Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is getting its own CG animated movie.
You can find the trailer and more information here:
An Unreal project spotlight video for the movie was also published on October 1
It has been announced “a special look at the film adaption” will be shown during a RazerCon talk with sci-fi director Hasraf ‘HaZ’ Dulull.
A few days prior, Funcom hinted they had something in store for RazerCon.
More details on RazerCon can be found on its Razer website page.
Q: ‘How did you become part of the creative industry?’
A: ‘I started in the game industry. I liked games. I worked on game cinematics until 2003, when I decided to work in visual effects. I then worked as compositor, visualizer for BBC, Discovery. One project went viral (Project Kronos). Around 2016 I decided to make my first feature. And so I came here.’
Q: ‘Was the viral your breakthrough? DId you feel like you left a mark on the industry?’
A: ‘Yes, but I didn’t really do any festivals. The community feasted for me.’
Q: ‘What do you think of science-fiction?’
A: ‘I was inspired by Bladerunner, a movie my dad showed me. I think Bladerunner predicted the future; we live in a very sci-fi world.’
Q: ‘How did you make the transition to film making?’
A: 'I never studied film making. Working with film makers educated me. Everything I did became a ground for me to work with film making.
Q: ‘We are in a quarantine and you made the movie with Razer Blade. What was your experience?’
A: ‘I decided to work in my house and fully remotely. By the time of the pandemic, we were already working online. I didn’t use pc’s a lot anymore because of what I do, but when it came down to make an animated pilot and wanted to work on laptop and with Unreal Engine, I found rendering I was rendering 4K and rendering was really hard.
I asked Funcom to send me some assets, put together a pitch and they were blown away by it. They asked which machine or team was used and he pointed at the laptop - they couldn’t believe he could’ve done it with just a laptop. Thanks to modern GPUs, I had desktop performance. Rendering was really fast.’
Q: ‘You gave us some previews, what does your timeline for working on this movie look like?’
A: ‘If I was doing this traditionally, I would need 2 - 3 years. But, what you saw was early footage. We’re looking to finish the movie in 12 - 14 months now.
We only render what we want to see, so there’s technically only one rendering pass. And, everything is in realtime.’
Q: ‘Are there any other projects you can talk about?’
A: ‘You can’t just have one project as film maker usually. There’s luckily a huge demand in the industry right now.
I can’t mention the name yet, but it’s with 10 directors, 10 stories, different perspectives, all in London -and I can produce it all from home again-.’
Q: ‘What is your advice for people aspiring to be a creator?’
A: 'Go and make content. There’s no need to wait for the best tech. Low-end tech has the required quality. Today you can make and publish content easily.
Also, try to look at what’s in the market and don’t be afraid to put your work online. It’s really trial and error.
Q: ‘What are your favorite directors?’
A: ‘There’s two directors.’ (Sorry, don’t know them myself)
Q: ‘What else do you do?’
A: 'I like to break away from making a scene. I’m a huge fan of CoD, I play Death Stranding. I like Silent Hill, something which inspired the darkness and fog in the movie.
Something like Call of Duty gets better and better as time progresses.
Before, we looked at video games and think it’s not a respectable industry. Now, we look at them and think of them just as movies.
Q: ‘What is your favorite scene you have created?’
A: ‘There’s two. Okay, Death Origin. I created a dramatic scene with a CGI actor. This also made me no longer only a CG guy.’
[Presenter doesn’t let him tell about the second. Presenters talk to each other and say they would love to hang out with HaZ.]
Follow HaZ Dulull on Twitter for more content during production:
https://twitter.com/HaZ_Dulull