Machine Junkies

"Holy fucking shit!"

The Challenge

Back in 2020, there was a bit of downtime with client projects at the UPP Advertising studio — it was the Covid years, after all — Jesus, time flies…

I came across a cool Real-Time Shorts Challenge created by John MacInnes and his studio. Participants were provided with existing mocap animation and 3D models of a couple of soldiers clearing a building.

This would be the starting point for any kind of short story you wanted to tell using Unreal Engine. This was during the days of 4.27 — the last version before UE5. I’d been eyeing Unreal for some time and was eager to learn it because of the virtual cinematography I wanted to get into.

Unreal had been used in the studio for a couple of virtual production shoots, and we had a decent basic setup — a virtual camera using Vive trackers and an Xsens suit. But we’d never done a full piece from start to finish on our own.

Gears started turning in my head, and since a couple of 3D guys didn’t have much to work on, I figured it was the perfect time to dive into Unreal. And most importantly — there was a clear brief, an asset, and a deadline! That felt like a good combo.

Huge thanks to my boss at the time, Jan Malíř, who green-lit it as an internal project. So it is solely the property of UPP and technically not my personal project — but I’m presenting it here under the "Personal Projects" section, because I was the driving force behind it and it’s basically a big nerd fest/homage to a bunch of things I love.

Mainly pipes. Lots of pipes. Demons. Dark shit. And more pipes.

The final short on MacInnes Studios YT.

The Story & Hellboy

I love how these things evolve organically. I didn’t have a precise story yet — I just knew I wanted to do something dark, something we usually can’t do in an advertising studio. While scrubbing through the mocap data and thinking about camera angles, looking at the soldiers, it reminded me of the B.P.R.D. comic story The Abyss of Time, illustrated by the motherfucking legend James Harren. And that was it! I’m going to totally rip that story and call it an homage later! :) Half-joking — but I’ve been a Hellboy universe fanatic for many many years. It became a fan project.

The story has a team of BPRD agents exploring an abandoned underground site. It has an empty ritual chamber with a circle of wires and bulbs on the ground — something happened here long time ago. And then it hit me — why not connect it directly with the original story of this site? That’s actually told in Hellboy in Hell #4, where we find out that this is THE site where Sir Edward Grey is dragged to hell by a demon during a failed ritual. Fucking got it!

I wanted to definitely show one very obviously weird artefact as a nod to the Hellboy universe – and that’s the Hyperborean sword.

When you think about it, this seemingly irrelevant abandoned underground site is actually pretty significant for the whole Hellboy universe - the Brotherhood of Ra had an operation here, Sir Edward Grey was dragged to hell here and agent Howards found his sword right here! Pretty cool...I love how Mignola and the writers connect these things!

B.P.R.D #103 © Dark Horse Comics

Hellboy in Hell #4 © Dark Horse Comics

Cool — so the soldiers/SWAT team think they're on a routine sweep of a meth lab. That's the ground floor. But all the mess and pipes are there because they were actually building a ritual site here, and the machines are powering the ring-shaped portal.

Then we have the saloon for the Brotherhood with the sword — and then BOOM! They hear the portal being opened on the upper floor. They break in, only to realize they’ve walked right into the middle of a demon summoning.

They have to destroy the machines powering the portal — which they do — but at the last second, one of the soldiers gets dragged to hell!

Ok, so what about the name of the film? That one came actually later during the making of it. David Dvořák – the main 3D artist – came up with the idea of the meth lab environment, which led me to incorporate it into the story, and that led to the ending of the soldiers trying to end the ritual by destroying the surrounding machines supplying the ring on the floor. These two things mixed and – that’s why Machine Junkies. And also, to be completely honest – aren’t we all, as digital artists, kind of like that? Junkies to the computers, technology, and machines we work on? Anyway… :)

So, the tagline would be somehing like this:

"What started as a routine meth lab sweep ... ended in a doorway to hell!"

