Tell us how Slay came about. For the last 20 years, I’ve been working in VFX and animation. About four or five years ago with the explosion of VR, I got interested in real-time technology and started seeing the need and the advantage of using real-time tools to create content, particularly to create animated content more efficiently. I pitched Epic Games on the idea of doing an animated short as a proof of concept. Those of us at Mold3D wanted to use our VFX backgrounds to create a sample project that could inspire others to use Unreal Engine to create animated content and also teach them how they could do it. The goal was to show a little bit of everything, such as lighting, character animation, and camera moves. So that was the pitch to Epic. As things progressed we also decided to incorporate the Windwalker Echo character.

Once Slay was greenlit you had to go into production in the midst of a global pandemic. How did you overcome that?

At the beginning things were challenging and just like for any other business, we had to quickly figure out our remote setup. Production had literally just started a week or so before things shut down. Because of the pandemic, things like virtual production and these types of projects were really in demand, because everyone saw this as a solution for not being able to do on-set production. So Slay worked hand-in-hand with the solutions we needed to find anyway in this new world of remote collaboration, and the virtual production tools made the transition easier.