Animated Horror Tale | "The Man with the Box" | Edgar Allan Poe Inspired | Unreal and iClone

Old London. A stranger enters a quiet pub on a stormy night with a strange box and a stranger tale. Inspired by the wonderful literary work of Edgar Allan Poe.

I'm always excited to do something new with Unreal and decided to experiment with using still images to tell a story. Naturally, I had to draw inspiration from a master storyteller, Edgar Allan Poe. Let's call this Edgar Allan Faux. :)

I also love telling stories in Unreal that would otherwise be very challenging to tell traditionally. It's safe to say that shooting a period piece is always tough (and pretty expensive). Thankfully, animation makes the impossible possible.

Let's start with the most important part...the narration. I wanted people to be able to close their eyes and simply listen to it. This is another reason for the still images. I didn't want the visuals to be too distracting. I was blessed to have the insanely talented Daniel Yaiullo come in and knock it out of the park. Normally I can't stand hearing my own work but he brings so much life and feeling to the words that I can listen to his narration on a loop.

I was actually twice blessed on this project when Daniel told me his brother, James Yaiullo is a composer. What he brought to the project was the perfect score to accompany Daniel's narration. Atmospheric, creepy, and spot on for the period. The Yaiullo bros are a super-talented one-two punch.

I needed very specific characters and wardrobe for this story so I went to Daz 3D. I wanted to use Metahumans but they all looked very modern to me- even in period clothes. Daz's large library of characters lets you really dial in on specific looks.

The environments are a combination of assets from the Unreal Marketplace and Daz.
The styled cartoon effect was added in After Effects after the entire film was edited.
The opening credits come from VideoHive.

For anyone interested in freeze-framing animation clips in Unreal, you can use the Keep State option in Sequencer. I used that technique and simply extended the duration of single frames from exported video in Premiere.

The mocap was captured with the Perception Neuron Pro. Cleanup was done in iClone and everything was put together in UE.

Playing with different styles in another fun Unreal Engine experiment. Thanks as always for watching!