A sensitive young goat who feels things in a deeper way than others. He tries to stand out from the
crowd, but struggles with a sense
of belonging.
Animated with a purpose: In an age of uncertainty and confusion, mental health and well-being, among the young in particular, is of paramount importance. Our film will be directed at a youthful audience in the hope that the unique message will stay with them into adolescence and beyond. It delivers a feeling of optimism and aspires to be an inoculation against despair in the form of an earnest story based around a set of child-friendly characters…
A down-on-his-luck, slightly tubby teddy bear. Following a recent relationship breakdown and estranged from his own family, he feels he has no one
left to turn to.
A wise old sage of a bunny rabbit. He’s known his ups and downs in life and has a wonderful tale to tell.
Oracle’s trusty canine sidekick. Energetic and fiercely loyal.
A bunny’s best friend.
A teddy bear at the end of his tether, contemplating ending it all, receives a message of wonder and hope from a wise old bunny rabbit - wisdom that he can't help but want to pass on. Our script can be found here and see our work-in-progress below:
Original Characters
A Story to Share
Also viewable on Vimeo
Our Headspace
Based in the UK, Train of Thought Studios is creating this film with the intent of partnering with local mental heath and suicide prevention charities as well as getting the film seen far and wide in as many animation festivals as possible.
Charities we plan to resume talks with following the project's completion include Papyrus, Childline, and CALM.
Unreal Technology
Given the limited resources of what is essentially a charity piece / passion project, we've been looking for cutting-edge ways to streamline our
CG animation pipeline.
First and foremost is the use of Unreal Engine to generate the environments for the film - building our character's world inside the world's best game engine is a massive advantage when considering production and render timeframes.
Unlike many short films made in-engine that have a sci-fi or 'human-made' setting, we wanted a lush and natural environment that would feel alive, but also stark at times - just like the coast of south-east England, where our story is set.
Our project forms something of a showcase for many of Unreal Engine 5's latest tools and plugins:
Our world is built using the landscape system and leverages the powerful toolset of Brushify. All the objects that can be Nanite are nanite, even the grass. The lighting is globally illuminated with the high-end raytraced implementation of Lumen. The clouds in the sky are a combination of volumetric clouds and the new VBD implementation. Trees are imported from SpeedTree and blow dynamically in the wind. The ocean simulation pushes Imaginary Blend's Fluid Flux plugin to its very limits. All this is rendered out in 4K HDR for a film-like presentation.
Due to the extremely computationally expensive fur on the characters, they are rendered in a traditional offline method, but using lighting data from Unreal. These are then composited into the environments rendered out of Unreal's movie render queue.
Community Contributions
It feels like we’ve gotten so much from the wider UE community while getting to grips with Unreal's powerful toolset. In order to give back, we’d want to make the environmental assets and levels used in the creation of the film available for free through the UE Marketplace upon the project’s completion.
We’d also like to commit to a series of talks and tutorials on how we created the world of Teddy on the Edge and integrated our Maya workflow into Unreal - we feel this may prove massively useful to other aspiring real-time filmmakers.
Our Global Team
We've brought together a small, but brilliant group of people from across the globe to work remotely on Teddy on the Edge.
Driving the performances from Scotland is an experienced senior feature animator (who gave birth to her first child in the middle of production!) as well as two junior animators studying at Animation Mentor concurrently to working on the film, giving them great first hand production knowledge.
We also employed a 2D animator to work on elements for the 'ancestors' sequence of the piece, and setting up our 3D character rigs we had a highly knowledgeable technical director working out of Germany/Namibia.
We were very lucky to line up professional British character actor Paul Ready to record our voices and narration, plus a talented composer in South Korea creating the score for the film.
This is the debut short film from writer / director P.L. Kerr, originally a professional animator and CG artist based in London, who has become fascinated over the past several years with Unreal Engine and its implication for classic linear storytelling.
Art and Design:
(done by the director)
Concept Art and Character Design: $0
Storyboards: $0
Animation Production:
(allocated and paid for)
Animators: $15,000
Animation Software Licenses: $2,000
Unreal Engine: Free (thank you!)
Voice Acting:
(actor / studio gave us time for free)
Voice Actors: $0
Recording Studio Rental: $0
Music Composition and Soundtrack:
Composer Fees: $2,000
Sound Design and Effects:
Sound Designer Fees: $1,000
Foley and Sound Effects: $500
Audio Editing and Mixing: $1,000
Post-Production:
Editing and Compositing: $0
(director doing this)
Rendering and Output: $1000
(contingency for cloud rendering)
Contingency and Miscellaneous:
Contingency Fund: $500
Miscellaneous Expenses: $2000
(marketing materials, festival submissions, etc.)
Total Budget to Complete: $8000
With principal animation complete and the professional voice recording in place, we are seeking the Epic MegaGrant to keep our talented team going and get the film done and dusted. We have raised and allocated the bulk of the funds ourselves and are asking for $8000 to fill out the budget, complete the film and promote it.
Please help us reach the finish line and get Teddy's story told.
The next steps are already in motion. Fairly ambitious ones – an animated kid’s show rendered entirely in Unreal. With this as a goal, we’re currently involved with another venture - Little Genius Entertainment - and have prepared a pitch for a children’s educational science-based cartoon series. Once we have built some interest off the success of Teddy on the Edge, we will surely be knocking once more on Epic’s door to support us in the exciting future of real-time linear storytelling!
© 2024 by Train of Thought Studios
Budget Breakdown
A Future of Entertainment
Many Thanks for your Consideration
