Ed Laag

After a lot of hard work, we are so proud to finally share Ghost Stride, an original animated short made by the team at Dardo Studios. What started as a quick animation test grew into a full short film built in Unreal Engine from rigging to final render. Every character was rigged with Control Rig and animated directly in Sequencer, with the final cameras, lighting and shaders in front of us the whole time. Cameras were blocked out alongside the animation inside the final environments so every discipline could work in the same scene and see changes almost instantly. On top of that real time foundation, we pushed the painterly look as far as we could. We projected more than 60 hand painted images back onto the 3D so the brushstrokes feel alive in motion and finished it off with hand animated 2DFX, like Shadow's hair and environmental VFX. Ghost Stride was made in the gaps between client projects and it pushed us beyond our usual boundaries. It is a story about facing your fears and moving forward anyway, which turned out to be a pretty honest reflection of what making it felt like. Huge thanks to the incredible team at Dardo Studios and our audio partner, Moonsailor Audio. We will be sharing more about how we solved the trickiest parts of the film in our upcoming Problem Solving Series so stay tuned. We hope you enjoy watching Ghost Stride as much as we enjoyed making it. #GhostStride #UnrealEngine #GameDev #Animation #dardostudios