Nexus director Patrick Osborne, who won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for Feast in 2014, gives us a peek at the future of animation production with this teaser for his new real-time animated series created using Unreal Engine.

A coming-of-age adventure conceived and directed by Osborne, This Tape Deck is a Time Machine follows a time-traveling teen who drops into strangers’ lives courtesy of music he plays on a retro cassette player.

From the team at Nexus: “At its heart, This Tape Deck is a Time Machine is an impossible tale of friendship and love centered around soulmates born generations apart.

“With the support of an Epic Games’ MegaGrant, Patrick led a team of expert real-time artists and creators who embraced the unique challenge of crafting the ‘Tape Deck’ world with a refined 2D aesthetic, created entirely in the Unreal Engine (4.26) with no compositing.

“The team developed bespoke shading techniques to achieve the painterly and naturalistic quality, leveraging the visual potential of the engine to make high-quality stylized animation.”
 

 
Production: Nexus Studios
Director/Writer: Patrick Osborne
Executive Producers: Diego Rosner, Chris O’Reilly, Charlotte Bavasso
Executive Producer/Producer: Julia Parfitt
Production Manager: Edith Chappey
CG Supervisor: Dave Hunt
Art Director: Callum Strachan
Character Designer: Uwe Heidschoetter
Concept Artist & Matte Painter Graphic Designer: Brandon Coates Ieuan Lewis
Unreal Generalist: Christian Johnson
Tech Artist/Real-time Graphic: John O’Really
Character Modelling: Stefano Dubay, Florian Caspar
Rigging: Victor Vinyals
Environment Modelling & Texturing: Fabien Glasse, Hannah Wahlers, May Iren Vedal Lorentsen, Ashley Wade
Animation: Conor Ryan, Clément Fassler, Aziz Kocanaogullari
VFX: Tim Bacon
Unreal Artist: Zach Hewett
Unreal & 3D Pipeline: Tom Melson, Patrick Hearn
Pipeline Assistant: Harry Nichols

Produced with with the support of an Epic Games’ MegaGrant

Toolkit: Unreal Engine