the team pulled together and created a true piece of collaborative art.

Feeding Time

Fery Vincze

Fery Vincze is a freelance animator and videographer based in Hungary and I have made animations and short films since 2004. He's made several broadcast designs for local television channels, produced experimental short films and 3D animations before founding his own business, Rendered-frames.com, using Unreal with motion capture, and Iclone from for the character animations. In 2018 he won the Unreal Dev Grant for my animated feature "The Chest" which is currently in production. "Feeding Time" was a quick idea. I really like Futuristic scenes, robots and heavy machines. For the RTSC I modelled and made everything from scratch.

Steve Pepin is originally from Canada where he earned a Petroleum Engineering degree in 1995. In the late 90's he started to teach himself 3D modeling and animation in his spare time.  After doing many years of engineering jobs, he went back to school to take a 3D animation degree. He then moved to Paris and started creating marketing animations.  A couple of years ago he taught himself VR using the Unreal engine.

The Quarantine

Steve Pepin

Cute Creatures

Eddie Munoz & Nicholas Silveira

Eddie Munoz and Nicholas Silveira are experienced AAA game developers. They started working together at Rooster Teeth Productions and since then we’ve collaborated on www.Mini-VS.com and are currently employed at Aspyr Media. Cute Creatures took the two developers one month to create in their free time and they wanted to create something small in scope in order to focus on making something visually different. Actor Ashley Suda provided the real-time facial capture and audio.

runner-ups

Thanks to everyone who took part in the first ever Real-Time Shorts Challenge, it's been an overwhelming success. The enormous diversity of entries made it very hard for the judges. All of the shorts have merits and many could've easily been Runner-up, so please take time to watch all the entries. We had industry veterans participating along with filmmakers who opened UE4 for the first time (including the winning entry). I had over 170 people register and just under 100 people download the scene files. Interest in virtual production and real-time filmmaking is expanding so I look forward to seeing you all for the next RTSC. Special thanks to Kim Libreri, Dana Cowley and Jodie Anderson at Epic Games for their support.

John MacInnes

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