CGI 3D Game Trailer : Valve"s Source Engine Animated Movie Deep (2012)
169Valve"s Source engine has been licensed by Brown Bag Films and Shane Acker (director of the Tim Burton produced movie 9) to create the animated movie Deep. The movie is set in a world after World War III has happened and we have been forced to live underwater using sunken ships for shelter. The story revolves around Captain Sullivan who commands a nuclear sub and is determined to save a devastated earth.
Deep only has a budget of $19 million, which is a drop in the ocean compared to what someone like Disney must allocate for new projects. So Brown Bag had to think outside the box on how to cut corners and save money. A game engine like Source offers up many of the features required to make a movie, albeit it at a drastically reduced cost compared to typical industry tools.
As well as offering all the features and a rich set of tools to make the movie happen, using the Source engine brings with it two further advantages. The first is the ability to produce a game that reuses all the assets and looks just like the movie, again at a reduced cost and development time.
The second advantage has the potential to push Valve into a new market. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Valve opts to distribute Deep the movie alongside Deep the game on Steam. Movies on Steam? Why not?
Whatever the final look of Deep turns out to be, it"s an interesting experiment that could lead to other movie studios trying the same thing in the future. You only have to view the quality of cutscenes being produced using game engines like Unreal Engine and CryEngine to know that movie-quality visuals won"t be a problem.
Read more at Variety http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118055231