Spire Animation Studios has raised $20 million in funding from Epic Games and others to create animated films for the metaverse. The company will use Epic’s Unreal Engine to create new cinematic worlds for its feature animation project.
The agreement, according to the firms, is a game changer for the future of movie animation. Epic Games is partnering with Connect Ventures. Which is a joint venture between Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and New Enterprise Associates, to invest in Spire (NEA). Equipment expansion, studio technology and infrastructure development, as well as creative development, will all benefit from the money. Epic will also become a member of the Spire Board of Directors.
For MetaNews.
This investment will help to speed up the animation process and boost cross-departmental collaboration quality.
In an interview with GamesBeat, Spire co-founder and creative director Brad Lewis said; “We felt that not only would the efficiency be really useful to a company like ours, but the more intimate filmmaking experience would allow us to bring in talent from other mediums.” “We might be able to break away from the assembly line method of making animated feature films.”
The animation company will collaborate with both top talent and emerging creatives to create original, culturally relevant stories that will resonate with audiences all around the world.
By using a lighter, state-of-the-art production style that blends top talent and animators. With the most current technologies, the team gives animated filmmaking a fresh creative voice.
Trouble and Century Goddess, the studio’s first two projects, are now under production. As a new way to generate animated films, the business is developing real-time processes and rendering in the Unreal engine.
Further, “our objective in animation is to create a movie-going experience, a new atmosphere, a stylization of environment, with location, setting, tone, and character, depending on the tale,” Lewis added. “We perform our finest work in classic feature animation, which progresses from narrative to story,”. However, “it has nothing to do with naturalistic or realistic animation.”
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