The Team

I already mentioned David, our main 3D artist. He created all the custom environment assets, did initial scene prep and set dressing, and helped with retargeting the awesome demon 3D model. Then there was Tomáš Barvík, our main Unreal Engine artist, who helped me learn UE from scratch — huge thanks for his patience! It wasn’t easy wrapping my head around Unreal as a compositing artist with no prior 3D software experience… shit, now that I think about it, UE was the first 3D software I ever used. That’s just wrong :)

We also had support from others in the studio — helping with the Xsens suit calibration, early sound design, and later — voiceover sessions. Those were so much fun. Tom Scarlett and Patrick Blades — both 3D artists at the time — voiced the soldiers. I needed native English speakers, and Patrick is British, Tom is Australian — which you can totally hear in his: “Holy fucking shit!” line… :)

For mocap, I asked my friend Martin Dědoch — an actor, who helped with additional soldier movements, the two summoners, and the demon itself. I did the virtual shoot with him, and he helped me figure out the camera angles and the demon’s movement. I loved that we could capture the performance, see it live in the camera, and do it all together in the moment — so much fun.

Later, Fabiano helped with the initial sound design and then handed it off to me for final assembly.

Big thanks to Eldar Alizade for the BTS.

The Process

Seeing a film sequence come together and being able to adjust it in real time is just addictive. But since I was learning from scratch, I worked closely with Tomáš. He showed me the ropes and handled the Virtual Shoot technical setup. In the meantime, David prepped the environments and did custom 3D modeling. Of course we used lots of Megascans and other marketplace assets as well.

First, I hand-animated all the cameras and created a previz. Then we layered the virtual cameras on top of that. We attached the virtual camera on top of the animated moves - like a camera operator on a dolly. Or we shot completely new virtual camera shots. I knew we had to visually cheat a lot. The camera needed to be handheld so you didn’t notice the game engine's limitations. The lighting had to be dark and contrasty. The editing had to speed up during the film, etc. Cheat, cheat, cheat.

There were a lot of technical issues. We didn’t have version control, so we passed projects and files manually. Stuff kept breaking. Near the end, I even corrupted the entire project and had to rebuild from an older version on our server — fun! The Movie Render Queue existed in 4.27, but was still a bit rough compared to today’s version. My machine didn't have the fastest gpu, etc. Still, I cannot complain, it was a great opportunity and we pulled it off — that’s the power of deadlines!

I edited the film in DaVinci Resolve, learning how to switch between UE and the editing suite to build the flow. Tweak the edit in Resolve, play it, adjust in UE, render, import, repeat. I love working in Resolve — paired with Unreal, it’s a killer combo.

The math on the soldiers was also fun - 1 model duplicated 4 times (hide the face) with 2 voice actors talking to each other ... no time for logic :)

Previz first steps.

The Mural

Big thanks to the artist EELUS, based in England. He is the author of the mural of the two demon ladies in the hallway from the opening of the film. I needed something visually striking for that shot, and didn’t have time to build a whole new environment. So I searched for a mural, stencil, or graffiti art online and found his work. I reached out, asked for permission to use it, and he kindly agreed.

In my head, for the purpose of the story — maybe someone from the neighborhood painted the mural as a warning about the bad vibes of that place — and it fits perfectly as foreshadowing for the demon/hell sequence later.

The Music

I’m a huge fan of Ash Thorp and his work, and I know he collaborates with his friend, composer Aeph. Through Aeph, I found his collaboration with Kings & Creatures — and their stuff is fucking amazing. Dark, demonic trailer music! I found their licensing rep through Position Music and bought the track Bone Setter by Si Begg & Damon Baxter. The credits song is Divided by Zero, also from Kings & Creatures.

I’ve used their music in a few other projects since. Volume up!

The Conclusion

The biggest takeaway from the project was that the people working on our small team had a lot of fun making it. We had a good time, explored new tools and workflows, and ended up with a cool short film. We even took second place — which felt really good after all the work we put into it.

First place was very well deserved — a short film called Nemosyne by Kevin Stewart & Luc Delamare. They used the second asset of the "Grace" android woman. Please check out their work, they are absolutely killing it!

What I would change in the final film is giving more screen time to the portal with the demon — to give the viewer more of a chance to understand what the hell is happening. :) But hey — the deadline was close, and my cinematic storytelling skills weren’t quite there yet. :)

Still, it was a great learning experience, the studio got a cool film to show clients for bidding virtual production jobs, we moved the UE worflow forward and the artists got more skills — lovely.

Thanks for checking out the project!